🇮🇳 C. V.
Raman

On February 28, 1928, in a laboratory at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman shone a beam of monochromatic light through a liquid and observed that a small fraction of the scattered light emerged at a different wavelength — shifted in energy in a way that revealed the molecular structure of the substance. The phenomenon, immediately dubbed the Raman Effect, was a fundamental discovery about the interaction of light and matter. Within two years it earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, making him the first Asian scientist — and the first person from any country outside Europe or North America — to win a science Nobel Prize. He had done it all with equipment that cost less than two hundred rupees, in a country that was still a British colony.

Raman was born on November 7, 1888, in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu. His father, Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer, was a lecturer in mathematics and physics; books and scientific curiosity were constants of the household. Raman was a prodigy by any measure: he passed his matriculation examination at age eleven, graduated from Presidency College Madras at sixteen with a gold medal in physics, and completed his master’s degree at seventeen with the highest distinction. His research was good enough to be published in the prestigious journal Philosophical Magazine while he was still an undergraduate. He sat the civil service examination and topped it, joining the Indian Finance Department as an assistant accountant general — because in colonial India in 1907, the civil service offered more security than a scientific career.

He spent ten years as a civil servant in Calcutta, but he never stopped doing physics. The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science had a modest laboratory; Raman obtained a key and worked there every spare hour — evenings, weekends, holidays. His research on acoustics, the vibration of strings, and the optics of colloids attracted international attention long before his Nobel discovery. In 1917 he was offered the Palit Chair of Physics at the University of Calcutta and resigned from the Finance Department without hesitation. He became a full-time scientist at the age of twenty-eight.

The Raman Effect — formally, the inelastic scattering of photons by molecules, resulting in a shift in the photon’s energy that is characteristic of the molecular bonds involved — is now the basis of Raman spectroscopy, one of the most powerful analytical tools in chemistry, materials science, medicine, and forensic science. Every pharmaceutical laboratory in the world uses Raman spectroscopy to verify molecular structures. Geologists use it to identify minerals. Astronomers use it to analyse the composition of distant objects. The technique Raman discovered with a two-hundred-rupee apparatus is now embedded in instruments worth millions used in laboratories across the globe.

After the Nobel Prize, Raman moved to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore as its first Indian director, a position he held from 1933 to 1937. In 1948 he founded the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, which he directed until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1954, the first scientist to receive the honour. He died on November 21, 1970, aged eighty-two, two days after collapsing in his laboratory. India observes National Science Day on February 28 — the anniversary of his discovery — every year.

The broader significance of Raman’s achievement was not only scientific but political and psychological. He made his discovery in a colonial country with no tradition of experimental physics, using improvised equipment, largely without foreign collaboration. He demonstrated in the most public way possible that Indian science could not only participate in but lead world science. His insistence on building a world-class research culture in India — at the Raman Research Institute and through his mentorship of an entire generation of Indian physicists — shaped the institutional landscape of Indian science for decades after his death.