Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, India. His parents were R. Chandrasekhar Iyer and Parvathi Ammal. He was the second of eight of their children. His father was a teacher at a local high school, and earned a modest income. He recalled: "I was born with a copper spoon in my mouth. At my birth my father was earning the magnificent salary of ten rupees per month!" In 1892, his family moved to Visakhapatnam (then Vizagapatam or Vizag) in Andhra Pradesh as his father was appointed to the faculty of physics at Mrs A. V. Narasimha Rao College.

Raman was educated at the St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School, Visakhapatnam. He passed matriculation at age 11 and the First Examination in Arts examination (equivalent to today's intermediate examination, pre-university course) with a scholarship at age 13, securing first position in both under the Andhra Pradesh school board (now Andhra Pradesh Board of Secondary Education) examination.

In 1902, Raman joined Presidency College in Madras (now Chennai) where his father had been transferred to teach mathematics and physics. In 1904, he obtained a B. A. from the University of Madras, where he stood first and won the gold medals in physics and English. At age 18, while still a graduate student, he published his first scientific paper on "Unsymmetrical diffraction bands due to a rectangular aperture" in the British journal Philosophical Magazine in 1906. He earned an M. A. from the same university with highest distinction in 1907. His second paper published in the same journal that year was on surface tension of liquids. It was alongside Lord Rayleigh's paper on the sensitivity of ear to sound, and from which Lord Rayleigh started to communicate with Raman, courteously addressing him as Professor.

Aware of Raman's capacity, his physics teacher Rhishard Llewellyn Jones insisted he continue research in England. Jones arranged for Raman's physical inspection with Colonel (Sir Gerald) Giffard. Raman often had poor health and was considered as a "weakling". The inspection revealed that he would not withstand the harsh weathers of England, the incident of which he later recalled, and said, "[Giffard] examined me and certified that I was going to die of tuberculosis... if I were to go to England".

Raman's elder brother C. Subrahmanya Ayyar had joined the prestigious Indian government service, Indian Finance Service (now Indian Audit and Accounts Service). Raman followed suit and qualified for the Indian Finance Service achieving first position in the entrance examination in February 1907. He was posted in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as Assistant Accountant General in June 1907.

He was highly impressed by the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Calcutta, the first research institute founded in India in 1876. He immediately befriended Asutosh Dey (who would eventually become his lifelong collaborator), Amrita Lal Sircar (the founder Mahendralal Sircar's son and then secretary of IACS), and Ashutosh Mukherjee (then executive member of the IACS and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta). With their support, he obtained permission to conduct research at IACS in his own time, even at "very unusual hours," as Raman later reminisced. Up to that time the institute had not yet recruited regular researchers, or produced any research paper. Raman's article "Newton's rings in polarised light" published in Nature in 1907 became the first from the institute. The work inspired IACS to publish a journal, Bulletin of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, in 1909 in which Raman was the major contributor.

In 1909, Raman was transferred to Rangoon, British Burma (now Myanmar), to take up the position of currency officer. After only a few months, he had to return to Madras as his father died from an illness. The subsequent death of his father and funeral rituals compelled him to remain there for the rest of the year. Soon after he resumed office at Rangoon, he was transferred back to India at Nagpur, Maharashtra, in 1910. Even before he served a year in Nagpur, he was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and again posted to Calcutta.

From 1915, the University of Calcutta started assigning research scholars under Raman at IACS. Sudhangsu Kumar Banerji (who later become Director General of Observatories of India Meteorological Department), a PhD scholar under Ganesh Prasad, was his first student. From the next year, other universities followed suit including University of Allahabad, Rangoon University, Queen's College (Indore), Institute of Science, Nagpur, Krishnath College, and University of Madras. By 1919, Raman had guided more than a dozen students. Following Sircar's death in 1919, Raman received two honorary positions at IACS — Honorary Professor and Honorary Secretary. He referred to this period as the "golden era" of his life.

Raman was chosen by the University of Calcutta to become the Palit Professor of Physics, a position established after the benefactor Sir Taraknath Palit, in 1913. The university senate made the appointment on 30 January 1914, as recorded in the meeting minutes:The following appointments to the Palit Professorships were made at the meeting of the Senate on 30 January 1914: Dr P. C. Ray and Mr C. V. Raman, MA... The appointment of each Professor shall be permanent. A Professor shall vacate his office upon completion of sixtieth year of his age.Prior to 1914, Ashutosh Mukherjee had invited Jagadish Chandra Bose to take up the position, but Bose declined. As a second choice, Raman became the first Palit Professor of Physics but was delayed for taking up the position as World War I broke out. It was only in 1917 when he joined Rajabazar Science College, a campus created by the University of Calcutta in 1914, that he became a full-fledged professor. He reluctantly resigned as a civil servant after a decade of service, which was described as "supreme sacrifice" since his salary as a professor would be roughly half of his salary at the time. But to his advantage, the terms and conditions as a professor were explicitly indicated in the report of his joining the university, which stated:

Mr C. V. Raman's acceptance of the Sir T. N. Palit Professorship on condition that he will not be required to go out of India... Reported that Mr C. V. Raman joined his appointment as Palit Professor of Physics from 2.7.17... Mr Raman informed that he will not be required to take any teaching work in MA and MSc classes, to the detriment of his own research or assisting advanced students in their researches.

Raman's appointment as the Palit Professor was strongly objected to by some members of the Senate of the University of Calcutta, especially foreign members, as he had no PhD and had never studied abroad. As a kind of rebuttal, Ashutosh Mukherjee arranged for an honorary DSc which the University of Calcutta conferred Raman in 1921. The same year he visited Oxford to deliver a lecture at the Congress of Universities of the British Empire. He had earned quite a reputation by then, and his hosts were Nobel laureates J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford. In addition, his student N. C. Krishna Aiyar was named among the very first Fellows of the American Physical Society in 1921. Upon his own election as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924, Mukherjee asked him of his future plans, which he replied, saying, "The Nobel Prize of course". In 1926, he established the Indian Journal of Physics and acted as the first editor. The second volume of the journal published his famous article "A new radiation", reporting the discovery of the Raman effect.

Raman was succeeded by Debendra Mohan Bose as the Palit Professor in 1932. Following his appointment as Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, he left Calcutta in 1933. Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the King of Mysore, Jamsetji Tata and Nawab Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad, had contributed the lands and funds for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The Viceroy of India, Lord Minto approved the establishment in 1909, and the British government appointed its first director, Morris Travers. Raman became the fourth director and the first Indian director. During his tenure at IISc, he recruited G. N. Ramachandran, who later went on to become a distinguished X-ray crystallographer. He founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1934 and started publishing the academy's journal Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences (later split up into Proceedings - Mathematical Sciences, Journal of Chemical Sciences, and Journal of Earth System Science). Around that time the Calcutta Physical Society was established, the concept of which he had initiated early in 1917.

With his former student Panchapakesa Krishnamurti, Raman started a company called Travancore Chemical and Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 1943. The company, renamed as TCM Limited in 1996, was one of the first organic and inorganic chemical manufacturers in India. In 1947, Raman was appointed the first National Professor by the new government of independent India.

Raman retired from IISc in 1948 and established the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore a year later. He served as its director and remained active there until his death in 1970.

Raman married Lokasundari Ammal, daughter of S. Krishnaswami Iyer who was the Superintendent of Sea Customs at Madras, in 1907. The wedding day is popularly recorded as on 6 May, but Raman's great-niece and biographer, Uma Parameswaran, revealed a factual date of 2 June 1907. It was a self-arranged marriage and his wife was 13 years old. (Sources are contradicting on her age as her birth year is specified as 1892, which would make her about 15 years of age; but Parameswaran affirmed the 13-year, corroborated by her obituary in Current Science that mentioned her age as 86 on her death on 22 May 1980.) His wife later jokingly recounted that their marriage was not so much about her musical prowess (she was playing veena when they first met) as "the extra allowance which the Finance Department gave to its married officers". The extra allowance refers to an additional INR 150 for married officers at the time. Soon after they moved to Calcutta in 1907, the couple were accused of converting to Christianity. It was because they frequently visited St. John's Church, Kolkata as Lokasundari was fascinated with the church music (unlike Raman's sisters Meena and Sitalakshmi) and he with the acoustics.

They had two sons, Chandrasekhar Raman and Venkatraman Radhakrishnan, a radio astronomer. He later cut his relations with his elder son due to ideological disputes. Raman's elder brother C. Subrahmanya Ayyar's son Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. Raman's sister Sitalakshmi's son is condensed matter physicist Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar.

Throughout his life, Raman developed an extensive personal collection of stones, minerals, and materials with interesting light-scattering properties, which he obtained from his world travels and as gifts. He often carried a small, handheld spectroscope to study specimens. These, along with his spectrograph, are on display at IISc.

Lord Rutherford was instrumental in some of Raman's most pivotal moments in life. He nominated Raman for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, presented him the Hughes Medal as President of the Royal Society in 1930, and recommended him for the position of Director at IISc in 1932.

Raman had a sense of obsession with the Nobel Prize. In a speech at the University of Calcutta, he said, "I'm not flattered by the honour [Fellowship to the Royal Society in 1924] done to me. This is a small achievement. If there is anything that I aspire for, it is the Nobel Prize. You will find that I get that in five years". He knew that if he were to receive the Nobel Prize, he could not wait for the announcement of the Nobel Committee normally made towards the end of the year considering the time required to reach Sweden by sea route. With confidence, he booked two tickets, one for his wife, for a steamship to Stockholm in July 1930. Soon after he received the Nobel Prize, he was asked in an interview the possible consequences if he had discovered the Raman effect earlier, which he replied, "Then I should have shared the Nobel Prize with Compton and I should not have liked that; I would rather receive the whole of it".

The Nobel Prize

Independent discovery

In 1928, Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam at the Moscow State University independently discovered the Raman effect. They published their findings in July issue of Naturwissenschaften, and presented their findings at the Sixth Congress of the Russian Association of Physicists held at Saratov between 5 and 16 August. In 1930, they were nominated for the Nobel Prize alongside Raman. According to the Nobel Committee, however: (1) the Russians did not come to an independent interpretation of their discovery as they cited Raman's article; (2) they observed the effect only in crystals, whereas Raman and Krishnan observed it in solids, liquids and gases, and therefore proved the universal nature of the effect; (3) the problems concerning the intensity of Raman and infrared lines in the spectra had been explained during the previous year; (4) the Raman method had been applied with great success in different fields of molecular physics; and (5) the Raman effect had effectively helped to check the symmetry properties of molecules, and thus the problems concerning nuclear spin in atomic physics.

The Nobel Committee proposed only Raman's name to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the Nobel Prize. Evidence later appeared that the Russians had discovered the phenomenon earlier, a week before Raman and Krishnan's discovery. According to Mandelstam's letter (to Orest Khvolson), the Russian had observed the spectral line on 21 February 1928.

Role of Krishnan

Krishnan was not nominated for the Nobel Prize even though he was the main researcher in discovering the Raman effect. He alone first noted the new scattering. Krishnan co-authored all the scientific papers on the discovery in 1928 except two. He alone wrote all the follow-up studies. Krishnan himself never claimed himself worthy of the prize. But Raman admitted later that Krishnan was the co-discoverer. He however remained openly antagonistic towards Krishnan, which the latter described as "the greatest tragedy of my life". After Krishnan's death, Raman said to a correspondent from The Times of India, "Krishnan was the greatest charlatan I have known, and all his life he masqueraded in the cloak of another man's discovery".