“I am the master of my failure… If I never fail how will I ever learn”, is a famous quote by the greatest scientist of modern India Sir C.V. Raman.
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Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, popularly known as C.V. Raman saw the first light of earth on 7th November, 1888 at Tiruchirappalli (now Trichy) in Tamil Nadu, to Hindu Tamil parents, Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer and Parvathi Ammal. He was the second of eight siblings. His father was a teacher at the local high school, and earned a modest income. In 1892, his family moved to Visakhapatnam (then Vishakhapatnam or Vizagapatam or Vizag) in Andhra Pradesh as his father was appointed to the faculty of physics at Mrs. A.V. Narasimha Rao College. There Raman studied at St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School. He passed matriculation at age 11 and the FA examination with a scholarship at age 13, securing first position in under the Andhra Pradesh school board examination. In 1902, Raman joined Presidency College in Madras (now Chennai) where his father had been transferred. In 1904, he obtained a B.A. degree from the University of Madras, where he stood first and won the gold medal in physics. At age 18, while still a graduate student, he published his first scientific paper on "Unsymmetrical diffraction bands due to a rectangular aperture" in the British journal Philosophical Magazine in 1906.
Aware of Raman's capacity, his physics teacher Richard Llewellyn Jones insisted him to continue research in England. But due to his poor health he was unable to do so. In no condition to study abroad, Raman qualified for the Indian Finance Service with first position in the entrance examination in February 1907. He was posted in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as Assistant Accountant General in June 1907.Then in Calcutta (now Kolkata) he became highly impressed with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). He immediately befriended Asutosh Dey, Amrita Lal Sircar, founder and secretary of IACS, and Ashutosh Mukherjee, Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta. With the help of such a connection, he obtained permission to conduct research in his own time. In 1909, Raman was transferred to Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar), to take up the position of currency officer. After only a few months, he had to return to Madras as his father succumbed to fatal illness. The subsequent death of his father and funeral rituals made him stay there for the rest of the year. Soon after he resumed office at Rangoon, he was transferred to Nagpur, Maharashtra in 1910. Then again, he was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and again posted to Calcutta. From 1915, the University of Calcutta started assigning research scholars under Raman at IACS. Kumar Banerji (who later become Director General of Observatories of India Meteorological Department), a PhD scholar under Ganesh Prasad, was his first student. By 1919, Raman had guided more than a dozen students. Following Amrita Lal Sircar’s death in 1919, C.V. Raman received two honorary positions at IACS, Honorary Professor and Honorary Secretary. Raman was chosen by the University of Calcutta to become the Palit Professor of Physics. He was elected the Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1924. He discovered the “Raman Effect” in 1928. For it he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. With this award, his reputation increased by leaps and bounds and many Universities and institutions of repute honored him with Ph D and D.Sc. degrees. Lord Rutherford was instrumental in some of C.V. Raman's most pivotal moments in life. He nominated C.V. Raman for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, presented him the Hughes Medal as President of the Royal Society in 1930, and recommended him for the position of Director at IISc in 1932. In 1933, he left Kolkata to join the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore as its first Indian director. With his former student Panchapakesa Krishnamurti, Raman started a company called Travancore Chemical and Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 1943. In 1943 he founded the Raman Research Institute at Bangalore. The company, renamed as TCM Limited in 1996, was one of the first organic and inorganic chemical manufacturers. In 1947, C.V. Raman was appointed as the first National Professor by the new government of Independent India. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and the International Lenin Prize in 1957. At the end of October 1970, Raman had a cardiac arrest and collapsed in his laboratory. He was moved to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed his condition and declared that Raman would not live more than four hours. However, he survived a few days and requested to stay in the gardens of his institute surrounded by his followers. He died from natural causes on 21st November 1970 at the age of 82.
Sir C.V. Raman was a born genius and a self-made man and scientist with deep religious convictions. His interests were wide and deep and so were his contributions to the human knowledge and development. Besides optics, he was deeply interested in acoustics—the science and study of sound. His contributions to the mechanical theory of bowed, stringed and other musical instruments like violin, sitar, cello, piano, veena, Tanpura and mridangam have been very significant. He explained in detail how these musical instruments produce harmonious tones and notes.
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