Meghnad Saha, the Dhaka-born scientist who dreamed a technological future

Prof. Meghnad Saha (1893–1956) is known as an outstanding scientist — mainly an astrophysicist — of the modern era from the Indian subcontinent, although his contributions as a social activist and an institution-maker are unforgettable. He was born on October 6, 1893 in undivided India, in a hamlet named Sheoratoli near Dhaka, which is now in Bangladesh. In 1911, he moved to Calcutta for higher education and preferred to stay there after the partition of India in 1947.

A patriot since childhood, he dedicated himself to developing scientific knowledge production, bringing about social change, and initiating technology-based economic development planning in India. His incessant efforts led to the foundation of the Indian National Academy of Sciences (1930/1934), the Indian Science News Association (1935), a journal named Science and Culture (1935), the (Saha) Institute of Nuclear Physics (1949), the Damodar Valley Corporation (1948), and other important organisations. But a huge part of Bengal, including his native village, became part of another country (Pakistan) by the time his dreams started to materialise concretely.

The night Meghnad was born, rain, wind, and thunder were creating havoc in nature. That is why his grandmother named the newborn Meghnath, which was later changed to Meghnad. The family was poor; his father, Jagannath Saha, used to run a grocery shop in the nearby market of Baliadi. He could not provide education to all his children, but Meghnad turned out to be an exception. Thanks to his extraordinary talent and the help he received from his mother Bhubaneshwari, brother Joynath, kind teachers, and other benevolent people, he completed the village primary school and the nearby middle school with flying colours.

He came to Dhaka and faced the current of the wider world for the first time. A scholarship helped him get admitted to Dacca Collegiate School, where he apparently became involved with swadeshi movement groups. It was a turbulent time after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and the entire Bengal was politically charged. Meghnad and one of his classmates were expelled from the school for their alleged protest against the visit of Governor Bamfylde Fuller. However, a private school named Kishori Lal Jubilee School admitted him, offering the necessary financial support. Meghnad finally passed the entrance examination from that institution in 1909; he stood first in the whole of East Bengal.

Professor Meghnad Saha (1893-1956)

The seed of patriotism was sown in him in Dhaka, and a desire to do something meaningful for the country remained in his soul throughout his illustrious career. Meghnad entered the Intermediate Science (ISc) course at Dacca College and started learning German from a Vienna-returned chemistry professor. Later, this foreign language proved immensely useful in his scientific career. Although Meghnad stood third in the ISc examination, his marks in mathematics and chemistry were still the highest in the university.

After leaving Dhaka in 1911, he enrolled in the BSc course at the famous Presidency College in Calcutta, where he became a student of eminent scientists such as Prafulla Chandra Ray and Jagadis Chandra Bose. He found himself among students who later became big names. Among his seniors were P. C. Mahalanobis, Nilratan Dhar, and others; among his classmates were Satyendra Nath Bose, Nikhil Ranjan Sen, Gyan Chandra Ghosh, and others; and Subhash Chandra Bose was a junior student at the college. He was given lodging at Eden Hostel near his college, but caste-based discrimination made his life uncomfortable there. He never forgot or forgave the treatment he received from upper-caste Hindu society and fought hard, with logic and reasoning, through his writings and speeches, against the tyrannical superstitions of Brahminism.

He passed his BSc (Honours) in Mathematics in 1913 and MSc in Mixed Mathematics in 1915, securing first-class marks, but in both examinations, he ranked second. His friend and competitor, S. N. Bose, stood first in both. In 1916, both of them joined Calcutta University as lecturers in Applied Mathematics, and subsequently both became lecturers in Physics. It was this duo who, for the first time, translated Einstein's Theory of Relativity from German into English and had it published by Calcutta University in 1919. That was how the entire world came to know and understand Einstein's theory. Calcutta University awarded Saha the degree of Doctor of Science in the same year, and the Royal Society in London elected him a Fellow in 1927, despite opposition from the British government. From 1930 onwards, he was nominated several times for the coveted Nobel Prize but never received it.

After returning from a tour of the UK and the USA in 1945, Prof. Meghnad Saha received an invitation from the USSR Academy of Sciences to attend its 220th anniversary. He immediately accepted the invitation, as he was eager to see with his own eyes the "mystery" land that "took to a new way of life after the Revolution of 1917". At this time, there was no dearth of propaganda literature for and against the new Soviet state, and these materials had further deepened the haziness of the picture. Saha was immensely impressed by what he witnessed in Soviet Russia; it cleared away the fog for him, and he wrote a travelogue titled My Experiences in Soviet Russia. The book was published in Calcutta in 1947, immediately after India gained its independence along with a blood-smeared geographical partition.

It was this duo who, for the first time, translated Einstein's Theory of Relativity from German into English and had it published by Calcutta University in 1919. That was how the entire world came to know and understand Einstein's theory. Calcutta University awarded Saha the degree of Doctor of Science in the same year, and the Royal Society in London elected him a Fellow in 1927, despite opposition from the British government. From 1930 onwards, he was nominated several times for the coveted Nobel Prize but never received it.

Although categorised as a travelogue, the book discusses the post-revolution progress of Russian (and Soviet) science and technology, as well as the radical changes that took place in the country's socio-economic and political system. Meghnad narrated the process of a backward country like Tsarist Russia transforming itself into a mighty modern power that ultimately defeated a technologically advanced enemy like Germany in the Second World War. He was not an ordinary traveller; as a scientist himself, he saw and analysed many phenomena that other people would have failed to notice.

The first chapter, in which he describes his journey to Moscow via Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, is picturesque and a clear indication that he knew the history and geography of these lands very well. Once he arrived in Moscow, he dealt with more serious and contemporary issues as well in his narration, which form the bulk of his later chapters.

A common feature of travelogues on foreign countries is an inevitable comparison of the host country with one's native land, and Meghnad was no exception. In his travelogue, he was comparing the condition of Russia to that of India all the time, as well as thinking about the ways in which India could also evolve into a technologically developed modern state. In fact, Saha had initiated the process of forming a National Planning Committee and then a Planning Commission in India much before he visited Russia, but the five-year plans that the Indian government would adopt later were clearly a Soviet influence.

It was Saha who, for the first time (in the 1930s), raised the issue of the scientific and technological development of the country as the only way ahead and left no stone unturned to see that things moved in the right direction until his untimely death in 1956 in New Delhi. The USSR's first five-year plans and their achievements have been narrated in this book with interesting details, and anyone can notice the prototype of India's first five-year plans in them.

Meghnad Saha working in his lab

Meghnad knew that one needed to have a visionary leader like Lenin in India, who would lead the country forward with the help of science and technology. He was absolutely not interested in the 'spinning wheel and bullock-cart economics' of Gandhi, although he respected Gandhi for his huge role as a nationalist leader. He considered Gandhi's approach a backward one and preferred to have electricity, multipurpose dams on rivers, and technology-based industries in India (like in Russia) that would uplift the lives of the masses. Meghnad described in some detail the four kinds of revolutions that had taken place in the Soviet system — namely technological, political, socio-economic, and religious revolutions. He would clearly have liked to have a similar system working in his motherland.

Very few scientists in the entire world would think about moving in the direction Saha had ventured for his country. In his own words, "Scientists are often accused of living in an ivory tower and not troubling their mind about realities; apart from my association with the political movement of juvenile years, I lived in the ivory tower till 1930." Saha was not in the good books of Prime Minister Nehru in independent India, so in order to make his voice heard he fought the general election of 1952 as an independent candidate and became a Member of Parliament.

He always had close contact with his village and East Bengal, and when millions of refugees fled that part to take shelter in India, he felt disturbed. As usual, he came forward and sprang into action. As president of the East Bengal Refugee Relief Committee, he visited the camps to see how things were going. What he found there did not please him. In Parliament, he raised the issues of the proper rehabilitation of the refugees as well as their integration into the socio-economic scene.

Prof. Saha kickstarted the process in India; then it took off. However, in a frenzied bid to technologise science for the benefit of the country (for whom and at whose cost?), in making hundreds of big dams on the rivers, and in manufacturing weapons for the (legitimate) protection of the country, the next generation of scientists and statesmen did not realise that nature was being used as if it were an infinite resource, which was not the case. It is clear now that the world cannot sustain this form of science and development, particularly when it faces a huge risk of imminent climate change and other probable calamities. But the slogan of the early Soviet times was "fight and win against the unkind nature" instead of remaining an organic part of it; and while following that line, Saha too could not foresee the future of the world very clearly. Herein lies the greatness of a poet like Rabindranath Tagore, who was able to correctly predict the fate of the Soviet system and wrote against structures like large dams and a mechanistic, machine-driven society. In spite of that, nobody should misunderstand Saha's love and dedication to his countrymen and his incessant pursuit of the objective truth.

Sajal Dey, PhD, is a Professor at the Department of Russian Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Regional Campus Shillong, Meghalaya, India.