The Hindu : National : The scientist and the aviator: a positive celebration

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 17, 2005

National

National

The scientist and the aviator: a positive celebration

Ranjit Hoskote

Homi J. Bhabha - THE HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVE

MUMBAI: The scientist and the aviator were the twin symbols of India's project of modernity: the two were embodied, for many Indians during the early years of Independence, in Homi Bhabha and J.R.D. Tata.

India's atomic energy programme emerged from the partnership between these two — Bhabha, research scientist and institution-builder, and Tata, visionary industrialist and pioneering flying enthusiast — as did the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. The TIFR is today a leading research centre in pure physics. Their collaboration is celebrated in an audio-visual exhibition that has opened at the TIFR: `J.R.D Tata and TIFR: Partners in Science'.

J.R.D. Tata - THE HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVE

The exhibition, drawing on the TIFR's extensive archives, presents rare photographs and documents, including letters written by Bhabha and Tata to each other, as well as images of some of the seminal conversations of that epoch: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in discussion with Bhabha and Tata; Bhabha with his legendary contemporaries, Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr; Bhabha with his team of scientists, drawing up what would evolve into a nascent nation-state's most ambitious attempt to place itself on the international map of scientific advancement. Walking through the show, we revisit that early period of optimism, when India's technocratic elite believed it could manage the destinies of millions, leading them towards self-sufficiency and power.

Bhabha, working as a 30-year-old research scientist in Cambridge, found himself marooned in India when the Second World War broke out in 1939. With help from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, he set up the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He worked there for four years, but grew restless at what he saw as the absence of an "institution in India devoted solely to fundamental research". He wrote to J.R.D. Tata expressing his willingness to found such an institution.

The TIFR was inaugurated in December 1945. The Second World War had ended and Independence for India was being discussed as a serious possibility. The TIFR quickly assumed the status of a key platform in India's developing scientific culture. Bhabha and Tata found a kindred soul in Nehru, since the cause of science lay at the heart of the Nehruvian project of modernity. With Nehru's patronage, the TIFR received the official imprimatur it needed to work on an atomic energy programme committed to peaceful goals.As the chief representative of India's atomic energy programme, Bhabha articulated the country's position in international fora including at the U.N. He also presided over the development of a collegial culture of research and debate at the TIFR.A man of many parts, Bhabha was also a painter and a patron of the arts, a connoisseur of classical music and the opera, a passionate amateur botanist: he represented the Renaissance synthesis of the sciences and the arts, rather than embodying single-point specialisation. He died in an air crash over Mont Blanc in 1966.

But his vision endures in the institution he created and the community he nurtured. You savour some of his many-sidedness as you walk through this exhibition, with its black-and-white photographs. Some of them show Bhabha in his study, surrounded, not by the paraphernalia of the physicist, but by paintings and flowers.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National