The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India

1st Edition Somaditya Banerjee install download

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-making-of-modern-physics-in-
colonial-india-1st-edition-somaditya-banerjee/

Download more ebook from https://ebookmeta.com

We believe these products will be a great fit for you. Click
the link to download now, or visit ebookmeta.com
to discover even more!

Economic Slowdown in India: An Introductory Analysis

1st Edition Asis Kumar Banerjee

https://ebookmeta.com/product/economic-slowdown-in-india-an-
introductory-analysis-1st-edition-asis-kumar-banerjee/

Mesozoic Stratigraphy of India A Multi Proxy Approach

1st Edition Santanu Banerjee

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mesozoic-stratigraphy-of-india-a-
multi-proxy-approach-1st-edition-santanu-banerjee/

Roads to Freedom Prisoners in Colonial India 1st

Edition Mushirul Hasan

https://ebookmeta.com/product/roads-to-freedom-prisoners-in-
colonial-india-1st-edition-mushirul-hasan/

The Elements of Advanced Mathematics 5th Edition Steven

G. Krantz

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-elements-of-advanced-
mathematics-5th-edition-steven-g-krantz/
Leading Colleges and Universities Lessons from Higher
Education Leaders 1st Edition Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

https://ebookmeta.com/product/leading-colleges-and-universities-
lessons-from-higher-education-leaders-1st-edition-stephen-joel-
trachtenberg/

Nanomaterials: Application in Biofuels and Bioenergy

Production Systems 1st Edition (Eds) R. Praveen Kumar

https://ebookmeta.com/product/nanomaterials-application-in-
biofuels-and-bioenergy-production-systems-1st-edition-eds-r-
praveen-kumar/

Advances in Mathematical Logic: Dedicated to the Memory

of Professor Gaisi Takeuti, SAML 2018, Kobe, Japan,
September 2018, Selected, Revised Contributions 1st
Edition Toshiyasu Arai
https://ebookmeta.com/product/advances-in-mathematical-logic-
dedicated-to-the-memory-of-professor-gaisi-takeuti-
saml-2018-kobe-japan-september-2018-selected-revised-
contributions-1st-edition-toshiyasu-arai/

Signs and Discourses in John 5 and 6: Historical,

Literary, and Theological Readings from the Colloquium
Ioanneum 2019 in Eisenach (Wissenschaftliche
Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament, 463) 1st Edition
Jorg Frey (Editor)
https://ebookmeta.com/product/signs-and-discourses-in-
john-5-and-6-historical-literary-and-theological-readings-from-
the-colloquium-ioanneum-2019-in-eisenach-wissenschaftliche-
untersuchungen-zum-neuen-testament-463-1st-editi/

Engineering Fundamentals: An Introduction to

Engineering, 6th Edition Moaveni Saeed

https://ebookmeta.com/product/engineering-fundamentals-an-
introduction-to-engineering-6th-edition-moaveni-saeed/
Food on a Stick Cookbook State Fair and Carnival Food
on a Stick Recipes 1st Edition Davidson Louise

https://ebookmeta.com/product/food-on-a-stick-cookbook-state-
fair-and-carnival-food-on-a-stick-recipes-1st-edition-davidson-
louise/
 Empires in Perspective

THE MAKING OF MODERN

PHYSICS IN COLONIAL
INDIA
Somaditya Banerjee
“By exploring the intellectual and sociocultural conditions for doing quantum
physics in 1920s colonial India from a non-Eurocentric angle, this book fills a
void in the history of physics literature. Banerjee studies three important Indian
physicists and identifies them as bhadraloks, a sort of Indian Bildungsbürger.
Little more than their names and key contributions were known so far. This
changes with this book, making it an important reference not just for historians of
science, but for anyone interested in colonial history.”
Dr. Christian Joas - Director, Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen

“Everybody familiarized with physics possibly have once asked how the Bose-
Einstein statistics and the Raman effect were produced in colonial India in the
early part of the 20th century. Banerjee’s remarkable book mobilizes the cultural
history and the idea of “bhadralok physics” to examine the group of intellectuals
who looked for scientific goals as part of their social and cultural identities. The
book fulfills an overdue gap in the history of physics.”
Professor Olival Friere, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

“Banerjee grapples skillfully with a crucial question – how was early 20th century
India able to develop advanced physics research while under colonial rule? The
case studies of Bose, Raman, and Saha document a novel system of indigenous
knowledge production - “bhadralok physics.” This unprecedented book takes
seriously the technical physics as well as the cultural diversity of India. It power-
fully demonstrates how a postcolonial analysis can reveal an entirely new chapter
in the history of modern physics.”
Professor Matthew Stanley, New York University, USA

“In The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India, Banerjee addresses a sadly
neglected issue in the history of modern science and provides insightful answers
to some central questions about the development of science. He shows how Indian
scientists contributed major discoveries in the development of quantum physics,
the most esoteric and novel branch of science at the time. He argues that this
groundbreaking work was a part of the development of Indian nationalism and
was very much a home grown phenomenon as major thinkers emerged from the
bhadralok class of middle-class intellectuals and the movement for Indian self-
rule. This engaging and well-written book is at once an important contribution to
our understanding of scientific development in colonial and post-colonial socie-
ties and to our understanding of the development of quantum mechanics.”
Professor Daniel Kennefick, Department of Physics,
University of Arkansas, USA

“This monograph offers a new perspective on the history of physics and moder-
nity in early twentieth-century India. Transcending earlier approaches to global
science as hybridity or the interaction of center/periphery or universal/local,
Banerjee argues that early Indian quantum physicists reveal features of what he
calls “cosmopolitan nationalism” or the melding of traditional Indian culture,
British cultural traits and transnational ideas. This book situates the careers of
three India-born and -educated physicists–Satyendranath Bose (1894-1974),
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970), Meghnad Saha (1893-1956)—
within the Bengali middle-class intelligentsia known as the Bhadraloks. Living
in a colonial situation, these physicists sought international collaborations outside
the British empire and turned, in particular, to Germany. Banerjee’s history of
bhadralok physics is a fascinating study of colonialism and decolonialism, Indian
nationalism and modernity, cosmopolitanism, and dynamics of class, caste and
social manners. This book will engage a wide range of readers, especially those
interested in science studies on a global scale.”
Professor Richard Kremer, Department of History,
Dartmouth College, USA

“This is a fascinating and much needed account of the remarkable rise of physics
in colonial India from humble beginnings to world-class status in quantum phys-
ics during the first half of the 20th century. Drawing upon his expertise in Indian
and international scientific history and culture, Somaditya Banerjee provides an
engaging story of broad interest and insight.”
Professor David Cassidy, Hofstra University, USA

“This is a riveting analysis of how imperial science intersected with indigenous

knowledge through the works of three twentieth-century scientists, S.N. Bose,
C.V. Raman, and Meghnad Saha. It argues that their globally acclaimed interven-
tions in relativity and quantum physics helped produce a radical variety of cos-
mopolitan nationalism. Somaditya Banerjee’s engaging discussion of ‘bhadralok
physics’ emerges as an essential reading on the intellectual lineages of colonial
and Asian modernities, intersectional knowledge production, local and global his-
tories of science and technology.”
Professor Jayeeta Sharma, History Department,
University of Toronto, Canada
“How did quantum physics research start in India, while it was still under the
British colonial rule? Somaditya Banerjee’s book answers this question by stud-
ying the cases of three Indian physicists, Satyendranath Bose, Chandrasekhara
Venkata Raman, and Meghnad Saha, whom Banerjee considers as “bhadralok
scientists.” It is a fascinating read that explores physics and its socio-cultural con-
text in India and expands the scope of the history of quantum physics beyond
Europe and North America.”
Professor Kenji Ito, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for
Advanced Studies), Japan

“Somaditya Banerjee’s The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India is a case

study of three Indian physicists Meghnad Saha, C. V. Raman and Satyendranath
Bose. All three of them made foundational contributions to the then nascent
field of quantum mechanics. Their physics is now standard text book material.
However, with his training in both physics and history, Banerjee brings a fasci-
nating and new perspective to their story. Somaditya’s unique contribution is the
careful study of the socio-political and cultural milieu which played a key role in
shaping Saha, Raman and Bose’s science. This detailed and careful work is a very
important contribution to the history of science in India, and should be of interest
to scientists, social scientists, historians as well as the lay public.”
Professor Jayaram Chengalur, National Centre for Radio Astrophysics
(Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), Pune, India
The Making of Modern Physics in
Colonial India

This monograph offers a cultural history of the development of physics in India

during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on Indian physicists
Satyendranath Bose (1894–1974), Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888–1970)
and Meghnad Saha (1893–1956). The analytical category “bhadralok physics”
is introduced to explore how it became possible for a highly successful brand of
modern science to develop in a country that was still under colonial domination.
The term bhadralok refers to the then emerging group of native intelligentsia, who
were identified by academic pursuits and manners. Exploring the forms of life of
this social group allows a better understanding of the specific character of Indian
modernity that, as exemplified by the work of bhadralok physicists, combined
modern science with indigenous knowledge in an original program of scientific
research.
The three scientists achieved the most significant scientific successes in the
new revolutionary field of quantum physics, with such internationally recognized
accomplishments as the Saha ionization equation (1921), the famous Bose–Einstein
statistics (1924), and the Raman Effect (1928), the latter discovery having led to
the first ever Nobel Prize awarded to a scientist from Asia. This book analyzes the
responses by Indian scientists to the radical concept of the light quantum, and their
further development of this approach outside the purview of European authorities.
The outlook of bhadralok physicists is characterized here as “cosmopolitan
nationalism,” which allows us to analyze how the group pursued modern science
in conjunction with, and as an instrument of, Indian national liberation.

Somaditya Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and

Philosophy at Austin Peay State University, Tennessee, USA. He is the Faculty
Advisor for Phi Alpha Theta (which won the best chapter award in 2019 for the
11th consecutive time), History Club and the newly created India Club at Austin
Peay and currently teaches Early and Modern World History, Historical Methods,
Modern South Asia, Mughal India and History of Science & Technology.
At Austin Peay, Banerjee is also a member of the Faculty Senate and a member
of the Hispanic Cultural Center Advisory Committee and the Adjunct Committee.
Find him on Twitter @Soma_Band2020 or at https://www.apsu.edu/history-and-
philosophy/faculty/banerjee.php
Empires in Perspective
Series Editor: Jayeeta Sharma, University of Toronto

This important series examines a diverse range of imperial histories from the early
modern period to the twentieth century. Drawing on works of political, social,
economic and cultural history, the history of science and political theory, the
series encourages methodological pluralism and does not impose any particular
conception of historical scholarship. While focused on particular aspects of
empire, works published also seek to address wider questions on the study of
imperial history.

British Imperialism and Turkish Nationalism in Cyprus, 1923–1939: Divide,

Define and Rule
Ilia Xypolia

A History of Italian Colonialism

Giuseppe Finaldi

Liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia

Edited by Gareth Knapman, Anthony Milner, and Mary Quilty

Outskirts of Empire: Studies in British power projection

John Fisher

The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British

India, 1914–1924
Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury

Colonialism, China and the Chinese: Amidst Empires

Edited by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Peter Monteath

The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India

Somaditya Banerjee

The Discourse of British and German Colonialism: Convergence and

Competition
Edited by Felicity Rash and Geraldine Horan
The Making of Modern
Physics in Colonial India

Somaditya Banerjee
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Somaditya Banerjee
The right of Somaditya Banerjee to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9781472465535 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315555799 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Dedicated to my mother and father—Dr. Roma Banerjee and
Partha Banerjee
Contents

List of Figures xii

Preface and acknowledgments xiv
List of Bengali and Sanskrit words xvi
List of Abbreviations xvii

1 Introduction: Writing a history of modern science

in South Asia 1

2 Bhadralok culture and the making of Satyendranath Bose 26

3 Satyendranath Bose and the concept of light quantum 47

4 Colonial modernity and C.V. Raman: Verifying the

light quantum 75

5 Meghnad Saha: Applying the light quantum 115

6 Reflections on bhadralok physics 161

Bibliography 169
Appendix 186
Index 197
Figures

1.1 Raman’s spectrograph 21

2.1 Bose as a student circa 1910–11 28
2.2 A group of bhadralok intellectuals in the 1910s. Seated (left
to right): Meghnad Saha, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Jnanchandra
Ghosh. Standing (left to right): Snehamoy Dutt, Satyen Bose,
Debendramohan Bose, Nikhil Ranjan Sen, Jatindra Nath
Mukherjee, N. Chandra Nag 36
3.1 Philip Hartog 49
3.2 Walter Jenkins 55
3.3 Bose in Paris with Bertrand Zadoc Kahn 65
3.4 Bose with a friend in Berlin 66
4.1 Raman wearing his turban 82
4.2 Raman’s lone assistant at IACS: Ashutosh Dey 83
4.3 Raman with Compton at the center 89
4.4 Raman scattering 92
4.5 Energy level diagram showing Rayleigh and Raman (Stokes and
anti-Stokes) scattering 92
4.6 Comparison of Rayleigh with Raman spectrum with its Stokes
and anti-Stokes lines 93
4.7 First newspaper announcement of the discovery of the Raman
Effect made on February 28, 1928 94
4.8 Nominations for the 1930 Nobel Prize in physics 101
4.9 Raman (second from right) with Niels Bohr to Raman’s left. The
others from the left are George Gamow, Thomas Lauritsen, T.B.
Rasmussen and Oskar Klein 102
5.1 Saha in 1920 in Calcutta seated at the centre. To his left is Raman
and Satyendranath Bose is seated to the extreme left (photo credit:
Science and Culture) 131
5.2 Meghnad Saha (photo credit: Science and Culture) 133
A.1 Satyendranath Bose’s letter from Berlin to Jacqueline
Eisenmann in 1926 186
A.2 Indian chemist Jnan Ghosh’s letter in Bengali to Saha and
Satyendranath Bose’s letter in Bengali to Saha 188
 Figures xiii
A.3 Satyendranath Bose’s letter to Albert Einstein June 4, 1924 190
A.4 Einstein’s postcard to Satyendranath Bose July 2, 1924 191
A.5 Einstein’s postcard to Satyendranath Bose July 2, 1924
(translated in English) 192
A.6 Satyendranath Bose’s third letter to Einstein January 27, 1925 193
A.7 Hermann Mark letter of reference for Bose, May 9, 1926 195
A.8 Paul Langevin letter of reference for Bose, April 26, 1926 196
Preface and acknowledgments

When I was in physics graduate school at the University of Arkansas, I attended

a physics colloquium on Albert Einstein and the history of gravitational waves by
Daniel Kennefick. Dan’s talk at the Paul Sharrah Lecture Hall was a life-chang-
ing event, so much so that I decided to switch careers from physics to history.
My sincere thanks to Dan for introducing me to the very exciting field of his-
tory of science. When I arrived at the University of Minnesota, to do graduate
work in the history of science and technology, Michel Janssen helped me think
about the history of quantum physics and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt introduced
me to the history of science and technology in various cultural settings. In the
History Department at the University of Minnesota, I thank Patricia Lorcin and
Ajay Skaria who introduced me to postcolonial theory and South Asian history.
My sincere thanks to Alexei Kojevnikov at the Department of History at The
University of British Columbia (UBC) for his incredible intellectual rigor, bril-
liant scholarship, and extraordinary generosity. At the UBC History department, I
also thank John Roosa, who helped me think through South Asian history, and the
most incredible Robert Brain, along with Harjot Oberoi, Paul Evans, Devendra
Prakash Goel, CISAR and Allan/Kathy Abraham.
In North America and Europe, I thank David Cassidy, Rajinder Singh, Richard
Staley, Matthew Stanley, Abha Sur, John Stachel, Lewis Pyenson, Asif Siddiqui,
Antonia Moon, Roopen Majithia, Subrata Dasgupta, Joe Martin, Peter Pesic, Greg
Good, Charles Day, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Archive, Deepanwita
Dasgupta, Angela Creager, Erika Milam, Suman Seth, Peter Galison, Richard
Kremer, Ernie Hamm, Gustave Lester, Marco and Melinda Deyasi, Lori Celaya,
Gordon McOuat, Robert Anderson, and Theodore Arabatzis. At Fayetteville,
Arkansas, I’m thankful to Surendra Singh, Reeta Vyas, Arnabdyuti Mitra, Dileep
Karanth, and the Rybas family (Pam, Ray, Adam, Ryan), and Brian Tessaro.
I thank all the archivists especially Pramod Mehra at National Archives and
Nehru Memorial and Museum Library at Teen Murti House at New Delhi,
Calcutta Mathematical Society, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and A.N. Sekhar
Iyengar, Prof. Samit Ray at Satyen Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences,
Bose Institute and T.P. Sinha, Chittabrata Palit, Institute of Historical Studies,
Kolkata, National Library, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science,
Calcutta University, Jadavpur University, Indian Institute of Science, Raman
 Preface and acknowledgments xv
Research Institute (RRI-Digital Repository), Raju Varghese (photographer at
RRI), Dr. Meera B.M., Indian Academy of Science, Delhi University Libraries
and Archives, R.C. Yadav at Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Amar Roy,
Dhruv Raina, Shiv Viswanathan, State Archives, Kolkata, Intelligence Bureau,
Kolkata, Enakshi Chatterjee, Subrata Dasgupta, Subhash Kak, Sarat Book House,
Ambar Dey, St. Xavier’s College, Presidency College, Richard Dickerson the
curator of the Jagdish Mehra Special Collections at the University of Houston
Library, Collected Papers of Albert Einstein at Caltech, Partha Ghose, Anadi Das,
Satyendranath Bose’s grandson Falguni Sarkar, Indian Science News Association,
Bangiya Bigyan Parishad, Indian Statistical Institute, Asiatic Society Kolkata,
Science & Culture, and Suprakash Roy. I also thank Vinod Kumar Rastogi, NRI
Welfare Society, Deepak Singh, Hannah, Gauhar Nawab, Gopesh and Suparna
Saha, Ajoy Ghatak, DCV Mallik, JIIT, Deepak and Rajani Dhingra, Anirban
Pathak, Peter Minorsky, Baisakhi Bandyopadhyay, Rajeev Pathak and Pramod
Joag at Pune University, Jayaram Chengalur and Rajaram Nityananda at NCRA.
Portions of my book have previously appeared in a few articles, and I am grate-
ful to the editor and publisher of each journal for granting permission to use the
materials here. Portions of Chapter 4 was published as “C.V. Raman and Colonial
Physics: Acoustics and the Quantum”, Physics in Perspective 16 (2), 146–178.
Portions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 were published as “Transnational Quantum:
Quantum Physics in India Through the Lens of Satyendranth Bose”, Physics in
Perspective 18 (2), 157–181. A portion of Chapter 5 was published as “Meghnad
Saha: Physicist and Nationalist”, Physics Today 69 (8), 38–44.
I thank the History and Philosophy department at Austin Peay State University
(APSU). I don’t think I have ever been in a more supportive and nurturing depart-
ment than here at APSU. I thank Cameron Sutt, David Rands, Greg Zieren, David
Snyder, Kevin Tanner, George Pesely, Dean Barry Jones, Minoa Uffelman, Ken
Faber, Debbie Shearon, Nicole Wood, Greg Hammond, George Pesely, Christos
Frentzos, Antonio and Amy Thompson, John Steinberg, Mark Michael, Jordy
Rochleau, Dzavid Dzanic, Michele Butt, Mickey Wadia, Karen Meisch, Allyn
Smith, Isaac Sitienei, Allan Chaparadza, Sergei Markov, Yoshio and Claudia
Koyama, Felix G. Woodward Library, Joe Weber, my GTA Chesley Thigpen,
Jessica Blake, and all my students at APSU. At Routledge, I greatly appreciate
Rob Langham’s support for the project and for steering the manuscript through
the commissioning and editorial process. I thank the anonymous reviewers who
helped me improve the manuscript considerably. Thank you very much Jayeeta
Sharma, Tanushree Baijal and Rennie Alphonsa for all your help and making me
stay on course. Any mistakes that remain are mine alone.
Finally, I thank my dearest mom and dad for cheerfully putting up with their
only child living in distant North America for the last eighteen years. Without the
exceptional support of my parents, it would be impossible for me to pursue my
education in India and North America and it is to them I dedicate this monograph.
List of Bengali and Sanskrit words

Bhadralok: Well-mannered, educated individual

Bhadramahila: Female analogue of Bhadralok
Bharatiya: Indian
Calcutta: Called Kolkata in present day
Guru: Revered Master or Teacher
Guru-Shisya: Master-Student.
Jati: Nation
Jatiyatabaad: Nationalism
Madhyabitta: Middle-income group
Pathsala: School
Shesher Kabita: The last poem (Title of a novel by Rabindranath Tagore)
Shishya: Pupil or student
Swadeshi: Of one’s own country
Vande Mataram: Hail to the Motherland
Vigyan/Vijnan: Science
Visvajaneen: Cosmopolitan
Visvajaneenata: Cosmopolitanism
Abbreviations

AU: Allahabad University

BAAS: British Association for the Advancement of Science
CM: Classical Mechanics
CPAE: Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
CU: Calcutta University
CVR: Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
DMB: Debendra Mohan Bose or Debendra Mohan or D.M. Bose
DU: Delhi University
IACS: Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science
IISC: Indian Institute of Science
INC: Indian National Congress
JCB: Jagdish Chandra Bose
JU: Jadavpur University
KSK: Kariamanikam Srinivasa Krishnan
MNS: Meghnad Saha
PCB: Prafulla Chandra Mahalanobis
PCR: Prafulla Chandra Ray
QM: Quantum Mechanics
RRI: Raman Research Institute
SINP: Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics
SNB: Satyendra Nath Bose
SNBCS: S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences
SSHRC: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada)
UCS: University College Science (Calcutta University)
1 Introduction
Writing a history of modern science in
South Asia

In 2012, physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research

with the world’s biggest particle accelerator—the large hadron collider—made a
watershed announcement.1 They claimed to have experimentally observed signa-
tures of the long-sought-after particle, the Higgs Boson, the discovery of which
provided the decisive confirmation of the fundamental Standard Model in high-
energy physics. The British physicist, Peter Higgs, who worked at the University
of Edinburgh, had theoretically postulated the existence of the Higgs Boson in
1964. Overnight, the 2012 discovery made Higgs a major celebrity and the focus
of much public attention, reminding of the way Arthur Eddington’s observation
of the 1919 solar eclipse had made Albert Einstein world famous by confirming
the general theory of relativity.2
While the international scientific community celebrated a major victory for
physics, an important aspect of the discovery went unrecognized. The new parti-
cle belonged to the fundamental class of bosons, named after the Indian physicist
Satyendranath Bose (1894–1974). A modest college professor working in colo-
nial India, Bose discovered in 1924 the special type of statistics that characterizes
bosons as quantum particles. His proposal was supported, popularized, and fur-
ther developed by Einstein. But for the rest of his life Bose remained in relative
obscurity, teaching in India, and staying far away from major centers of physics.
Even professional physicists of today, for whom bosons are a textbook concept
that is constantly used in teaching and research, are typically aware of Bose’s
discovery, but know relatively little about its author, the context, and the circum-
stances of how it was made.
Interestingly, Bose was not the only Indian scientist of the early twentieth
century who, while working in a distant country that was still under colonial
domination, managed to make a breakthrough contribution to the emerging new
field of quantum physics, and thus influenced the development of fundamental
science in the European metropole. Such an unusual phenomenon, apparently
without a historical analog, deserves a special reflection and investigation that
is undertaken in this monograph from a multidisciplinary point of view, incor-
porating the social and cultural history of science, postcolonial theory, and the
history of South Asia.
2 Introduction
Overview
What constellation of circumstances allowed the development of an original and
successful research program in modern physics in early twentieth-century India,
a colonized country with limited financial resources, devoid of a fully institu-
tionalized research, and with uncertain career trajectories for aspiring scientists?
Yet, despite such hindrances, and in contrast to many other European colonies of
the time, Indian scientists achieved their most important successes in one of the
most sophisticated and revolutionary and cutting-edge fields—quantum physics.
To answer this question thoroughly, we would need to conduct a historical inves-
tigation at several levels: the social context, the analysis of scientific works and
intellectual influences, and biographical case studies.
This monograph first describes the social group to which those scientists
belonged—the bhadraloks, or a new type of intelligentsia that developed under
the special conditions of colonial power in India. Bhadraloks as a group were
distinct from both the European officials as well as the traditional Indian intel-
lectuals. They were natives of India who received European-style education and
training, primarily for the purpose of assisting and working in the colonial admin-
istration. Yet many of their representatives defied or complicated that colonial
agenda by turning into major promoters of the emerging Indian nationalism and
the national independence movement. Bearing an ambivalent relation to the colo-
nizers’ heritage, the bhadraloks became the chief harbingers of the specifically
Indian drive toward modernity that placed a particular importance and hope on
science. Many of the bhadraloks pursued modern science in conjunction with, and
as an instrument for achieving, independence from British rule, granting a signifi-
cant role to science in the emergent Indian nationalism. In the process, some of
them developed versions of science that sought meaningful connections between
the modern, twentieth-century European scientific outlook, and the indigenous
knowledge of India.
To illustrate and explore this distinctive historical phenomenon, this book ana-
lyzes in detail three individual cases: that of Satyendranath Bose, Chandrasekhara
Venkata Raman, and Meghnad Saha. All three of them received their training and
scientific education in India, but also used opportunities to travel and develop con-
tacts with colleagues among European scientists. They all made important contri-
butions to the revolutionary field of quantum physics, and achieved their greatest
scientific successes in the 1920–30s. The notable ones are the Bose–Einstein sta-
tistics, the Saha equation, and the Raman Effect, which earned the Nobel Prize in
1930, and it was the first Nobel awarded to an Asian scientist. It will be argued
that, for all three of them, the bhadralok identity is the key for understanding their
lives and main accomplishments as scientists. At the same time, it is to be noted
that they came from very different strata, traditional castes, and regions of India.
Raman was a member of the upper social class and caste, Bose belonged to the
middle caste, and, quite remarkably, Saha came from the lowest Indian caste,
but managed to overcome the very strong social and cultural prejudices associ-
ated with it. Their correspondingly different versions of bhadralok careers and
 Introduction 3
mentality affected their somewhat diverging scientific programs and results, and
each of them articulated somewhat different versions of the cultural nationalism
of the bhadraloks.
As was typical of the intelligentsia in many countries, science and higher educa-
tion represented a major vehicle for social mobility between otherwise often rigid
and hierarchical traditional classes and groups. One can observe this process in the
different paths Bose, Saha, and Raman took to becoming bhadraloks, as will be
explored in more detail in the subsequent chapters of the monograph. Raman was
born into an educated, upper-class Brahmin family in South India, de facto inherit-
ing the bhadralok status straight from his family background. Bose came from the
middle tier, was born as a Kayastha and had to go through several tiers of academia
before he was offered a teaching position in 1917 at Calcutta University. At that
point he could be identified as a bhadralok by his intellectual pursuits. Saha’s trajec-
tory was the most challenging one, as he was born in the lowest tier of the caste hier-
archy—the shudra. Saha had to face a lot of discrimination in his youth, especially
in college, because of his lower caste. In spite of such adverse conditions, Saha
eventually rose to become a professor of physics at Calcutta University in 1919.
From there on, he too came to be perceived as a bhadralok by his intellectual peers
and colleagues. To members of the Indian society, he appeared as an educated,
civil, and well-mannered individual, possessing all of the attributes required for
being a bhadralok. This was certainly not an easy task in the somewhat rigid, colo-
nial Indian society of the early twentieth century. But Saha’s search for an Indian
modernity and the achievement of his bhadralok status made his accomplishments
in science and his nation-building endeavors stand out.
The bhadralok careers of Bose, Raman, and Saha reveal some characteristic
dilemmas between enjoying certain privileges and serving the colonial administra-
tion on one hand, and harboring nationalist aspirations on the other. They got their
scientific training not in the metropole, but in India proper, and could be regarded
as the first generation of indigenously trained modern scientists. They received
financial support from the colonial government, their Indian mentors, and local
philanthropists such as Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee. They approached modern sci-
ence in a somewhat indigenous fashion, not by any means linked to the industrial
hands-on approach exemplified by the Cambridge-British education. At the same
time, they found a stimulating intellectual community and reference group over-
seas, mostly in Europe, as they communicated and collaborated with intellectu-
als, such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Arnold Sommerfeld, Alfred Fowler, and
Walther Nernst. In the case of Bose, collaboration with Albert Einstein, who was
a world luminary in the 1920s, was in keeping with his nationalist feelings, since
it provided him an escape from the intellectual dependence on Britain. Raman’s
physics was essentially colonial in character, but with a fusion of indigenous and
international traits. The academic trajectory of Saha, however, was much more
uncertain than that of Bose or Raman, given his involvement with the Bengal
Revolutionaries, along with a concomitant devotion to quantum physics. The sub-
sequent chapters will explore in more detail and elaborate on the contradictions
between colonial science and the specific project of Indian modernity.
4 Introduction
Reflections of the social and cultural conditions of bhadraloks’ scientific
practices in colonial India can also be found in the ways Bose, Saha, and
Raman responded to the revolutionary idea of the light quantum, which was
the key scientific concept for their research. The chapter on Bose will argue
that his education, the local cultural influences on his scientific beliefs, his
anticolonial sentiments, and his fusion of nationalist aspirations with a cosmo-
politan outlook were important for his acceptance of the quantum discontinuity
of light. Saha’s political radicalism converged with his wholehearted embrace
of the radical concept of light quantum at a time when, unlike in the Indian
colony, most scientists in the British metropole were still extremely skeptical of
this subversive intellectual novelty that contradicted the well-established wave
theory of light. The chapter on Raman will explore how his regional brand of
nationalism, his fascination with Indian musical instruments and musical the-
ory, his scientific work at the IACS and Calcutta University, and his dialogues
with senior colleagues like Jagadish Chandra Bose, contributed to his biases
towards the wave theory of light, and only a gradual, reluctant acceptance of
the quantum theory of scattering as an explanation of the experimental effect
he discovered.
The methodology adopted in this book combines the analysis of the scientific
works of Bose, Saha, and Raman with an investigation into the social and cultural
milieu in which their science was produced. The interplay between science and
culture thereby informs the reader that their science did not operate in a social
vacuum but was very much contingent on the culture of the period. To get a better
understanding of the modernity of Indian physics in the 1920s, and to fuel public
interest for the period under study, one needs a finer understanding of not only
the technical components of the bhadralok physicists, but also the intellectual
climate, the zeitgeist of the colonial period in South Asia.
The investigation of the three case studies will allow me to introduce the con-
cept of “bhadralok physics” as a description and analysis of how modern science
was pursued, and successfully developed in late colonial India. The main scientific
accomplishments by bhadralok physicists—the Bose–Einstein Statistics (1924),
the Saha ionization equation (1921), and the Raman Effect (1928)—reflect the
culturally specific ways in which scientific knowledge is produced in the condi-
tions of a colony striving for modernity. The results of this monograph thus bear
ramifications for the two, typically separate, academic fields—South Asian his-
tory, and History of Modern Science—which have as yet remained mostly discon-
nected historiographically, but have the potential to contribute productively to
one another. By developing these ties, my monograph contributes to the emerging
historiography of modern South Asian science.

Reconfiguring the term bhadralok

The analysis undertaken in this monograph crucially depends on the somewhat
malleable concept of bhadralok whose applicability, meanings, and attributions
have received an evolving treatment in historical and sociological literature. To
 Introduction 5
understand the bhadralok identity, it will be important to discuss how scholars
have viewed the bhadraloks in South Asian history; who and how one could
become a bhadralok, and who were not identified as such even among the elite
and the middle class – for example, members of the business community, who
were financially respected, but were not necessarily well-mannered, educated,
and did not contribute toward the nation the way Bose, Saha, Raman, and other
bhadraloks did. In addition to the three cases discussed in this monograph, there
were many other scientists, such as A.K. Ramanujan, Debendra Mohan Bose,
or Prasanta Mahalanobis, who can also be identified as bhadralok scientists and
subjected to a similar analysis in future.
Histories of the bhadralok have been primarily written within the discipline
of South Asian history, usually by historians who worked on social histories of
nineteenth-century Bengal, but rarely had connections with or familiarity with the
history of science. As a South Asianist, Tithi Bhattacharya remarked, echoing an
argument by Sumit Sarkar:

In their own perception this was a ‘middle class bhadralok world which
situated itself below the aristocracy’ but ‘above the lesser folk’ engaged in
manual labor and distinct from the lower castes or Muslims. What distin-
guished them from both was education of a particular kind, so much so that in
commonsensical terms the pronouncements about education became the sole
criterion for defining the bhadralok.3

Bhattacharya went on to say, “although the idea of the bhadralok is a necessary

link in any analyses of nineteenth-century thinking and behaving, it is difficult to
define.”4
For Bhattacharya, the bhadralok category is applicable for the social organ-
ization in nineteenth-century India, and is strongly associated with the middle
class, while excluding lower castes or Muslims. Including bhadralok scientists
into consideration, as this monograph does, demands certain revisions to such
an understanding. The more complicated case of Meghnad Saha, for example,
demonstrates that even a person who originated from a lower caste could, under
certain conditions, gradually transcend his rigid caste status through the pursuit of
science and education to eventually becoming a bhadralok.
Another influential South Asian historian, John McGuire, highlighted some
of the nuances of this social category, pointing out that it was much more than
merely a label for “respectable people.”5 He argued that there are two problems
in defining the term bhadralok. He suggested that it was rather problematic to use
the term exclusively for Hindus and that the term “cannot be seen as a fixed social
group, but rather as the embodiment of changing sets of organic social relation-
ships.”6 Since McGuire considered only the period from 1857 to 1885, my book
builds on his study. With the rise of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the
Partition of Bengal in 1905, many Indian nationalists became identified as bhad-
raloks, while historians gradually reified bhadralok as a middle-class and not a
lower-caste entity within the nation.
6 Introduction
For example, another South Asian historian, Amit Kumar Gupta, in his mono-
graph, Crises and Creativities: Middle-Class Bhadralok in Bengal c. 1939–52,
stated that

the bhadralok in Bengal formed essentially a socio-cultural category who

had a distinct way of life, characterized by a certain standard of personal and
familial refinement, a code of public and societal conduct, and a well-laid out
system of values.7

Gupta continues to say that

socially the category incorporated all members of the middle class (both the
upper and the lower), excluding strictly those who performed manual labour
of any kind, and those who were educationally handicapped, but included
liberally the members of the rich.8

Gupta considers the possibility of a lower class to be included in the bhadralok

category, provided there was no manual labor performed. Gupta does mention
that bhadraloks were typically English educated and economically stable but
“were dominated by the upper caste Bengali Hindus.”9 I disagree with him on the
point about upper caste Bengali Hindus, because anyone with education, refine-
ment, and manners could actually become a bhadralok.
Similarly, Swati Chattopadhyay another South Asianist remarked that:

In nineteenth-century Bengali parlance the landed elite were referred to

variously as vishayi (propertied), dhani (wealthy), abhijata (aristocrats), or
baramanush (literally, “big” people), and the middling classes were referred
to as madhyabitta (middle income) or grihastha (householder). They, along
with the “daridra athacha bhadra” (poor yet respectable) constituted the
respectable minority of the Bengali residents in the city – the bhadralok.
Freedom from manual labor (for men) was the prime factor that designated
these classes/caste as “respectable,” a factor that distinguished them from the
lower classes/castes or chotolok. The respectable stratum typically consisted
of the higher castes of Hindu society.10

If we analyze this passage, we find that unlike Chattopadhyay, one can make a
distinction between class and caste, the two systems of social stratification. Caste
is a unique system of social stratification prevalent in India, where status is fixed
by birth, whereas class allows mobility between strata. As there is no mention in
her remark of the possibility of social mobility in Indian society so far as class
distinctions are concerned, this monograph tackles this problem by examining the
bhadralok physicists.
As bhadralok is a Bengali word that ascribes positive values to an individ-
ual who is polite, gentle, and well-mannered (bhadra), there is also the abhadra
who do not qualify in the bhadra category. The abhadra are impolite, use foul
 Introduction 7
language, and can belong to any class or caste. Thus, abhadra is the negation
of bhadra, emphasizing the social distinction that transcended caste and class
categories, or at least modified them. Abhadra can also be called chhotolok, or a
lowly person. Just as a person can rise to the bhadra level, a bhadra person who
is educated and well-mannered could, by his actions, become abhadra. This tran-
sition is powerful because once a person is de-classified as abhadra, one has to
remain as an outcast in society. The bhadra status could be lost in a day through
marriage, or if the family’s reputation is maligned.
The three bhadraloks examined in this monograph all married as per family
instructions, arranged within their social groups, to very young women. Women
also had to belong to refined, or bhadra, families. Such refined and educated
women were called bhadramahila, where mahila means female in Bengali.
Saha’s family had to overcome an old prejudice concerning the fact that they had
once specialized in the brewing and distilling of alcohol, which was not a “clean”
profession for a bhadralok. Some occupations, such as pathologists, printers, and
pharmacists, took years to move up the scale to “clean” occupations. One strategy
was to undergo suitable marriages with bhadra women; therefore, this high status
was not simply restricted to male roles and male occupations. If anything, this sta-
tus was just as much about women—potential wives and daughters-in-law—and
their relations to bhadralok men. The major capital outlay for a middle-class male
was for the marriage of his daughter(s), so this investment required extreme care.
The opinions of the wife and her female relatives were decisive in the matter of
marriage. This was one sphere in which women were more important than men
within the bhadralok culture.11 While the role of gender within bhadralok is an
important issue, existing scholarship has also focused on the modernity of these
Indian intellectuals who pursued science.
Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib argued that “The Bengali Bhadralok class was
a Western-educated modern elite who had been socialized through the colonial
education system into ‘colonial values’”12 While this statement might be valid
for Indian scientists who were Western educated like Jagadish Chandra Bose and
Prafulla Chandra Ray, it cannot be applied to the first generation of indigenously
trained scientists like Satyendranath Bose, C.V. Raman, and Meghnad Saha.
Raina and Habib echoed Mahendralal Sircar—the founder of the Indian
Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS)—when they further argued that

for a colonial subject, the inauguration of the age of modernity is imbued with
an inescapable ambiguity: it is an age of invasions and oppression; but, in
addition, for those who empathize with the project of modernity, it is an age
of advancement of the sciences.13

In their study, Raina and Habib focused on the social context of science without
an actual engagement with the contents of scientific research. Thus, their analyses
were based on a form of modernity which was not easy to explain. I think that
such an externalist approach to social history in India, as taken by Nehruvian14
historians, reflects the academic field of the history of science, which is still in a
8 Introduction
formative stage today. This monograph, however, builds on the work of Raina and
Habib and approaches the period under study from a dual externalist and internal-
ist approach, so that one has a fruitful interaction between South Asian culture and
the contents of science influenced by the bhadralok culture. This, however, begs
the question of who these intellectuals were.
The bhadraloks were trans-class, trans-caste individuals who were well-man-
nered and polite. An individual born in the lowest shudra caste could move up the
social ladder and achieve the status of bhadralok through the acquisition of higher
education. So, the term bhadralok has a sociological implication as it signifies a
new status in Indian society. For example, Meghnad Saha was one of the great-
est bhadralok scientists India has ever produced, because he worked hard toward
reaching the status of bhadralok while coming from the lowest caste shudra.15
Therefore, this conceptualization of Saha rising in Indian society from a shudra
to a bhadralok through his science is new, as presented in this monograph. The
approach of these colonial intellectuals was unique with regard to their approach
to science.
Physicists among the bhadraloks blended Western culture and physics with
Indian tradition to create what I call a unique “cosmopolitan nationalism” that—
being somewhat similar to the German “mandarins”16—served at once to foster
the national culture, to divert support from the political authorities of the time, and
to promote its adherents into the upper social and scientific strata. Subsequently,
the similarity between bhadraloks in India and Wilhelmian17 academic scientists
is striking.
Russell McCormmach, in his seminal article “Academic Scientists in
Wilhelmine Germany,” developed ideas of the German “mandarin” culture
in the famous work of Fritz Ringer: The Decline of the German Mandarins.18
McCormmach, echoing Ringer, argued that

the cultural justification rested on the self-appointment of Wilhelmian aca-

demic scientists to the class of culture bearers. ‘Culture-bearer’ (Kulturträger)
was a value-laden term denoting those who were considered well educated
and qualified to judge matters affecting the quality of culture.19

Just as “German scientists had long placed their scientific ideology in the service
of their greatest political cause, the unification of Germany,”20 the Indian bhad-
raloks I examine in this monograph steered their scientific pursuits in direct and
indirect ways toward Indian independence and decolonization.
Moreover, the concept of Kulturträger is important in this context because
it carried a somewhat anti-Western, especially anti-British, connotation, imply-
ing that Germans were a people of culture (Kultur), whereas, the British were
people of civilization, i.e., materialist values. German scientists, like Hermann
Helmholtz, who adhered to this ideal, not only pursued culture avidly, but also
signaled it in their general bearing and in the myriad ways they executed science.
For example, Hermann Helmholtz in Erhaltung der Kraft (1847) accepted this
Bürgerliche Intelligenz as science’s primary task.21 Thus, the Prussian educated
 Introduction 9
members of the bourgeoisie—the Bildungsbürgertum—and the Indian bhad-
ralok’s rationale for executing science were humanistic, and a narrative of Indian
modernity would remain incomplete without fleshing out these transnational con-
nections. Furthermore, Gerald Holton has written about Einstein from this per-
spective, identifying him as a German Kulturträger.22 This monograph builds on
this existing innovative scholarship applying it to the South Asian context.
This information is relevant because C.V. Raman—another bhadralok scien-
tist examined in this monograph—considered Helmholtz to be his scientific guru.
And Raman’s investigations of Indian musical instruments were very similar to
what Helmholtz exemplified in his Sensations of Tone, in which he showed how
Western musical theory was elaborated in and through the character of Western
musical instruments, which had evolved just as the physical science of acoustics
had developed. As a result, both Raman and Helmholtz were trying to indigenize
both science and global musical theory. Hence the nineteenth-century deutsche
Kultur, as seen through the bildungsbürgertum, and the twentieth-century bhad-
ralok culture had a few similarities and differences.
As the subsequent chapters will show, Indian bhadralok scientists embraced
German science as a means of getting away from the colonial Indo-British frame-
work. German scientists, such as Arnold Sommerfeld and Albert Einstein, were in
turn impressed by the culture and bearing of Indian scientists who added a dress-
ing of credibility to their excellent scientific work. While Sommerfeld really liked
Saha and Raman, and Bose–Einstein statistics is one of the triumphs of twenti-
eth-century physics, this was not always the case especially with some German
scientists, such as Richard Gans at Jena, who was very skeptical of Raman’s
experimental work. However, it is unclear whether Bürgerliche Intelligenz23 (sci-
ence as a cultural project) was the primary project of German physicists interact-
ing with the bhadralok intellectuals. Such close entanglement between German
and Indian physics leads us to examine the scholarship on the history of physics.

History of physics
The history of physics has long been plagued by debates between “internalists”
and “externalists.” Broadly speaking, internalists concerned themselves with the
technical and conceptual development of physics while externalists were moti-
vated by society, politics, and institutions. A classic work in the history of physics
written by Paul Forman showed how this debate is actually not inappropriate for
writing a cultural history of science.
Forman argued that indeterminism, or acausality, in quantum physics appeared
because of Weimar culture.24 The acausal description of events governing the
dynamics and kinematics of the subatomic world came about as a purposeful
adaptation by physicists and mathematicians to the hostile intellectual milieu in
Weimar Germany. After the end of World War I that brought defeat and devas-
tation to Germany, the political, cultural, and intellectual climate became irra-
tional. The military defeat, financial uncertainty, and social crisis prompted many
intellectuals to question the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and progress and
10 Introduction
inspired corresponding criticisms of science. The Forman thesis launched a heated
discussion with polarized views among historians of science, but in the long run
proved very influential in ushering new approaches to the history of science from
a cultural standpoint. My approach in this monograph is also indebted to Paul
Forman insofar as I examine the influence of the cultural milieu—both external
and internal to science—in the making of modern physics in colonial India; only
this monograph will consider both internal and external factors as important ele-
ments in the cultural history of South Asian science.
One important caveat for the cultural history of science is that the cultural
values that are prevalent spatially and temporally exert influences on scientific
research, including the content of science, as revealed in the history of quantum
physics. Paul Forman’s work was instrumental in the rise of new approaches to
science studies, and the history of physics during the 1980s. A growing number
of case studies involving various cultures and different fields of sciences have
emphasized a now widespread understanding that science is produced and co-
produced locally in particular cultural settings.25 Despite these growing examples
of cultural histories of science, there has been precious little work of culturally
based studies of physics from the early twentieth century till the time Forman
published his work. From the 1980s to the late 1990s the academic landscape
started changing with Peter Galison’s and Andrew Pickering’s work on important
cultural analyses of early twentieth-century physics, especially relativity theory
and particle physics.26
However, there still remain some blind spots in the current literature on the
history of quantum physics. The contributions of South Asian scientists are either
absent or misunderstood due to lack of a close reading of their lives and works.
For example, never has Forman’s influential work on “Weimar Culture and
Quantum Acausality” been extended to other “contact zones” like South Asia.27
Despite very few recent works in this direction, “we know little about the social,
political, and cultural influences on the content of scientific knowledge produced
in India.”28 This shortcoming highlights the need for more cultural histories of
physics within a colonial framework. My monograph is a beginning piece in that
direction which builds on the existing scholarship on cultural histories of science
and applies it to the Indian context.
A crucial aspect for the development of modern physics in India was the
weakness of certain established traditions. For example, scientists’ perception
of the Maxwellian electrodynamical continuum was not as embedded in India
as in Europe, especially Britain. India lacked a tradition of classical physics.
This crucial absence played a key role in the easier acceptance of Einstein’s
light quanta after 1905, an acceptance which did not happen very smoothly in
Europe. Consequently, the reception of quantum discontinuity was very differ-
ent in India. More importantly, this specific field of history of Indian physics is
still an unexplored territory for the social historian whose focus is the social and
cultural underpinnings of science. It is also unexplored because some of the rep-
resentations of Indian scientists, as perceived in Europe and North America, are
not based upon a close textual analysis of their works. For example, Einstein’s
 Introduction 11
biographer Abraham Pais denotes the work of Satyendranath Bose as “serendipi-
tous.” My investigation of Bose’s approach to quantum statistics will reveal the
cultural factors on which Bose–Einstein statistics were contingent. This study will
rely on the forthcoming analysis of several other classic works in the history of
quantum physics.
Mara Beller has written about the history of quantum physics and its interpre-
tations by important interlocutors, like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg among
others.29 Beller used the phrase “quantum dialogue” as a lens to see through the
maze of intellectual conversations, which were not always free from paradoxes
and uncertain interpretations. However, as Beller argued, these dialogues helped
assist in furthering the emergent field of quantum mechanics, and its dominant
“Copenhagen interpretation.”30 Beller’s dialogue-thesis is innovative and inspir-
ing. It can, with some modifications, be applied to the colonial situation in which
the Indian physicists worked like Satyendranath Bose’s contributions in quantum
statistics, C.V. Raman’s work in light scattering, or Meghnad Saha’s work in
astrophysics.
Richard Staley analyzed the basic categories of classical and modern physics
as historic constructs useful for periodization, which were first introduced by Max
Planck during the 1911 Solvay conference.31 The time around World War I is
generally seen as a watershed that saw the collapse of the classical “world picture”
and the ushering in of modern physics.32 This monograph will explore the reac-
tions to these events by the Indian intelligentsia, which did not actively partici-
pate in the debates until the end of World War I; and their response to the newly
emergent quantum physics of the non-classical discontinuous theory of light and
the modernity it entailed. It is also important to highlight that modern physics and
modernity in physics are subtly different yet related entities. While modern phys-
ics refers to drastic changes in the way physicists conceptualized fundamental the-
ories like quantum physics early in the twentieth century, the onset of modernity in
Indian physics began when physicists started explaining novel phenomena using
traditional classical explanations, for example, the endeavor of physicists in India
to explain the Compton Effect using classical physics. The transitional passage to
modernity continued with more non-classical phenomena, like the existence of
spontaneous emission that Einstein tried to explain phenomenologically in 1917.
But Indian scientists, as I examine here, gave a statistical explanation of spontane-
ous emission on which Paul Dirac later worked to produce a full-fledged quantum
electrodynamics. This was the background to the modernity of modern physics.
The transition to modernity was complete when there was a switch from what
was mechanical and visualizable (e.g., orbits), to a mathematically abstract, non-
visualizable (e.g., transitions) and counterintuitive domain of matrices and non-
commuting algebra, as seen in a formalism of quantum mechanics called matrix
mechanics, which emerged in 1925.33 The experimental verification of matrix
mechanics was given by the Raman Effect in colonial India, discovered in 1928
by a bhadralok intellectual, C.V. Raman, and his cohort working in Calcutta.
Hence, these bhadralok intellectuals need to be studied not only because they
are important for discoveries in physics and its history, but also because several
12 Introduction
approaches in postcolonial theory have toiled hard to understand the development
of modernity outside the purview of Europe.

Postcolonial theory
While theories of modernity, as formulated by historians, anthropologists, and,
most recently, postcolonial theorists, have come to mean a wide variety of things,
it is most useful to contextualize them historically, being sensitive to the various
perspectives that exist in present scholarship.34 A historian at NYU, Frederick
Cooper, has given an insightful analysis of modernity using a four-fold definition
in the context of colonialism. First, Cooper argued:

modernity represents a powerful claim to singularity, which is central to the

history of Western Europe and a goal which the colonized world aspires to
acquire as a tool to break from the shambles of backwardness. Secondly, it
might be an imperial construct which gives the ethical right to the West to
impose its will on the colonies. Thirdly, the singularity and European nature
of modernity will always make it an unattainable object by the non-European
world, however close one may come. Fourthly, the nature of modernity can
be espoused in different plural cultural, local and transnational forms and
there exist multiple modernities and alternative modernities.35

Giving some agency to the non-Western world, this fourth category shows how
non-European cultures could engender unique forms of representations and con-
ditions of modernity. These are not mere mimicry of Western modernity but, in
actuality, attempts to derive alternative techniques that are self-consciously dis-
tinct and independent of colonial connotations, as we will explore through our
case-studies of bhadralok intellectuals. For example, postcolonial theorists like
Partha Chatterjee objected to the notion of colonial India being a passive recipi-
ent of Western modernity, and being reduced to the role of “perpetual consumers
of modernity.”36 Chatterjee’s works showed that “the colonial intelligentsia was
pondering over the issue of Indian nationalism in the light of a different modernity
and made a distinction between ‘our modernity’ and ‘their modernity’.”37 This
scholarship made a splash originally with the publication of an important text in
the late 1970s.
In 1978, with the publication of Orientalism, an influential work by the
Palestinian-American literary theorist and public intellectual, Edward Said
exerted a remarkable influence in South Asia,38 especially on discourses about
knowledge produced in the colonies and the various brands of nationalism begin-
ning from the 1980s. Said’s Orientalism by itself pays no serious attention to
British Orientalism in South Asia, and mostly concerns itself with scholarship on
the Middle East. The nature of the Saidian discourse initiated a manifest tradition,
engendering an outpouring of specific writings on India defined as the Orient.
In the wake of Said’s Orientalism, two evaluations have emerged amongst his-
torians. The first, most notably Gyan Prakash, following Said’s thesis, contends
 Introduction 13
that the discourse of Orientalism was hegemonic as extended to South Asian intel-
lectual history. The second evaluation, following Kapil Raj, claims that “colo-
nized South Asians played a determinant role in a dialogical process through
which ‘colonial knowledge’ was constructed.”39 But what about voices that were
not included in nationalist narratives? What about subaltern40 voices?
The study of South Asian history was meant to further develop with the ush-
ering in of the Subaltern Studies Collective (SSC) in 1982, along with the dis-
placement of Marxism as the dominant mode of theoretical framework amongst
South Asian historians engaging in the relationship between the Western and non-
Western worlds. The problem that a group of South Asian academic scholars, like
Ranajit Guha and Gyanendra Pandey, addressed was how to write a “history from
below,” i.e., a history about the ordinary people at the grassroots level, the non-
elites of India. Vivek Chibber argues that “while elite politics could be identified
with the modern institutions built around the colonial state, the domain of the sub-
altern constituted a distinct arena which was different from the ruling elite with a
manifestly important yet underrepresented area”.41 But what about the scientific
non-elites, the non-dominant social groups whose career trajectories show that
they had their own conception of the world which differed from the mainstream
nationalists? While expanding the idea of the marginalized, the disenfranchised,
or popularly, the term “subaltern,” Antonio Gramsci remarked:

In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular

grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode
of thinking and acting … When one’s conception of the world is not critical
and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one belongs simultaneously to a
multiplicity of mass human groups.42

The Subaltern Studies Collective (SSC) in the early 1980s made a major impact
on South Asian history especially by examining various intellectuals who were
marginalized and hence could be seen as subaltern. However, this approach was
never extended to Indian scientists who could possibly be conceptualized in this
category. My monograph is not an intervention in using the Subaltern Studies
framework, but is an inspiration on a motivational register to write about bhad-
ralok intellectuals who were neither subaltern nor elite. This book espouses a new
approach in Science Studies in South Asia by looking at Indian scientists who
were not exactly elite or subaltern, and demonstrates how their conceptualization
of the light quantum differed from the dominant notions of light that existed in
Europe. Such an approach goes significantly beyond the common view about the
fusion of separate cultural and knowledge traditions that is typically theorized
using a hybrid model of the colonizer and the colonized.
One of the postcolonial/Subaltern theorist Homi Bhabha’s insights looked at
the Indo-British encounter in a binary-mode, as an interaction between two well-
defined entities (hybridity).43 Based on this assumption, the notion of hybridity
was made popular, and the concept has acquired a widespread following in North
America. Analyzing the colonial intelligentsia in early twentieth-century India
14 Introduction
shows the problematic nature of this notion of hybridity. Especially in the sci-
ences, hybridity, (i.e., cross-fertilization between two traditions) does not capture
the full problem of explaining how Indian scientists produced new knowledge.
In fact, there were many elements in Indian science that were neither Indian nor
British but belonged to the wider transnational community. While a broader
framework is required to examine the making of modern Indian science, it may
be pointed out that there was exchange of scientific knowledge between the local
and the global. Knowledge was also indigenized, leading to the development of
a distinctly modernized yet local form—amalgamation of tradition with moder-
nity. One needs to analyze the rich scholarship on the history of science in India,
and how science and nationalism have interacted within a power differential in a
colonial landscape.

Science studies in India

Analysts of science and technology in India have examined the varieties of
nationalism expressed by scientists of the pre-1950 period. However, a com-
plete understanding of how scientists were influenced by nationalism, or even
the wide spectrum of nationalist aspirations that were also internationalist and
transnational while grounded in the local, is still developing. For example, John
Lourdusamy has studied four individuals—the Indian homeopath Mahendralal
Sircar, the philanthropist and educator Ashutosh Mukherjee, the chemist Prafulla
Chandra Ray, and the physicist/plant physiologist Jagadish Chandra Bose. These
individuals played different roles and interacted differently with the subjects of
this monograph. So, it is important to mention them in the present context, and
also to mention the problematic aspects of this scholarship.
Lourdusamy argued that Sircar, Mukherjee, Ray, and Jagadish Chandra Bose’s
“engagement with western science was not a nativist project of identifying an
exclusive Indian science, but was a confident and positive engagement with a
universal modern science”.44 Lourdusamy claimed that Sircar, a prominent prac-
titioner of homeopathy in Calcutta and the founder of the Indian Association
for the Cultivation of Science (1876), established the Institute to promote sci-
entific research among Indians, a project that led to the emergence of nationalist
movements.45
Furthermore, Lourdusamy argues that the well-known physicist cum plant
physiologist, Jagadish Chandra Bose, “sought to infuse elements of Indian cul-
ture into western science from a conviction that science was a global heritage”.46
Noted chemist, Prafulla Chandra Ray, who contributed greatly to modern chem-
istry by discovering an amorphous form of a chemical compound—mercurous
nitrite—in 1896, established the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works
(1893) and wrote the History of Hindu Chemistry (1902), which viewed Indian
history in very discontinuous terms characterized by phases of order and external
invasions. Ray made important scientific contributions to the metropolitan sci-
ence community while also pondering over the low rate of literacy in colonial
India. Lourdusamy’s thesis, as Pratik Chakrabarti remarked, claimed that “the
 Introduction 15
works of the Indian scientists were not non-conformist practices from mainstream
modern science but were very much in keeping with universality.”47
While Lourdusamy’s detailed account of the lives of the scientists is informa-
tive, it is also very descriptive. It is not clear what Lourdusamy meant by universal
nature of modern science as perceived by Indian scientists. His work fell largely
within a framework highlighting the agency of Indian scientists in their selective
adoption of Western science, and coupling this agency with nationalism.48 It is
unclear in Lourdusamy’s narrative what role nationalism played for scientists in
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India.
“Nationalist consciousness” should not necessarily be equated with national-
ism. For example, the Indian National Congress (INC from here on), which was
created in 1885, and its supporters and collaborators among scientists, argued
in the early years that India had never been a nation. The nationalist movement
gathered steam after the Partition of Bengal in 1905, and between 1915 and
1920, when INC began to organize mass protests under the purview of Mahatma
Gandhi’s leadership. Lourdusamy’s work makes no mention of the renowned
Indian nationalist thinker Satishchandra Mukherjee, who launched the Dawn
Society to promote the idea of national education. With the formation of the
Indian Science Congress Association in 1914, Indian scientists gained a wider
platform on which to assemble and exchange ideas. These developments, which
are missing in Lourdusamy’s narrative, can be argued to have been important
reasons for the development of a nationalist science.
Whether nationalism was a result of interaction with foreign knowledge sys-
tems is debatable, but science was one of the most important components of the
Indo–British colonial encounter. It will also be clear from this monograph that
knowledge was not transferred to India in a passive way. However, the ideol-
ogy of science was reconfigured in the zeitgeist of India’s culture. Science and
nationalism were also closely enmeshed, especially with nationalists who thought
beyond the nation, and whose intellect displayed a cross pollination of local,
national, and global ideas. For example, Subrata Dasgupta, another scholar of
science studies in India has given a more thorough analysis of Jagadish Chandra
Bose (JCB from here on).49
Though Dasgupta distanced his account from nationalist historiography, he
argued that for JCB and many of his contemporaries, “knowledge and glory were
inextricably intertwined with the Indian past.”50 Dasgupta wrote that

JCB’s experiments initially in the electromagnetic theory and later with metals
and plants were a vindication of his interpretation of ancient Indian wisdom
and Vedic monism. JCB felt that what India needed was not a few individual
scientists, but a rejuvenation of a long-lost treasure of its scientific knowledge
to generate a whole institutional framework of scientific research.51

Although Dasgupta was aware that colonial relations, nationalist ideologies,

and metaphysical commitments of Vedic monism played an important role for
Jagadish Chandra Bose’s creative work, he nonetheless adhered to a “rather strict
16 Introduction
separation between science and extrascience.”52 In this book, Dasgupta’s analysis
will be further extended to JCB’s mentees—Bose, Raman, and Saha.
Insofar as the mentors of the scientists in this book are concerned, Prafulla
Chandra Ray, the author of The History of Hindu Chemistry, had a Weltanschauung
that was inspired by Indian history. His involvement in indigenous chemical
research relied on looking back at the ancient Indian engagement with the chemi-
cal element mercury. Dasgupta argued that Ray was successful in forming a school
of chemistry, while Jagadish Chandra Bose failed to create a school of physics.
His argument was that Jagadish Chandra Bose failed because he was an upper
class and upper caste scientist, while Ray achieved success in creating a school of
chemistry because he was from a “lower” caste, as per the traditional Indian caste
system.53 Instead of a failure–success binary, I argue it would be instructive to
delve deeper into the methodologies of the bhadraloks and the multidimensional
nature of their science. Before that, it is important to examine the very recent
scholarship on nuclear science in colonial India, because the actors of this book
created a strong platform on which nuclear science launched itself in the 1940s.
Few recent studies in the past decade have discussed the key role played by
science, particularly the quest for nuclear energy and its symbolic power. In
2010, an influential study by Robert Anderson gave a very detailed ethnographic
history of scientists and scientific establishments, starting from 1920 till 1980,
that played a significant role in integrating state-making with nationhood. Using
the Actor Network Theory as methodology, the author has traced the “nucleus”
of people who made the creation of the first atomic bomb possible in India in
1974, and the nucleus’ relation to the nation. The nuclear program in South Asian
historiography is used as a “focusing device to understand the scientific com-
munity.”54 The main focus of the study examined the Indian physicist Meghnad
Saha, the chemist Shanti Bhatnagar, the physicist Homi Bhabha, and nationalist
leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Anderson argued that “that
there would not have been a sustained atomic energy program in India without a
co-evolving relationship between science and politics, which resulted in a larger
community.”55
The most innovative conclusion Anderson reached is that “there has been a
creative tension running through the Indian scientific community between the idea
of science as a movement and science as an institution.”56 The author described
this tension as a process of schizmogenesis, the term coined and described by the
anthropologist Gregory Bateson in Naven (1958), which is in essence “a pro-
cess of separation and disconnection” at the levels of both rhetoric and action.
For example, Saha Institute’s emergence from Science College Calcutta and also
Raman Research Institute’s emergence from Indian Institute of Science can be
seen as examples of the tension between science as a movement and science as
an institution.57
While Anderson’s brilliant account contributed richly to the complex inter-
play between science and culture in the Indian context, and extended Science
and Technology Studies to non-Western cultures, my monograph approaches the
problem of the origins of Indian science in the early twentieth century by the first
 Introduction 17
generation of indigenously trained bhadralok scientists. These scientists created
a platform from which, several decades later, modern physics in India became
institutionalized in such a way as to tackle the nuclear and, to use Itty Abraham’s
phrase, “grew to love the bomb.”
In contrast to Anderson’s study, Itty Abraham’s work on how India “grew to
love the bomb” does not pay sufficient attention to the intricacies of science in
India, or to the understanding of its scientific community. A historian of science,
Deepak Kumar, commented on Itty Abraham’s work:

How did science figure in this debate? What constituted India’s colonial
heritage? In addressing these questions Abraham refers, rather uncritically,
to Gyan Prakash’s thesis on “Hindu” science and revivalism. Did scientists
such as P. C. Ray and others try to establish Vedic Hinduism as the preemi-
nent definition of Indian traditions? Definitely not. After a brief comment
on “colonial science” in the following chapter, Abraham introduces Homi J.
Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear program, as a “colonial scientist who
brings to the fore the anxieties and ambivalences of metropolitan Western
science.” How Bhabha did so is not really made clear.58

Deepak Kumar’s critique of Abraham is part of a larger problem of narratives on

Indian science that make the Indian nuclear program synonymous with Indian sci-
ence, and also engage predominantly with elite figures of Indian nationalism, such
as Gandhi and Nehru. It seems as if one cannot write a history of India without
hagiographies on figures like Bhabha, Gandhi, or Nehru. On this point, I appreci-
ate the existing scholarship, but also differ from it.
The process of historical investigation for me is not restricted to a narrow
engagement with the elite characters mentioned above, and a celebration of their
careers, but with having to situate the investigation in an extensive horizon involv-
ing many individuals who were not necessarily elites, but could be conceptualized
as bhadraloks, and have been overlooked in historical narratives.
While there is plenty of literature on the Indian nuclear program and the atomic
bomb project, historians of South Asia seem to be “oblivious” of the role of sci-
ence in general. What is more, this lacuna has happened because most South
Asian historians focus on exclusively social histories, and typically omit the sci-
entific content from their analyses. As Prakash Kumar correctly remarked in his
2012 monograph on indigo:

But the study of science in South Asian historiography has so far evolved
along two parallel tracks – works that cover colonial science and works that
cover the social history of science in colonial South Asia. Their respective
philosophical orientations and theoretical borrowings have led them in dif-
ferent directions and they have built their own respective momentums in iso-
lation from one another. Thus, South Asia historians who study “science”
fall into one group or the other. The partiality in favor of analysis in one or
the other framework also accounts for the apparent chasm that separates the
18 Introduction
study of science so far. This mutual obliviousness is unfortunate because
each field has much to contribute to the other.59

Indeed, most South Asian historians have stayed away from deliberations of sci-
ence; while those who study science, like Gyan Prakash and Kapil Raj, belong
to an extreme “externalist” category that uses discourses around science, and the
images of science as their primary modus operandi in creating narratives. While
these issues surrounding discourse and images of science are important issues,
they do not fully capture, for example, conditions of how colonialism, nation-
alism, cosmopolitanism, and local knowledge systems influenced the growth of
the character of scientific knowledge. My monograph draws material from both
history of science and South Asian history to produce a narrative that aims to
resolve this “mutual obliviousness,” thereby bridging the “chasm” that, according
to Prakash Kumar, exists between these two fields.
A more balanced account of Science and Technology Studies in India, devel-
oped by digging deeper into the technical contents of the works by Indian scien-
tists, will help substantiate claims made by South Asian historians who approach
these issues using cultural history and postcolonial theories, and ascribe “differ-
ence” to South Asian scientists without a serious engagement with their research.
For example, the Princeton historian Gyan Prakash has traced the genealogy of
the culture of Western sciences in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Gyan Prakash remarked that “the insistent demand for a nation-state was an urge
to establish a modernity of one’s own, one that differed from Western moder-
nity.”60 It remains, however, unclear from Prakash’s narrative in what way Indian
modernity was different from Western. Hence it is important to flesh out how
science developed during the British rule, especially from 1876 on, which was
the founding moment for the first indigenous institute of scientific learning—the
Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). The major interlocutors
of scientific modernity in this context were the bhadraloks. Furthermore, it is also
relevant to appreciate how the various theories of nationalism elaborated by noted
scholars help us understand Indian nationalist thought as articulated by bhadralok
scientists.

Bhadraloks, nationalism, and scientific modernity

The image and practice of modern science, as it developed within colonial India,
reflected manifestly conflicting ideological predispositions. On the one hand,
there was the Orientalist vision of science as a civilizing mission, espoused by
William Jones—a British lawyer, Sanskrit scholar, and the founder of the Asiatic
Society—and Lord Macaulay, a British administrator; thus by implication, a vision
that had no roots in the Indian culture. On the other hand, there were nationalist
bhadralok scientists in India in the late nineteenth century who were the mentors
of Satyendranath Bose, C.V. Raman, and Meghnad Saha. These mentors included
Prafulla Chandra Ray and Jagadish Chandra Bose, for whom cultivating modern
science was a route to reviving the glorious tradition of ancient Indian knowledge.
 Introduction 19
The pioneering effort towards institutionalizing Indian interest in Western sci-
ence was the founding of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science
(IACS) in 1876 by Mahendra Lal Sircar, a medical practitioner and well-known
social reformer, as previously mentioned. The basic aim of the institute was to
encourage Indians in scientific research and to popularize scientific knowledge. In
1895, Sircar remarked:

We have two kinds of hoarded wealth in this country, one in the shape of
hoarded gold and silver, and the other in the shape of unused intelligence. In
order to liberate the latter, it is necessary to liberate the former, which in this
sublunar world of ours in a magic transformer of energy of all kinds.61

Furthermore, in 1897, Satish Chandra Mukherjee, an eminent nationalist and

bhadralok, launched the Dawn magazine, which spread ideas on national educa-
tion. In 1902, Mukherjee introduced the Dawn Society (as previously mentioned)
to promote the concept of national education.62 Mukherjee’s efforts led to the
founding of the National Council of Education (NCE), which assisted in keeping
science and technology in the curriculum of national education.63 With the forma-
tion of the Indian Science Congress Association in 1914, Indian scientists gained
a broad platform for exchanging ideas. A bhadralok chemist, Prafulla Chandra
Ray, published A History of Hindu Chemistry in 1902 as mentioned earlier.
Despite all the political and intellectual ferment in Bengal, a national con-
sciousness was growing that transcended its provincial boundaries. Ray also
understood the importance of a nation-wide awakening, saying:

In these days of awakened national consciousness, the life story of a Bengali

chemist smacks rather of narrow provincialism … It will be found, however,
that most part of the subject matter is applicable to India as a whole. Even
the economic condition of Bengal applies mutatis mutandis to almost any
province in India.64

These developments in nationalizing education, formation of the Indian Science

Congress, historical works in the sciences by bhadraloks, as well as the presence
of a colonial government, created a “nationalist” science. This science was one
that very often went beyond the boundaries of the nation, and incorporated ideas
from the transnational scene, as will be examined later in this monograph. The
bhadralok intellectuals eventually forged advances in science, such as the Bose–
Einstein statistics, the Saha equation, and the Raman Effect, that were nationalist
as well as cosmopolitan in nature. It can be inferred that a nationalist cosmopoli-
tan consciousness was a result of initiatives taken by the bhadralok intelligentsia,
and also of their interactions with their international colleagues. Science, nation-
alism, and cosmopolitanism were closely enmeshed, especially with the Indian
nationalists who were exposed to local and Western education—the bhadraloks.
The existing scholarship and theories of nationalism elaborate how academics
have viewed the workings of various forms of imagining the nation. For example,
20 Introduction
Ernest Gellner, an eminent scholar of nationalism, has located the “age of nation-
alism” in the structural transformation of state power, leading to the explanation
of a national identity. He argued that industrialization was the primary cause of
nationalism.65 For Benedict Anderson,

nations were imagined into existence through institutions of print-capitalism

in Europe and subsequently appropriated by nationalist elites in Asia and
Africa who borrowed the Western “modular” forms of nationalism.66

Several Indian nationalist leaders were Western educated and, accordingly, were
greatly influenced by Western modular forms of nationalism. Anderson’s model
has been critiqued by Partha Chatterjee, a scholar who studied anticolonial nation-
alism, and the subsequent processes of decolonization.67 Chatterjee pointed out,
that if “third world nationalisms were mere emulations of Western models, then
even the nationalist imaginations remain colonized forever.”68 This monograph
examines further this question of whether nationalist imaginations were colonized
forever, as per the thesis of Chatterjee.
This book draws on a wide range of sources and methods, including oral his-
tories, history of scientific ideas in the West and in South Asia, cultural history,
intellectual history, postcolonial theory, and archival research using close histori-
cal case studies. I see this work as part of a larger effort to make the history of
physics and science an integral part of a general South Asian history, and acces-
sible to a wider public. Quantum physics in colonial India, as it was received,
understood, and adapted in various ways to local conditions and academic tradi-
tions (or a lack of them) outside Europe, is an important area to explore.
India succeeded in developing a strong and original research tradition in mod-
ern science while it was a British colony. This success had come a couple of
decades prior to India acquiring independence in 1947. Quantum physics held
an attraction for, and was subsequently pursued by, a generation of young Indian
bhadralok scientists who were born and educated in India rather than in Europe.
In the chapters that follow, it will be argued why Indian science, through the lens
of “bhadralok physics,” followed such a trajectory; and how quantum physics
was received in India.
This monograph describes in detail the methodology for exploring the rise and
impact of “bhadralok physics” through the case studies of three bhadralok physi-
cists: Satyendranath Bose, who is best known for his work with Albert Einstein on
the quantum statistics of identical particles; C.V. Raman, who received the Nobel
Prize (1930) for his work on the quantum dispersion of light that helped bring
about quantum mechanics; and Meghnad Saha, a noted quantum astrophysicist
who later helped to establish the institutions of Indian physics, and who worked
to persuade Gandhi and Nehru for practical science policies.
This monograph’s analyses and conclusions are integrated into the larger field
of knowledge. The case studies illustrate and elucidate the origins and conscious
emergence of a bhadralok outlook among these influential physicists, and its
operation as a key component of Indian cultural nationalism. In the final chapter,
 Introduction 21
the monograph integrates my findings into the broader historical understanding
and historiographic viewpoints outlined in this opening chapter. These relate, in
particular, to an understanding of “bhadralok physics” as a worldview and social
phenomenon, and its impact on the emergence of Indian cosmopolitan national-
ism; which in turn contributed to the making of modern physics in colonial India.
Regarding the sources, there has been a severe dearth of primary sources for
the period and characters examined here. This scarcity is part of a larger problem
in South Asian history, and presently India is having a difficult time recovering its
own history. Because of the Nehruvian developmental model espoused by post-
colonial India, and a craving for science, technology, and engineering, studies in
the humanities and social sciences experienced a serious setback, and have been
reduced to the status of a subordinate.
Moreover, the profession of history in general and the history of science, spe-
cifically in India, has almost become a family property. Family members some-
times hold on to primary documents, unwilling to part with them, and often refuse
to engage with historians, with few exceptions. For example, I had a hard time
locating Raman’s spectrograph from the archives. It was only very recently that
Rajinder Singh shared with me the photo of Raman’s crucial instrument (see
Figure 1.1).
An additional obstacle comes from the fact that the field of history of science
is not a mainstream area of study or profession in Indian academia. Consequently,
scholars in North America working in this area are often seen through a lens of sus-
picion. Therefore, research in this area is even more challenging and painstaking.
Media sensationalism has also led people to perceive journalists and historians
as belonging to the same category. Though I personally have a lot of respect for
good journalism, serious scholarship in history and media journalism can never be
synonymous. The reason I mention this is because many family members of this

Figure 1.1 Raman’s spectrograph.69

22 Introduction
monograph’s protagonists have shown me the door and refused to engage with
me, assuming I was a journalist looking for sensationalist, therefore marketable,
stories for the media. If this problem can be appropriately addressed, I believe
it can open major gateways to furthering research on science in colonial India. I
hope that this book will contribute toward this wider goal of refuting stereotypes
of Asian scientists, and their respective contributions to the advancement and the
making of modern science.
The methodological approach undertaken in this monograph can be charac-
terized as follows. First, this is non-Eurocentric history of science in a colony
under the conditions of British Imperialism. Second, this book focuses not on a
recent episode (last fifty years), but on how science operated in a period about a
century ago. Third, this study uses non-English language sources in exploring the
methods and approaches of Indian bhadralok scientists. Fourth, it engages with
the internal and external context of science, thereby showing that science and
culture are deeply entangled. And last but not the least, it connects the separate
fields of South Asian history and the history of science, thereby starting to bridge
an important historiographic lacuna in the existing body of scholarship. The nar-
rative and analysis in the forthcoming chapters will follow the three bhadralok
scientists, their approaches and methods of doing physics and the culture in which
they were bred.

Notes
1 On a preliminary level, the Higgs Boson discovery was made on July 4, 2012 and a
more recent confirmation on March 14, 2013.
2 Somaditya Banerjee. “Transnational Quantum: Quantum Physics in India Through the
Lens of Satyendranath Bose.” Physics in Perspective 18, 2 (2016) 157–181.
3 Sumit Sarkar. Writing Social History (Delhi, 1998), 169 as quoted in Tithi Bhattacharya.
“In the Name of Culture” South Asia Research 21, 2 (2001) 161–187.
4 Ibid.
5 John McGuire. Making of a Colonial Mind: A Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok in
Calcutta, 1857–1885. (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1983) 18–31,
42–83.
6 N. Jayaram. “The Making of a Colonial Mind: A Quantitative Study of Bhadralok in
Calcutta, 1857–1885” [book review]. Contributions to Indian Sociology 19, 206–207.
7 Amit Kumar Gupta. Crises and Creativities: Middle-Class Bhadralok in Bengal, c.
1939–52. (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009).
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid. 8.
10 Swati Chattopadhyay. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the
Colonial Uncanny. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 138–139.
11 I thank Robert Anderson for this clarification.
12 Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib. “The Moral Legitimation of Modern Science:
Bhadralok Reflections on Theories of Evolution.” Social Studies of Science 26, 1
(1996) 9–42.
13 Ibid.
14 Historians based at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and others who espouse
Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision.
15 See Chapter 5 on Meghnad Saha.
 Introduction 23
16 Fritz Ringer. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic
Community, 1890–1933. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
17 See Note 18.
18 Russell McCormmach. “On Academic Scientists in Wilhelmian Germany.” Daedalus
103, 3 (1974) 157–171; and Fritz Ringer. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The
German Academic Community, 1890–1933. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press).
19 McCormmach, 158.
20 Ibid. 160.
21 Robert Brain. “Bürgerliche Intelligenz.” Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 26, 4 (1995) 617–635.
22 Peter Galison and Gerald Holton. Einstein for the Twenty First Century: His Legacy in
Science, Art and Modern Culture. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 3.
23 Robert Brain. “Bürgerliche Intelligenz.” 619.
24 Paul Forman. “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927:
Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual
Environment.” Historical Studies in Physical Sciences 3 (1971) 1–115; “Scientific
Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and its Manipulation in
Germany after WWI.” Isis 64 (1973) 151–180.
25 Mario Biagioli. Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904). Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.
Leviathan and the Air-Pump. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Geoffrey
V. Sutton. Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of
Enlightenment. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).
26 Peter Galison. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997); Peter Galison. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps:
Empires of Time. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Andrew Pickering. Constructing
Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
27 “Contact zones” is a term which was coined in the intellectual history landscape by
Mary Louise Pratt in 1991.
28 Abha Sur. Dispersed Radiance: Caster, Gender and Modern Science in India. (New
Delhi: Navayana, 2011) 25.
29 Mara Beller. Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
30 As Camilleri argues, “what we now refer to as the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI)
had its origins in discussions between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the latter
part of 1926 and early 1927.” Bohr’s idea of complementarity, his radical ideas sup-
porting causality, wave theory, and his measurement postulate are usually regarded as
the central ideas of the CI. K. Camilleri. “Constructing the myth if the Copenhagen
Interpretation”. Perspectives on Science, 17 (2009) 26–57.
31 Richard Staley. Einstein’s Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); “On the Co-creation of Classical and
Modern Physics.” Isis 96, 4, (2005) 530–558.
32 Russell McCormmach. “H.A. Lorentz and the Electromagnetic View of Nature.” Isis
61, 4 (1970) 459–497.
33 For a similar argument see Theodore Arabatzis’ article on “The Electron’s Hesitant
Passage to Modernity 1913–1925.” In M. Epple and F. Muller (eds.). Science as
Cultural Practice. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2017).
34 Frederick Cooper. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005) 113–152
35 Ibid.
36 Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 3–13; The Nation and
Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993).
24 Introduction
37 Partha Chatterjee. Our Modernity (Senegal). (Rotterdam and Dakar: CODESRIA-
SEPHIS, 1997) 3–20.
38 In the context of my study, South Asia means India.
39 Kapil Raj. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge
in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 229.
40 Non-elite voices from people not included in the narratives of a nation or non-dominant
social groups who are marginalized.
41 Vivek Chibber. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. (London: Verso,
2013) 33.
42 Antonio Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) 324. Ranajit Guha.
A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982) 1–8.
43 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Not
to be confused with the senior Indian nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha.
44 John Lourdusamy. Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870–1930. (New
Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004) 5–33.
45 The IACS formed by Sircar was a response to the system of reserving membership of
the Asiatic Society (founded in 1784) to only the British for the first few decades of its
working.
46 Lourdusamy, Science and National Consciousness, 141.
47 Pratik Chakrabarti. “Review of John Lourdusamy, Science and National Consciousness
in Bengal.” Medical History 50, 3 (2006) 403–404.
48 Ibid.
49 Subrata Dasgupta. Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western
Science. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 In a personal conversation with the author in March 2010.
54 Robert Anderson. Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks and Power
in India. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 7.
55 Ibid. 17.
56 Ibid. 538–539.
57 Ibid. 538–539.
58 Deepak Kumar. “The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the
Postcolonial State. Itty Abraham.” Isis 92, 1 (March 2001) 213–214.
59 Prakash Kumar. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 9.
60 Gyan Prakash. Another Reason, Science and the Imagination of Modern India.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 200–203.
61 Uma Dasgupta, ed. Science and Modern India: An Institutional History c. 1784–1947.
(New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2011) 69–117.
62 Pratik Chakrabarty. Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial
Practices. (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) 12.
63 Uma Dasgupta, ed. Science and Modern India: An Institutional History c. 1784–1947.
(New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2011) 849–870.
64 Prafulla Chandra Ray. A History of Hindu Chemistry. (2 vols). (Calcutta: Chuckervertty,
Chatterjee & Co., 1902–08); Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist. (Calcutta:
Chuckervertty, Chatterjee & Co., 1935).
65 Ernest Gellner. Nations and Nationalism. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
66 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
 Introduction 25
67 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 17–49. For a critique of Benedict Anderson,
see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 3–13.
68 Partha Chatterjee. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 3–13.
69 I thank Rajinder Singh for this photograph.
2 Bhadralok culture and the
making of Satyendranath Bose

In 1924, a thirty-year-old unknown Indian physicist from Calcutta by the name

of Satyendranath Bose (1894–1974) wrote a short letter to the then famous, forty-
five-year-old German physicist, Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in which Bose
requested assistance with the publication of his paper entitled “Planck’s Law and
Light Quantum Hypothesis.” Although Einstein had little idea who the author
was, he read the paper, translated it into German, and forwarded it to the German
journal Zeitschrift für Physik for publication. Regarding Bose’s paper, Einstein
said: “In my opinion Bose’s derivation of the Planck’s formula constitutes an
important advance. The method used here also yields the quantum theory of the
ideal gas as I shall discuss elsewhere in more detail.”1
Einstein was quite pleased with Bose’s novel derivation of the Planck’s
Law, and read this paper at the Physico-Mathematical Colloquium in the Berlin
Academy of Sciences.2 He immediately sent a letter of praise to Bose, calling his
work a beautiful step forward.3 After sending his letter, Einstein then extended
Bose’s approach from light quanta to material gas. Their collaboration by cor-
respondence formed the basis for the foundation of a novel concept in physics
that became known as Bose–Einstein statistics, or simply Bose statistics. The
correspondence between Bose and Einstein is a special moment in the history
of science, because Bose’s paper had already been rejected from the prestig-
ious Philosophical Magazine. It is possible that because Einstein was Jewish—a
peripheral identity in Weimar Germany—Bose resonated with him to the extent
that, in spite of Bose’s communication originating from the peripheries of science
in a British colony, it was sufficient for the further development of physics that led
to the Bose–Einstein statistics. It is also notable that Einstein had attained global
celebrity status by the early 1920s, especially after the Eddington eclipse expedi-
tion. Hence, his inspirational image was something to be emulated and respected
by a scientist from a colony like Bose’s.
Bose’s original paper, along with Einstein’s subsequent one, influenced the
work of Erwin Schrödinger, and contributed to the creation of the new quantum
mechanics in 1925. In 1926, following Bose’s method, Enrico Fermi, and later
Paul Dirac, derived a new distribution formula for an assembly of particles, obey-
ing Pauli’s exclusion principle. This formulation was later known as the Fermi–
Dirac statistics. Additionally, particles that obeyed Bose–Einstein statistics were
Other documents randomly have
different content
can neither live nor triumph by enthusiasm. There are claims which
outweigh all enthusiasms or artistic convictions.”
“Oh, but the two could not actually come in conflict,” said Maud. “It is
absurd to suppose that you will have to abandon your ideas of art at the very
outset because they are not marketable. Besides, most purchasers are
Philistines.”
“That is exactly what I fear,” said Tom. “Of course I don’t say for a
moment that I can produce good things, but I have an idea of beauty, and I
must work for that as long as I can. Perhaps great encouragement from any
one would mend my case, but the world regards me with disconcerting
indifference. Manvers thinks me a delver after uninteresting survivals. He
may be right, but again I may be. That the majority of purchasers think
Manvers right is of course indisputable.”
“But all this need not make you blasé,” said Maud.
Tom was silent. What he hungered for was active, sincere sympathy
from May, but that was not to be had. She seemed to regard the possible
abandonment of his practice of art as she would regard any other change of
employment, as if, for instance, Tom was a butcher and found it necessary
to become a baker. He had, as he acknowledged to himself, taken an
impossible view of all she might be to him. He was in love with her still, as
much as, or even more than when they married, but he had realized that she
did not and could not sympathize fully with his aims. At first it had seemed
as if there was nothing she could not do for him, as if they two were wholly
and inevitably one. But, without loving her the less, he had learned that it
was not so. She had one passion, he another, and they had to support their
passions singly. But the most rudimentary code of loyalty forbade his
saying anything of the kind to Maud.
“No; you are right,” he said. “I have a great many illusions left, and one
can’t be blasé if one has illusions. Of course I still have the illusion that the
Demeter is going to be a masterpiece. But the necessity of wondering
whether the masterpiece is marketable clouds the illusion a little.”
“Oh, you are certainly not blasé,” said Maud, with conviction. “How can
a man married to a woman he loves, working at what he loves, not only for
its sake but to supply her actual needs, be blasé. You ought to keep young
for ever.”
 “I am a quarter of a century old,” said Tom, “and I should like to live till
a hundred. It’s a good thing to be alive. Do you know that line of
Whitman’s?—I can’t quote it exactly—‘Let us take hands and help each
other to-day, because we are alive together.’ ”
Maud’s eye kindled.
“I like great big common ideas like that,” she said. “Mr. Manvers would
think it was a sign of approaching bourgeoisie or old age. After all we are
alive, and who is to help us except—except each other?” she added, with a
fine superiority to grammar, and holding out her hand to Tom.
Tom smiled, and the dimples came. Just now it struck Maud that he was
so like his cousin, instead of the other way about.
“I believe you understand me,” he said. “And to understand any one is
the greatest benefit you can do him!”
Lady Chatham returned before long from an unnecessary call,
undertaken chiefly because the carriage had to go that way, and it was the
most convenient thing in the world. She urged Tom to stop for tea, and it
was consequently nearly six when he left the house.
His way lay across the park from the Albert Gate to the Marble Arch,
and he loitered, for Maud had replenished his serenity, and when we are
serene we are not in a hurry. It was a hot afternoon, and by the time he got
to the Serpentine the banks were crowded with bathers. The grass
underneath the big elm trees on the side of the Row was covered with heaps
of clothes, and multitudes of boys and young men were standing about on
the bank, or swimming. The soft persuasive colour of an English evening
was there, and the warm languor of the south, and Tom stood watching
them for some time, feeling rather as if a gallery of antique statues had
come to life. Some of the bathers were very well made, one particularly, a
boy of about eighteen, who was standing on the bank resting on his
foremost foot, the other just touching the ground with the toes, his hands
clasped behind his head. He was long in the leg, short and slight in the
body, and his hair curled crisply on his forehead as in a Greek bronze. Tom
told himself that he was Lysippian, and went on his way thinking what a
fine subject for a statue Isaac would make—Isaac waiting with the faggots
of wood on his shoulder, standing gracefully, unthinkingly, like the boy he
had just seen, not knowing who the victim should be.
 May meanwhile had taken Mr. Thomas out for his airing, had had tea
alone, and was feeling a little ill-used. Maud had been quite right. Tom, she
thought, ought to have come away with her. Why? Well, for no reason
except the very important one that he wanted to stop. Then it occurred to
her that a candid enemy might say she was in danger of becoming jealous
of Maud, and the thought of that made her quite angry. But no one had
suggested it except herself.
In Tom’s mind the vision of Isaac was supplanted by other thoughts. He
wondered whether he had said too much, whether by any chance Maud
could guess his trouble, for he knew she was skilful at reading between the
lines, and on his way down Oxford Street he determined to write her a line
in order to counteract any such undesirable possibility.
May was not in the drawing-room when he got in, and taking up a
postcard—for there was nothing private in what he meant to say—he wrote:
“I am not blasé at all. Don’t think I am.”
He directed it, and leaving it with two or three others for the post, went
to see if May was in yet. He found her with Mr. Thomas, who was a little
fractious, and who, on Tom’s entrance, began yelling in a way that shouted
volumes for his lungs and larynx. Tom bore it for a minute or two, but as it
did not subside he shouted out to May across the tumult—
“I’ve only just come in, and if I stop here I shall be deafened. I shall be
in the studio till dinner.”
Mr. Thomas condescended to go to sleep after a quarter of an hour or so,
and May went to the drawing-room. Tom’s post-card was lying address
downwards, and not thinking what she was doing she read it. It was quite
natural and innocent to see to whom he was writing, but when she saw the
address she felt a little more ill-used than before.
About a week after this, Maud Wrexham came to see them in
Bloomsbury. May was out, and Tom was in despair because the breezy
model had taken it into her head to demand a higher wage for standing, and
Tom could not afford either to pay her more, or to part with her. He had
engaged her till the end of the week at the higher rate, but he knew he could
not continue to do so indefinitely. He was walking up and down the studio
when Maud was sloppily announced by the slip-shod maid—wondering
what on earth was to be done.
 “May not here,” she said, “and you be-thunder-clouded! What’s the
matter?”
Tom related the woes of the afternoon, and commented bitterly on the
rapacity of the human race.
“I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “I can’t possibly keep her on
at this rate. It’s hard enough as it is.”
Maud flushed suddenly, and seemed to have something to say.
“We are old friends,” she began at length, “and I don’t think you will be
offended at what I am going to say. Will you do me a favour? Will you let
me lend you some money?”
Tom stopped suddenly in his walk.
“How could I be offended?” he asked. “It is awfully kind of you. For
myself I should say ‘Yes’ at once. Why not? But there is May.”
Maud was silent a moment. A vague impatience came over her, for she
had understood rather more than Tom had meant her to understand a week
ago.
“Why should she know?” she asked at length. “It is a matter between
you and me. I know some people would refuse such a thing at once. It is
such a comfort that you are sensible. I have too much money, you have too
little. There can be no reason why I should not lend you some.”
Despite herself she felt a great anxiety that Tom should acquiesce. The
thing was of no importance, but she could not help longing that Tom should
take her offer, and not let May know. The feeling in her mind was too
undefined to lend itself to analysis, but she was conscious of desiring this in
some subtle manner beyond her control.
But Tom answered her at once.
“No, I must tell May. It would be out of the question not to tell her. You
see that surely. But I thank you again for your offer. I will tell her to-night.
Perhaps she will not object; on the other hand, I am afraid she may. I have
no such feelings about it. Of course we can go on for a month or so, but
what is to happen then? If I could get Demeter finished, and the clay sketch
of the other done, I shall have done my best, and if no one buys them——”
Maud looked up inquiringly.
“God knows what next,” said Tom. “If May and the baby keep well I
can’t bring myself to feel desperate. But if anything demanding expense
happens to either of them I don’t know what we shall do.”
“You’re fussed and worried this afternoon,” said Maud, sympathetically.
“It’s this bother about the model, and the heat, and so on. This room is
awfully hot. Why don’t you have a new blind up?”
Tom laughed rather bitterly.
“New blinds!” he said. “I’m thankful we’ve got some old ones. Thank
God May doesn’t know about it all, how near we are to actual want! But I
lie awake at night wondering if I ought to tell her. I am worried, I confess it;
and I thought I was so sure of myself. I aim at what I believe to be best. I
would sooner have produced that”—and he pointed to the Demeter—“than
all Manvers’ things, for which he gets what he asks. It will be finished next
week, and two or three dealers are coming here to look at it. They bought
those miserable statuettes of mine readily enough.”
“Of course you can’t make any more of those,” said Maud. “I understand
that.”
Tom flushed with pleasure.
“I believe you do,” he said, “though I don’t think any one else does.
Manvers and Wallingthorpe think it is half out of sheer perversity that I
make what they call heathen goddesses. But they are wrong. I do it because
I must. I may be quite wrong about myself, but I believe I am an artist. If I
didn’t think that I should have taken to the statuettes again the moment we
lost all our money. They might as well tell me to make plush brackets—
which I could probably do tolerably well. If I am not an artist, of course I
am wasting my time when I might be earning money, but I can’t sterilize
that possibility just yet. When you have a passion for a thing, it is not easy
to give it all up because you have no bank-notes.”
“It’s hard,” said Maud.
“I cannot serve two masters,” continued Tom, earnestly. “I cannot use
the gifts I believe I may possess in any other way than the way I believe to
be best. If the worst comes to the worst, if I cannot get my living by—oh,
it’s impossible, impossible!” he cried.
Before Maud had time to reply the door opened, and May came in. She,
too, saw by Tom’s face that something had happened.
“Why, what’s the matter, Tom?” she asked quickly.
 “Nothing, dear,” said he, getting up and recovering himself with an
effort. “I have had a row with a model, and she says she won’t sit for me
any more at the present terms; and so we parted. May, give us some tea,
dear, will you? I want tea badly, and so does Miss Wrexham.”
May looked a little vexed; she felt she had not been told all. She shook
hands with Maud, and remarked, a little curtly, that she did not know the
Chathams were still in London.
“Only a few days more,” said Maud. “How splendidly the Demeter has
got on.”
May was a little mollified.
“Yes, Tom’s been working very hard—too hard, I think. He doesn’t take
enough exercise.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that when she’s finished,” said Tom;
“and it’s exercise enough chipping away at that stone.”
“I saw Mr. Holders this afternoon,” said May. “Mr. Holders bought one
of Tom’s things last winter,” she explained to Maud, “and he wants to know
if you have anything else for him. I said there was one unfinished statuette,
but I couldn’t get you to finish it. Besides, you’d given it me.”
Tom grinned and stirred his tea.
“No, dear, I should just think you couldn’t get me to finish it,” he said.
“May means that little abortion on the chimney-piece in the sitting-room,
you know. There’s a horror for you!”
Maud Wrexham soon went away, and the two were left together. May’s
thoughts went back to the trouble she had seen on Tom’s face when she
entered, and presently she said—
“Tom, what was the matter when I came in?”
“We had been talking about what I told you,” he said. “I can’t possibly
afford to give more than I do for models, and I am rather in a hole.”
“Poor old boy!” said she. “But what can we do? You must have a model,
you say, and you have to pay her.”
“Unfortunately I have very little to pay her with. We must make the little
we have last as long as possible.”
“What did Maud Wrexham say?”
“She offered to lend me some.”
 May got up from where she had been sitting next to him with her cheeks
blazing. The idea of borrowing at all had been distasteful to her, and the
idea that Maud should have offered it was intolerable.
“She offered to lend you money—you? And you—what did you say to
her?”
“May dear, don’t behave like that. I said, of course, that I must ask you.”
May was all on fire with indignation. The offer appeared to her an insult,
and she smarted under it as a horse under a lash. She felt that her vague
disquietude for the last week or so was explained and justified. What
business had Tom to be on such terms with another? Her anger included
Tom too. He had not rejected it with surprise and scorn.
“You said you would consult me?” she asked. “And what answer did you
suppose I should give you? Did you think I should say, ‘Take it’? Tom, you
know me very little.”
“May, do be reasonable,” said Tom. “Perhaps I ought to have told you
sooner, but the state is this: if no one offers to buy the Demeter, we have to
face the fact that in a limited time we shall have no money left. What am I
to do?”
But May hardly seemed to hear what he said.
“You accepted her offer provisionally!” she exclaimed. “Tom, how could
you do it? And you said you would consult me? you told her that? And she
knows that you and I are talking the matter over, discussing whether we
should be her pensioners!”
Tom grew impatient.
“My dear, you really are talking nonsense,” he said; “there is no question
of being anybody’s pensioners. It is to a certain extent always a matter of
time before one is recognized. If I can manage to work on at the things I
think worth doing, good. If not, what is to happen to us? Maud Wrexham is
an old and great friend of mine. But you are unreasonable. Do not be
unreasonable. It is not like you. You have given me your answer, and of
course I accept your decision. Don’t let us discuss it any more. It is no
manner of use.”
He walked to the door and paused, looking at her. But she made no sign,
and he left the room.
 Tom stood still for a moment on the narrow landing outside the room. A
patch of ruddy sunlight came through the window which lit the stairs and
struck on the narrow strip of oilcloth which did duty for a carpet. The
window was bordered with hideous orange-coloured glass, and a ray
through it fell on Tom’s foot as he stood there, and the orange on the
blacking made an abhorrent tone. He felt beaten and dispirited, and the
whole place suddenly seemed intolerably sordid. The narrow strip of
oilcloth was continued along the landing, and was bordered on each side by
a foot or two of imperfectly stained board. The banisters were of that
particularly flimsy build which is characteristic of cheap lodgings. There
were two bad prints on the walls, one of King Alfred and the cakes, the
other of the Duke of Wellington with an impressionist background of the
battle of Waterloo. To Tom in his present mood the whole scene seemed to
him to be a sort of spectre reflected on to space from his own mind.
Everything was unlovely and impossible.
He felt sore and angry with May. She did not understand what his art
was to him. She did not understand Maud Wrexham’s offer. She did not
understand him. More than once the impulse came on him to go back into
the room and try to explain, but it seemed useless. She was angry and
indignant, and anger is a bandage over our eyes. And he knew, and was
honest enough to confess, that he was angry too, disappointed chiefly, but
also angry. Maud’s offer had come to him like manna. For himself he would
as soon have thought of not drinking of a spring that suddenly welled up in
a desert when he was dying of thirst, as of not accepting it. But May could
not understand that. She felt it as an insult to him and to herself, and to
disregard May’s feelings was impossible.
He took his hat and went downstairs. It was a broiling August afternoon,
and the world seemed dying of heat-apoplexy. The streets were breathless
and baked, and the sky was brass. At the corner of the street a watercart had
just passed, and Tom stood still a moment inhaling a whiff of air which had
a certain freshness in it. It reminded him of the smell of a morning in the
country, after a rainy night. He knew that he ought to go back and work, but
it was not to be done. His heart was heavy and his eye was dull. Well, there
was the British Museum only a hundred yards off, and a man must be in a
very bad state, he reflected, if the Elgin marbles have nothing to say to him.
The place was nearly empty, and he sat down in front of the eternal figures
from the Parthenon pediments with a little sigh of relief.
 He had made up accounts that morning with infinite difficulty, for it was
an operation to which he was not accustomed. The rapidity with which twos
and threes added up into tens and twenties seemed to him simply amazing.
And really it was absurd that there should only be twenty shillings in a
pound. There ought to have been at least twenty-five or thirty. And the net
result had been that at their present rate of living they could go on for three
weeks more, still leaving the bill for the piece of Carrara unpaid. He had
faced the situation manfully. He had determined to go on for three weeks
more, giving his heart and soul to what he thought best in art. But at the end
of those three weeks there stood a blank wall, separating him completely
and irrevocably from those shining gods and goddesses who were of the
golden age. May’s five hundred pounds he had determined quite definitely
he could not touch. More than once she had wanted him to let her sell out,
and though he had thrilled all over with pleasure that she should make the
offer, it was impossible to say yes. There was too much at stake; he might
die and leave her alone with the baby. Mr. Markham’s tithes had been
falling off lately, and if she went to live with him, as she would have to do,
she must be able to help in household expenses.
But for the half-hour that he sat before the marbles he forgot it all. What
did it matter after all if he produced beautiful things or not? Beautiful things
had been produced; the high-water mark of art had been touched. A race of
men had produced a race of gods, and he felt himself becoming sanely and
healthily small in his own eyes. Meantime May was at home; they had
parted in anger and indignation. Poor darling! perhaps she was unhappy,
perhaps she thought he did not care—that he was angry with her. Tom
smiled inwardly at the absurdity of the thought, and half unconsciously took
off his hat as he looked his last at the still marble figures and thanked them
for what they had taught him.
But into May’s mind there had definitely entered that afternoon a certain
subtle poison. For such a poison there is one unfailing antidote which Tom
held, and it is pure love. But when that poison, which is as minute in dose
as a drop of morphia injected from a silver syringe, has once entered the
system, however plentifully the antidote is administered the body is never
quite as healthy again as it was before. Where the syringe has pricked the
skin there is a little sore spot, and now and again the nerves shrink
instinctively at the thought that perhaps it may be introduced again. And the
clear drop which it holds is called jealousy. For the last week, and once
before that—one night soon after they had come up to London for the first
time, when she and Maud and Manvers and Tom had dined together—she
had seen the little green-eyed fiend hovering round her, and been vaguely
disquieted at him. She thought that Tom felt more interest in Maud than he
did in her. She could not talk smartly, she could not say those rather
amusing things, which meant nothing, with which Maud was so glib, and
which Tom apparently enjoyed hearing. But after that the baby had been
born, and the little green-eyed fiend had put his syringe in his pocket and
gone away. But for the last week he had been about, and this afternoon he
had come again, and had said, “Allow me—or would you rather do it for
yourself?” and had just pricked her with that fine point, and the poison was
coursing through her veins.
Anger is blinding, but jealousy is blind: she could not be reasonable, and
she would not. Tom had disgraced himself and degraded her, and his step
was on the stairs. Her anger would have allowed her to throw herself into
his arms, and say, “Forgive me, Tom, I was angry,” but her jealousy forbade
her. So she stood where she was with her back to the window, so that her
face was in shadow, and when he came in she neither spoke nor gave any
sign.
He sat down near her, and after a moment’s silence held out his hand to
her. May had long white fingers, and they often sat together talking, she
twining her fingers into his, and the action was common with him. But she
stood quite still, and his hand dropped again to his side. At length he spoke.
“May, how can you treat me like this?” he said. “What have I not done
that I can do? It was not very pleasant to have you speak to me as you spoke
this afternoon; but I accepted your decision at once; I did not attempt to
persuade you?”
“It would not have been much use trying,” said May in a high cool
voice.
“I should not have tried in any case,” said he. “I only wished to know
what you thought, and I was content to abide absolutely by your decision.”
“Why did you open the subject again, then,” said she with a sudden
spasm of jealousy, “unless it was to try to persuade me?”
Tom thought of the marble figures he had been looking at, and
remembered what they had taught him.
 “May dear, please don’t speak to me like that,” he said quietly. “You
know—you know that was not the reason.”
“Then what was the reason?”
“The look of your face and the tone of your voice was the reason. You
are not generous to me; you will not meet me halfway or go a step towards
me.”
“No, you are right. Do you expect me to come towards you on that
road?”
“On what road?” asked Tom, wonderingly.
Then quite suddenly and for the first time the real reason for his wife’s
attitude struck him. He got up and stood before her, and at that moment she
was desperately afraid of him. The anger which had possessed her seemed
to have transferred itself to him.
“May, how dare you think that?” he asked. “Are you not ashamed of
yourself?”
The least tremor passed through her, and she stood there not daring to
meet his eyes. The next moment he had turned from her and was walking
towards the door. Once she tried to find her voice and failed, but before he
had left the room she managed to speak.
“Tom, wait a minute,” she said.
He turned at once. He had been longing with all his soul that she should
say just that one word. He had been horribly wounded by her. Yet he felt
that he had never cared for her before as he cared now. He crossed the
room, sat down where he had sat before, and waited. The next moment she
had flung herself on her knees by him, and her face was buried on his
shoulder.
“My poor darling! what is it?” whispered Tom. “No, dear, don’t tell me
yet; wait a moment—yes, wait so. Come closer to me, May, closer. Your
place is here.”
In a few minutes her wild sobbing had become less passionate, and she
raised her face to his.
“I want to tell you,” she said. “I could never look you in the face again
unless I told you. You know, but I must tell you. I thought—oh, Tom, Tom,
what a brute I have been—I thought you cared for her, that she amused you,
when I didn’t. I can’t amuse you, I know. I’m not amusing by nature, dear.
And—and I thought your being willing to accept money from her, when
you wouldn’t let me sell out mine and give it you, meant just that. I wish
you would take it, Tom. Tom, I can’t tell you how I want to do something
for you. Or take hers—that would be better. It will show that I know what a
brute I have been, if I ask you to. Please do, Tom. But say you forgive me
first. Oh, I have spoiled it all—it can never be the same again!”
She spoke with the fatal conviction of experience. She had felt
poisonous jealousy run through her veins—a poison that cannot but leave
some trace behind. But of that Tom knew nothing.
And Tom forgave her from the fulness of his heart, and he believed that
he could forget what had passed, hoping an impossible thing. All events and
memories, as scientists tell us, write their record on our brains, as the sea
writes its ripples on the sand, and there they remain till the sweet hand of
death smooths the wrinkles out.
That evening Tom wrote to Maud, thanking her again for her offer, but
refusing it. On that point he could not give way. He himself felt as acutely,
or more acutely than May had done that afternoon, that to accept it now was
impossible. And he began to learn at once that bitter lesson, even in the first
glow of their reconciliation, the impossibility of forgetting. The thing had
been like a thunderstorm which had passed over and left the air fresh and
cool, but in the foreground stood the tree stripped and split by the lightning.
All that week Tom worked as he had never worked before. Doubts, fears,
and disappointments left him when he took up his chisel. The statue was
approaching completion, he had finished with the claw chisel, and was
working only with the fine point. Sometimes as he entered the studio, his
heart gave a sudden throb. Was his dream really coming true? Was the
Demeter really good—of the best? An artist’s conceptions are his religion,
and when he sees his religion becoming incarnate before him how can he
but be filled with joy and trembling? He knew that he saw before him his
conception. The thing was as he had meant it to be. He had realized his best.
And when she stood there finished, artists and others came and looked
and admired, and went away again. The Academy, they thought, would be
sure to take it; it was admirably conceived and wonderfully executed. But
how on earth would Tom get it down those little front stairs? Ha, ha! he
would have to take the roof off, or break off Demeter’s arm and say she was
an antique.
 But Tom felt singularly content. It was done: he had touched his own
high-water mark, and if no one else cared what cause was there for blame or
regret? The moment which he had feared and dreaded had come and passed.
Manvers was quite right; no one wanted the Demeter. They said it was
beautiful; some one had said it was Praxitelean, and that was enough. And
for the next three or four days he waited, doing nothing, walking out with
May when the day grew cooler, going through any amount of baby cult,
serene and content, knowing that in a little while the pause would inevitably
be over, and that he would have to do something—what he knew not. He
spent two days in shaping a little wax model of Persephone, which was to
have been his next statue, lingeringly, lovingly, regretfully, knowing he
would never make it.
About a week after Demeter had been finished, the end came. The baby
had not been well, and May, who was not usually anxious, had sent for the
doctor. Tom was out when he came, and she sat alone in the gathering dusk
waiting for him to come in. The room was nearly dark, and her chair was in
the shadow, so that when Tom entered the room he did not see her at once.
“May, are you there?” he said.
May’s voice answered him, and he sat down beside her.
“I sent for the doctor this evening, Tom,” she said; “baby’s not well.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was nothing really wrong, but that we ought to leave town
—to take baby to the seaside or somewhere. It’s this heat and stuffy air. The
nursery is terribly hot, you know; and I have to shut the window, or the
noise in the streets wakes him.”
Tom got up and walked up and down the room.
“There’s hardly any money,” he said. “I don’t see how we can manage
it.”
“Mr. Holders was here again this afternoon,” she said, “and he saw the
statuette—that little half-finished one you gave me. He said it was so good,
and told me to ask you to finish it at once for him. He said it was the best
thing you had ever done.”
There was a long pause. Tom stopped in his walk and stood with his
forehead pressed against the window. The sun had just gone down, but the
west was still luminous.
 “She cannot understand,” he thought to himself. “She will never
understand.”
And to confirm his thought, after a few moments May spoke again.
“I know how distasteful it will be to you, dear, because of course the
other style is what you really like. But we must have money. Even if baby
was quite well we should only be putting it off a little longer. And then if
you will do that, and perhaps do one or two more, you will have money
enough to go on with what you like. Mr. Holders admired it so awfully. He
said it was the best thing you had ever done, and he is a very good critic,
isn’t he?”
But still Tom did not answer. His time had come, and he knew it, but he
lingered a moment more by the window looking at the red colour in the
west. At last he turned and sat down by her. She took his hand and twined
her fingers into his.
“Yes, darling, you are quite right,” he said. “I will finish it at once; and
then we’ll take baby off to some seaside place, and—and build sand-castles,
and have a little jaunt generally.”
* * * * *
May went to bed early that night, and when the house was still Tom took
up the little rough sketch of Persephone, and with a candle in his hand went
into the studio. Demeter stood shining there, her head bent in sorrow for her
child. Tom looked at her long and steadily. The candle threw her shadow
vaguely and distortedly on to the walls and ceiling, but the statue itself
stood out radiantly from the obscurity round. He took hold of the cold
marble hand and stood there looking up to the down-bent face.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. “You are not wanted. And I—I have another
goddess and another child.”
 EPILOGUE.
Tom and Manvers were sitting at the bottom of a punt in one of the upper
reaches of the Thames on a September afternoon. Tom had taken out a
fishing-rod, but it was too hot to do more than smoke. Smoke produces
silence, and neither had spoken for some time. Manvers had arrived ten
days ago, and was staying with Tom in a small house he had lately bought,
in which he spent the summer months.
“It’s only three years since I saw you last,” he said at length, “but you
look more than three years older.”
Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of blue
smoke.
“I feel eighty-four,” he said. “Prosperity isn’t so soothing as I was led to
believe. I think worrying and fighting would have kept me young. You are
the only person who always remains twenty-five. How have you managed
it?”
“Growing old is absolutely a matter of will,” said Manvers. “It is like
Alice eating the mushroom to make her grow tall or short. You can eat
which side of it you like: one side makes you old, the other keeps you
young. No one need grow old unless he likes. The secret is to take nothing
seriously. I only once took anything seriously, and it made me three years
older in a single night. Consequently I am twenty-eight, not twenty-five.”
“What was that?” asked Tom, listlessly.
“I took Miss Wrexham seriously. I asked her to marry me. That was just
three years ago.”
“Poor old boy! Why didn’t you tell me? Are you going to try your fate
again? She is coming down here in a week.”
Manvers looked up.
“The deuce she is! No; the incident is closed.”
“Were you badly hurt?”
“I found everything distasteful for a time, but I recovered. Life is so
amusingly improbable. Fancy my doing that sort of thing! However, it was
very useful; I learned several lessons.”
 “What did you learn?”
“I learned that nothing can really damage one’s capacity for enjoyment.
Don’t think I wasn’t in earnest about it; I was in deadly earnest. The second
was that homme propose. It is a truism, of course, but it is useful to find by
experience that a truism is true. I have yet to learn who disposes,” he added.
“I must say I have never personally experienced the last part of the proverb.
By the way, I was talking to an old model the other day who was sitting to
me for my ‘Fourth Act’—the thing of the woman with the fan—and she
said, ‘Man appoints, God disappoints.’ But woman usually disappoints. And
the third thing I learned was that the most foolish thing in the world is to be
serious. While one can certainly amuse one’s self it is idle to forego that
bird in the hand for a problematic bird in the bush.”
“I wish I could learn one thing a year,” said Tom, “as you have been
doing. I should be getting confoundedly wise by now.”
“You always used to be learning things,” remarked the other. “I
remember you used to discover the secret of life about every other day.”
“I have unlearned a good many things, unfortunately.”
“It’s my turn to catechise. What have you unlearned?”
“I have unlearned my theory that I could do all I wanted. I have
unlearned my conviction that one made one’s own limitations—that one
could ever be certain about anything. In a way, I have all a reasonable man
could want. I have May, I have three healthy children, I have fame—fame
of a damnable kind, it is true—but there was a time when I shouldn’t have
been satisfied with anything. I longed to stretch out my arms round the
whole world, to take the whole world into my grasp. But now I know I
cannot do it, and, what is worse, I do not want to do it. I acquiesce in my
own limitations. What can be sadder than that?”
“If you are happy nothing matters.”
“I might once have been happier. I gave up what I believed I could do,
and what I believed was supremely well worth doing. I am an apostate.
Apostates may be very happy—they are rid of the thumbscrew and the
boiling lead—but I wonder if they ever lose that little cankerworm of
shame.”
“My dear Tom, what nonsense! You tried to fly, and before you had
succeeded some one took your apparatus away. Of course it is only natural
for you to think that you might have flown if you had been left with your
apparatus, but you never could have. Besides, you are rich now; you have
your apparatus again.”
Tom frowned.
“Cannot you understand?” he said, impatiently. “Good God, it is so
simple! Stevenson says somewhere that three pot-boilers will destroy any
talent. I must have made twenty pot-boilers at least. Don’t you see that what
I am regretting is that I no longer want to fly? The chances are a thousand to
one that I never could have. But that blessed illusion that I could fly has
gone.”
“You took it too seriously.”
“I did, much too seriously. I don’t take things seriously now; I have lost
the trick. But how I long to be able to! I was mad, no doubt: you often told
me so. But it was a very sweet madness. All enthusiasm is madness
according to you. But according to enthusiasts, enthusiasm is the only
sanity. I oughtn’t to complain. I sail closer to the shore. It is really much
safer and pleasanter. Indeed, we are thinking of taking a house at
Cambridge. It will be nice to have Ted near. If one wants to be happy, one
ought to have no ill-balanced enthusiasms. They are very disturbing while
they last, and they leave one as flat as a pancake. But when you have once
tasted them, though you may have lost them entirely, you can never wholly
forget their wonderful intoxication. One of those French enthusiasts says
that one must be drunk on something—on life or love, or virtue or vice, it
does not matter which.”
“I, too, am very catholic,” murmured Manvers, “I appreciate virtue as
little as I dislike vice. It is all a question of temperament.”
“Yes, temperament. That is another thing I have unlearned. There was a
time when I was convinced that no man need be in the clutch of his
temperament. I believed that one was free. One is not. One is in endless,
hopeless bondage to one’s temperament.”
“You are pessimistic this afternoon.”
“It is a relative term. I am really optimistic, though I allow my optimism
would have seemed pessimism to me three years ago.”
“I don’t quite see from what standpoint you can be considered
optimistic,” remarked Manvers.
 “I appreciate fully all I have got. I think the lines are laid for me in
pleasant places. That is surely the whole essence of optimism. I believe that
everything is for the best, and that if the best seems second-rate to me, it is I
who am wrong. I love May more than I love any one in this world, and she
is my wife. I have money, which is a hateful necessity, but as necessary as it
is hateful. And I have a good digestion.”
Tom leant back and beat out the ashes from his pipe against the side of
the boat. They would not come out at first, but eventually the whole dottel
of the pipe fell into the water with a subdued hiss. Some vague note of
thought twanged in his brain, and he paused for a moment, frowning
slightly, and trying to catch the remembrance which the sound had stirred.
After a little he smiled rather sadly, and not with the completeness which a
smile of pure amusement or of pure happiness has in it.
“I used to do that over King’s bridge at Cambridge,” he said irrelevantly;
“and I thought it seemed so like what I was going to do myself. I meant to
go through darkness, and then make a splash.”
“The end of your pipe made a very little splash,” said Manvers.
“Oh yes, a very little splash. All splashes are little; but splashes are rare.
Most people slide into the water anyhow, and are content to be seen
swimming.”
“The world would count you singularly happy.”
“Of course it would; it would be wrong if it did not. But—but what I
mean is that I might have been happier, and May might have been happier.”
Manvers looked up in surprise.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Tom sat up and played rather nervously with the tassel of the cushion on
which he was sitting.
“Surely it is simple enough,” he said. “I have acquiesced in limitations.
May is devoted to me—as much devoted to me as I am to her, I think. But
don’t you see there is less of me than there might have been. There is less of
me to love and to be loved—God knows, it is all perfect enough in its own
scale. But there might have been another scale. And now”—he dropped his
hands and sat upright, looking at Manvers—“and now we are measured by
yards, not by metres.”
 A little wind stirred suddenly in the elm trees by the bank and ruffled the
surface of the water. A fish rose in mid-stream beyond the boat, and the
current carried the concentric ripples down with it. Behind, the little
rambling red-brick house stood sunning its southern front, and on the lawn,
in the shadow of a tall copper beech, they could see the glimmer of a figure
in a white dress sitting in a low basket chair. Tom turned as he spoke and
looked half involuntarily at it.
“Come,” he said; “May will be waiting for us. We are going to have tea
early, and then go for a row up the river. We are going to do many pleasant
things.”
The boat was anchored among some flowering rushes; a few strokes of
the punt pole sent it back to the bottom of the lawn. They strolled up
together to where May was sitting, and she welcomed them with that
brilliant smile which was so natural to her.
“Tom has been so sombre this last day or two,” she said to Manvers. “I
hope you have been cheering him up.”
“I don’t think there is much the matter with him,” said Manvers. “He
says he feels optimistic.”
“Manvers called me pessimistic,” remarked Tom; “but that is only a
most flagrant instance of his own pessimism. He sees everything through
his own spectacles.”
May raised her eyebrows.
“What frightfully contradictory accounts,” she said. “Oh, Tom, by the
way, there is a man here who has come from the station to have the carriage
of the Demeter paid. It is fifteen pounds. Surely that is an awful lot. I
thought I had better ask you before I paid it.”
Manvers looked inquiringly at Tom.
“Have you the Demeter here?” he asked.
“Yes; I bought it back from Lord Henderson. He was very nice about it.
He saw I really wanted it, and he let me have it for what he had paid for it.
He bought it, you know, as a piece of cultured lumber, perhaps also as a
species of charity, and he has sold it for charity. It came two days ago. I told
them to unpack it this morning. Where have you had it put, May?”
“In your study, dear, where you said you wanted it. They unpacked it to-
day. But surely fifteen pounds is too much for the carriage, Tom?”
 Tom’s eyes wandered over the lawn, but came back to May.
“Yes, it seems a good deal. But I wanted it, you know, and one pays
anything for what one wants; in fact, one often pays a good deal for what
one doesn’t want.”
“You can’t say that that speech is optimistic,” said Manvers,
triumphantly.
“No, I don’t defend it,” said Tom. “May dear, let’s come in and have tea
now. It is getting much cooler, and then we can start in half an hour.”
May rose and walked with Manvers towards the house. Tom strolled on
a few steps ahead of them. As they reached the terrace which ran along the
front of the house he turned.
“I don’t think you ever saw the Demeter finished,” he said to Manvers.
“Come with me and look at it.”
“Yes, let’s all go and see it,” said May. “It looks so nice in that corner,
with the dark red paper behind, Tom. I went to see it just before I came
out.”
Tom’s room opened out of the hall, opposite the drawing-room. Just as
they got to the door he stopped and spoke to May without looking at her.
“Then will you have us told when tea is ready, dear?” he said.
May had intended to come in with them, but something in Tom’s voice
made her hesitate.
“Yes; don’t be long,” she said; “and don’t get to talking shop about it.
We shall never start if you do.”
Tom opened the door for Manvers and shut it again after they had
entered. The sun was already getting low, and a great blaze of light came in
almost horizontally through the open window and shone full on the statue.
Tom sat down opposite it, and Manvers stood near him. In the ruddy glow
of the evening the white marble was flushed with delicate red, and for the
first time Manvers really appreciated the noble conception of it—about the
execution he had never had any doubt.
They sat there in silence for some time, and then Tom got up.
“Do you see,” he said rather huskily, “do you see what I mean when I
say that I might have—might have——”
He turned abruptly. On the floor was lying the sheet in which the statue
had been wrapped. He took it up quickly and flung it over it.
 “We all have ghosts in our houses,” he said; “but we can at least veil
them a little. Besides,” he added, “to go back to what I was saying about my
optimism, I have had three crises, three revelations—unimportant little
revelations no doubt—in my life. I think I told you and Maud Wrexham
about them one evening, oh, ever so long ago!”
“I remember,” said Manvers.
“Well, to have had a crisis is in itself a most delightful experience, but if
your crisis remains, so to speak, critical, you ought to be perfectly happy.
Two of my crises were still-born. The crisis I had when I saw the Hermes at
Olympia has come to nothing.”
“Do you call that nothing?” said Manvers, pointing to the shrouded
Demeter.
“Worse than nothing. It is a dead child. It had better never have been
born. And the crisis I had, or thought I had, when the baby was born is—is
yet unfulfilled. But my third crisis remains critical. I met May, I loved her, I
love her. But the ghosts, the ghosts——”
They left the room. In the hall was the three-year-old Thomas, being
towed sideways across the hall by his nurse, going out for a walk. Tom took
the youngster up in his arms and turned to Manvers with a smile.
“I am a fool if I cannot lay my ghosts,” he said.

THE END.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

September, 1896.
 NEW & RECENT
NOVELS PUB-
LISHED BY
A. D. INNES
& C O M PA N Y
B E D F O R D S T.
MDCCCXCVI.
31 & 32, Bedford Street,
Strand, W.C.,
September, 1896.
NOVELS AND FICTION PUBLISHED BY
A. D. INNES & CO.
NEW ONE-VOLUME NOVELS.
By E. F. Benson.
Limitations.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By Francis Gribble.
The Lower Life.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By Eden Phillpotts.
Lying Prophets.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By G. B. Burgin.
Tomalyn’s Quest.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By Roma White.
The Changeling of Brandlesome.
Illustrated by Sydney Cowell. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
 By Howard Kerr.
Leeway.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By W. L. Alden.
The Mystery of Elias G. Roebuck.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By C. R. Coleridge and Helen Shipton.
Ravenstone.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By Nellie K. Blissett.
The Wisdom of the Simple.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
By Esther Miller.
The Sport of the Gods.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.

NEW AND CHEAPER EDITIONS OF TWO POPULAR NOVELS.

By Anthony Hope.
Comedies of Courtship.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.
“In this volume Mr. Anthony Hope is at his happiest in that particular
department of fiction in which he reigns supreme.”—Speaker.
“Delightful farcical comedies.... The whole book bears the impress of
Mr. Hope’s happiest manner.”—Glasgow Herald.
By Max Pemberton.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d.
“Is a selection of the adventures—daring, ludicrous, and pathetic—of
these two worthies. Seven exploits are recounted, and they are interesting
enough to make one wish they were seven times seven.... It is impossible
for one to refrain from the wish that Sir Nicholas Steele, Bart., and
Hildebrand may foregather
 RECENT POPULAR 6s. NOVELS.

By X. L., Author of “Aut Diabolus aut Nihil.”

The Limb.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
Mr. Gladstone writes: “Pray accept my thanks.... I was so imprudent as
to open it at once, and since that act have found great difficulty in laying it
down.”
The Glasgow Herald says: “An excellent, sometimes even entrancing,
novel.... Full of the deepest interest.”
The Birmingham Daily Gazette says: “ ‘The Limb’ is unquestionably one
of the most fascinating books of the season.”
By Roma White.
A Stolen Mask.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“A capital story, and Mrs. Roma White tells it with a delicate humour
and a spontaneous brilliancy as rare as they are delightful. ‘A Stolen Mask’
is a novel that stands high above the average, and can be strongly
recommended. It is a long time since we have come across anything so
thoroughly fresh and bright.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
“A powerful and fascinating story.”—Daily Telegraph.
“A novel of very remarkable originality, insight, and talent.”—Guardian.
By Francis Gribble.
The Things that Matter.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Is an extremely clever psychological study.”—The Times.
“It is a very amusing novel, full of bright satire directed against the new
woman and similar objects.”—Speaker.
“The book is extremely interesting, and brightly and swiftly told.... Full
of crisp epigrams.”—The Queen.
By G. B. Burgin.
The Judge of the Four Corners.
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“A delightfully humorous sketch, full of the purest fun, and irresistibly
laughable.”—Saturday Review.
“A tale which is well worth reading, and few who begin the idyll of ‘Old
Man’ Evans and Miss Wilks will lay aside the book unfinished.... Instinct
with humour, pathos, and a firm grasp of character.”—National Observer.
“A more stirring and fascinating tale has not been told for many a
day.”—Daily Telegraph.
By Eden Phillpotts.
My Laughing Philosopher.
Illustrated by George Hutchinson. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“We commend to the notice of any one wanting a good laugh ‘My
Laughing Philosopher,’ whose varied character sketches amply prove Mr.
Eden Phillpotts to be endowed with those two excellent gifts of humour and
imagination.”—Spectator.
“The book will be welcome to every one who likes a book from which a
man can get a good laugh.”—Scotsman.
By Norma Lorimer.
A Sweet Disorder.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Has freshness, vivacity, variety of scene, some very good character-
sketching, excellent dialogue, and plenty of epigram.... Ought to be a
success.”—Literary World.
“One feels quite safe in predicting a wide popularity for the book.”—
Queen.
By F. M. White.
The Robe of Lucifer.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Extravagant, whimsical, and delightfully ingenious.”—Manchester
Guardian.
“Undeniably ingenious—full of power and interest.”—Daily Telegraph.
By Leslie Keith, Author of “The Chilcotes,” “Lisbeth,” etc.
For Love of Prue.
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Plot and incident in this present story are alike remarkable.... Altogether
we heartily commend ‘For Love of Prue’ as a sensible, humorous, and
thoroughly wholesome book.”—Speaker.
“Some words of appreciative and cordial praise must be accorded to
Leslie Keith’s new story ‘For Love of Prue,’ which is fresh and wholesome
throughout, and teems with charming contrasts of pathos and humour.”—
Daily Telegraph.
By Dorothea Gerard.
Lot 13.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“A bright, buoyant, and bustling story, with plenty of local colour
derived from the scenery and the society, black and white, of a West Indian
plantation.”—Times.
“Delightfully fresh and original in plot, character, and incident, and it
has the charm that Miss Gerard’s work never lacks of an atmosphere of
imagination and poetry.”—Guardian.
By the late Mrs. J. K. Spender, Author of “Thirteen Doctors,” etc.
The Wooing of Doris.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.
“Has much to commend it to novel readers. A clever plot; well-drawn
characters—such are the leading features of a novel by which the reputation
of its much regretted writer is fully sustained to the last.”—World.
“A charming and wholesome story, it is full of human interest.”—
Sheffield Daily Telegraph.

THREE SUCCESSFUL ROMANCES.

By J. C. Snaith.
Mistress Dorothy Marvin.
A tale of the Seventeenth Century. Being Excerpta from the Memoirs of
Sir Edward Armstrong, Baronet, of Copeland Hall, in the County of
Somerset.
With Illustrations by S. Cowell. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6s.
 “The author has succeeded in making his story intensely interesting....
One of the very best adventure stories we have had for a long time past.”—
Speaker.
“Full of the most thrilling adventures and terrific fights.... But through
the story there runs the thread of as tender and rare a love between man and
maid as the most romantic reader could desire.... A story intensely
interesting and powerfully exciting. It cannot be put down when once taken
up till it has been read from cover to cover.”—Church Times.
“ ‘Mistress Dorothy Marvin,’ most delightful and winsome of women,
and one of the freshest and most unhackneyed heroines whose acquaintance
we have had the pleasure of making for a very considerable period.... Mr.
Snaith has a great gift of observation, and his book is a remarkable picture
of the age it is intended to depict.”—World.
By Frank Barrett, Author of “The Admirable Lady Biddy Fane.”
A Set of Rogues: Namely, Christopher Sutton, John Dawson, the Señor don
Sanchez del Castillo de Castelaña, and Moll Dawson. Their Wicked
Conspiracy, and a True Account of their Travels and Adventures.
With Illustrations by S. Cowell. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6s.
“He has related the adventures of a set of rogues ... with so pleasant a
tongue and in such attractive fashion that it is impossible for mere flesh and
blood to resist them. His set of rogues have won our entire sympathy, and
his narrative our hearty approval.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
“Another capital story.... Strongly recommended. Stirring tale this,
without a dull chapter in it, and just enough human sentiment in it to soften
down the roguery.... Let the honest reader procure the book.”—Punch.
“Most excellent story.... In the whole book there are no dull pages, and
the plot is worked out with a care that leaves nothing to be desired.... We
can only recommend the book to our readers as being in all respects a most
satisfactory and admirable bit of work.”—Speaker.
By Stanley Weyman.
My Lady Rotha.
A Romance of the Thirty Years’ War. With 8 Illustrations by John
Williamson. Crown 8vo, buckram, 6s.
“No one who begins will lay it down before the end, it is so extremely
well carried on from adventure to adventure.”—Saturday Review.
 “A novel which everybody must read and enjoy as such books are meant
to be read and enjoyed.”—Speaker.
“Exhibits in high degree and ample abundance the qualities which have
so certainly and so fast brought Mr. Weyman to the front; the excellence of
the narrative style, the skill with which the historical element is introduced,
the adequacy for romantic purposes of the character drawing, and above all
the quick invention in incident and situation.”—St James’s Gazette.
SCARLET NOVELS.
A SERIES OF POPULAR NOVELS BY WELL-KNOWN AUTHORS.
Crown 8vo, uniform scarlet cloth, 3s. 6d. each Volume.

By Anthony Hope.
Comedies of Courtship.
[Just added.
“He is undeniably gay in the best sense of the word, now and then
almost rollicking. An admirable example of what we mean by gaiety in
fictional literature.”—Daily Telegraph.
Half a Hero.
“The book is delightful to read, and an excellent piece of work.”—
Standard.
Mr. Witt’s Widow. A Frivolous Tale.
“A brilliant little tale.... Exhibits unborrowed ingenuity, plausibility, and
fertility in surprises.”—Times.
“Excellent fooling. From first to last the story is keenly and quietly
amusing.”—Scotsman.
By Max Pemberton.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman.
[Just added.
“This is very much the best book that Mr. Max Pemberton has so far
given us.”—Daily Chronicle.
By Richard Pryce.
The Burden of a Woman.
“Mr. Richard Pryce has worked a fresh vein of realistic romance, and has
done so with eminent success. The story which the author has here
presented so artistically is both a powerful and a beautiful one, told with
mingled strength and delicacy, enriched with admirable character-drawing,
and marked by real distinction of tone and style. Mr. Pryce has conferred a
benefit upon novel readers by the production of so noble and interesting a
book as ‘The Burden of a Woman.’ ”—Speaker.
By C. R. Coleridge.
Amethyst. The Story of a Beauty.
“Extremely amusing, interesting, and brightly written.”—Guardian.
By F. Frankfort Moore.
Two in the Bush and Others elsewhere.
“Carry the reader on from page to page till criticism is forgotten in
enjoyment.”—Daily Graphic.