ACHARYA JAGADISH CHANDRA BOSE ... 1

ACHARYA JAGADISH CHANDRA BOSE ... 1

Immersed in thought, the savant, the sage of science, Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose (30 November, 1858 - 23 November, 1937) pioneered the scientific spirit in this modern age in India. One of the most outstanding and versatile scientific geniuses the world has seen, Jagadish Chandra made significant contributions to both physics and botany and was an accomplished writer as well.

Jagadish Chandra Bose was a modern rishi in the classical expanded sense of the term and had great philosophical insight as well which prompted him to seek the unifying link of all life-forms in a physiological way. In consequence he discovered the response mechanisms of plant life to external stimuli and for this purpose he exhibited exceptional skills as an inventor of the required tools for the demonstration of his discovery, devices such as the crescograph and the morograph. Jagadish Bose even went to the extent of discovering the responses of metals to fatigue, that is, long use, which prompted Swami Vivekananda to call him a genius who was intent on making even dead matter come to life. The admiration was mutual which is evident from the glowing tribute Jagadish Chandra paid Swamiji after his mahasamadhi on 4 July, 1902.

A lifelong friend of Rabindranath Tagore, the scientist and the poet built up a great academic platform in suppressed India those days through their respective institutions in the 'Bose Institute' and the 'Vishwabharati Vishwavidyalaya' which gave resurgent India a new lease of intellectual and cultural life, creating in the process the foundation for future independent India's emergence as a nation where the diverse currents of thought and light would find a harmonic home.

But genius is best tested in adversity and when things went against the scientist in a bad way post colonial discrimination against him and alleged lifting of his scientific material by another famed scientist of Europe, it was a European lady who gave refuge to his sinking spirit, his drooping heart that found solace nowhere else. It was the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda, Margaret Elizabeth Noble, the unforgettable Sister Nivedita, who stood rock-like behind this towering scientific genius in dire straits in every possible way. Nivedita organised funds for the scientist by securing generous contributions from Sara C. Bull, a disciple of Swami Vivekananda, edited his works, pruning up the English of his impending publications, working tirelessly from morn to night months on end so that the light of India would shine resplendent in the firmament of world science. And when her health broke down and Nivedita had passed into silence in his Darjeeling abode then, Jagadish Chandra paid his homage to the great spirit by getting a bas-relief of a woman bedecked with prayer beads and holding a lamp in her hand erected in his 'Bose Institute'. It was sculpted after Nandalal Bose's painting on Nivedita titled 'The Lady with the Lamp'.

Lamp, indeed, nay, blazing sun each one of these titanic beings as Nivedita and Jagadish Bose, Tagore and Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Nandalal was. And today we are basking in their sunshine either in reverential memory or in utter oblivion of their existence ever. Either way we owe everything to them still.

Written by Sugata Bose

Comment :

Sugata Bose @Amrita Bhattacharyya : I will be writing serially on him. Today's short essay was but a brief introduction and the first in a series that is coming. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Brahmo which, if you wish, you may call a sect of the Sanatan Dharma, and hence a Hindu with a difference in terms of philosophical leanings. He was an extraordinary person of not only exceptional scientific merit but also humanitarian instincts. His devotion to science and humanity, his deep philosophical quest and insight into the inner nature of all forms of life and even inanimate matter like metals into which he almost infused life, as it were, in the words of Swamiji, do make him out as a devout person of sorts, though not in the common understanding of the term. It is difficult to define these seminal beings in rigid terms, in contours that thrust our finite conceptions on them, for they transcend ordinary limitations of thought to embrace the universal where borders are blurred and the infinite unfolds its realm in the very real. The works of these beings are but the fringes of their lives which in turn is but the feeble, fractional manifestation of their ever-expanding consciousness. Suffice it then to say that we may enter the mansion of their life and works to gaze in mute wonder at the breath-taking array of their insights and attainments and, if we are perceptive enough, absorbing enough critically, we may as well be induced by their thought-field into engaging in some worthwhile creative activity and emerging thence with some like achievement.