C. V. Raman

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7, 1888, in Tiruchirappalli, a town on the Kaveri river in the Madras Presidency of British India ^[1]. His father, Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer, taught mathematics and physics, first at a local school and later at a college in Visakhapatnam, where the family moved when Raman was a young boy. Books on science and music filled the household, and the boy absorbed both. His mother, Parvathi Ammal, came from a family of Sanskrit scholars ^[2].

Raman's progress through school was unusually fast. He passed his matriculation examination at age eleven and entered Presidency College in Madras at fourteen, one of the youngest students the institution had seen ^[1]. He took his bachelor's degree in 1904 with first place and the gold medal in physics, then completed a master's degree in 1907 with the highest distinctions. While still a student he published his first research paper, on the diffraction of light, in the Philosophical Magazine in 1906 ^[2].

Despite this promise, a research career in physics barely existed in India at the time. Doctors judged the frail teenager unfit for the sea voyage to England that most ambitious Indian students undertook. Instead, Raman sat the competitive examination for the Indian Finance Department, placed first, and in 1907 accepted a post as assistant accountant general in Calcutta ^[3]. Anyone asking who was C. V. Raman at that moment would have met a promising civil servant, not yet a scientist of consequence.

Calcutta changed everything. Soon after arriving, Raman noticed the signboard of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, a research society founded in 1876 by Mahendralal Sircar. He asked its honorary secretary for permission to work in its laboratories outside office hours, and for the next decade he lived a double life: government accounts by day, experiments on acoustics and optics in the early mornings and late evenings ^[3]. His studies of the physics of bowed strings and of Indian drums such as the tabla and mridangam attracted international notice, and he later wrote the article on the mechanical theory of musical instruments for the German Handbuch der Physik ^[2].

In 1917 Ashutosh Mukherjee, the vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta, offered Raman the newly endowed Palit Chair of Physics. Accepting meant a steep cut in salary and the loss of a secure government pension, but Raman took the professorship without hesitation ^[1]. He kept his ties to the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, serving as its honorary secretary and building it into the center of his experimental program.

A sea voyage to Europe in 1921, his first, set the direction of his mature work. Crossing the Mediterranean, Raman was struck by the deep blue of the water. The accepted explanation held that the sea merely reflected the blue of the sky. Raman doubted this, made observations through a Nicol prism on the return journey, and argued in a note to the journal Nature that the color arose from the scattering of light by water molecules themselves ^[4]. Molecular scattering of light became the consuming question of his laboratory for the rest of the decade.

Through the 1920s Raman and his students in Calcutta examined how light behaved when it passed through liquids, gases, and crystals. Working with K. S. Krishnan and others, he pursued a faint anomaly: a trace of scattered light whose color differed from that of the incoming beam. On February 28, 1928, using sunlight condensed by a telescope, filters, and purified liquids, Raman and Krishnan established that the effect was real and that it was a new kind of secondary radiation, not fluorescence ^[4]. Raman announced the finding publicly in Bangalore in March 1928, and the papers appeared in Nature and the Indian Journal of Physics that year.

The phenomenon, quickly named the Raman effect, occurs when a photon exchanges energy with the vibrating molecules of a material, so the scattered light shifts to slightly different wavelengths. Each substance produces its own pattern of shifts, a kind of molecular fingerprint ^[5]. The discovery gave direct experimental support to the quantum theory of light and opened a new window on molecular structure.

Recognition came fast. Raman had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924, and he received a knighthood in 1929. In 1930 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the scattering of light, becoming the first Asian and the first non-white scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in the sciences ^[1]. Among C. V. Raman achievements, the effect that bears his name stands first: after the invention of the laser in the 1960s, Raman spectroscopy became a routine tool in chemistry, materials science, pharmacology, and forensics, used to identify substances without destroying them ^[5]. In 1954 the government of India awarded him the Bharat Ratna, the country's highest civilian honor ^[6].

Raman married Lokasundari Ammal in 1907, shortly before taking up his post in Calcutta. She was an accomplished player of the veena, and music remained a shared thread in their long marriage. The couple had two sons, Chandrasekhar and Venkatraman Radhakrishnan; the younger became a distinguished radio astronomer and, like his father, a Fellow of the Royal Society ^[2]. The family was also linked to another Nobel laureate: the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the physics prize in 1983, was Raman's nephew ^[1].

Colleagues remembered Raman as brilliant, energetic, and difficult. He was fiercely proud that his Nobel work had been done entirely in India with modest equipment, and he said so often. His self-confidence shaded into combativeness, and his career included public quarrels with administrators, rival physicists, and eventually with the organization of state-funded science in independent India ^[3].

His curiosity ranged well beyond optics. He published on the acoustics of Indian musical instruments, the colors of flowers and butterfly wings, the luster of pearls, and the optics of diamonds, and he assembled a large personal collection of crystals, gems, and minerals that is still displayed at his institute ^[6].

In 1933 Raman left Calcutta to become the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. His tenure was stormy. He pushed to expand physics research and recruited the German physicist Max Born for a time, but conflicts over budgets and priorities led him to step down as director in 1937, though he stayed on as professor of physics until 1948 ^[3]. In 1934 he founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore and served as its president for the rest of his life, editing its journals with close personal attention ^[6].

On retiring from the Indian Institute of Science, Raman built his own laboratory, the Raman Research Institute, which opened in Bangalore in 1948 on land granted by the Mysore government. He funded it partly through his own resources and endowments, deliberately keeping it free of government control, and worked there daily on problems in crystal physics, the perception of color, and the physiology of vision ^[6].

He declined to slow down. Raman was still supervising research and lecturing to schoolchildren in his final years. In early November 1970 he collapsed in his laboratory, and after a brief illness he died at his institute in Bengaluru on November 21, 1970, two weeks after his eighty-second birthday. At his own request there was no state funeral; he was cremated in the institute's garden under the trees he had planted ^[2].

Few discoveries made with such simple apparatus have had so long a reach. Raman spectroscopy today identifies pigments in Renaissance paintings, checks the purity of pharmaceuticals, detects explosives at airports, and probes the chemistry of living cells, and instruments carrying his name have flown on planetary missions ^[5]. The American Chemical Society and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science jointly designated the discovery of the Raman effect an International Historic Chemical Landmark in 1998 ^[4].

India marks February 28, the date of the 1928 discovery, as National Science Day each year, established by the government in 1986 ^[7]. The institutions Raman built or led, including the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Raman Research Institute, remain active centers of research, and his insistence that world-class science could be done in India on Indian terms influenced generations of scientists after independence.

Any honest C. V. Raman biography must weigh the man's contradictions: a nationalist who accepted a British knighthood, an institution builder who feuded with institutions, a proud individualist who trained and promoted dozens of students. The essential C. V. Raman facts, though, are not in dispute. A boy from Tiruchirappalli, barred by health from studying abroad, taught himself research in borrowed rooms after office hours and found a fundamental property of light that laboratories on every continent still use each day ^[1].