Historian and teacher Rudrangshu Mukherjee has compiled a monumental 819-page volume felicitously titled A Touch of Genius. It is a collection of representative writings by nine Indian winners of Nobel prizes and their acceptance speeches. Mother Teresa, winner of the Peace Prize in 1979, is among the nine, having made India—specifically Kolkata—her own.
Of the nine, three are Bengali—Rabindranath Tagore (literature, 1913), Amartya Sen (economic sciences, 1998), Abhijit Banerjee (economic sciences, with Esther Duflo, 2019). Counting Mother Teresa of Kalighat among them, we get four. Taking C V Ramans defining years—full 25 of them from 1907 to 1933—working in Calcutta, he may well be regarded as a fifth Calcuttan to have won a Nobel.
No less impressive is the fact that three of the other Nobels are from Tamil India, their families descending from the Cauvery delta. What is more, all three have either Chandrasekhar or Venkataraman in their names—Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (physics, 1930), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (physics, 1983) and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (chemistry, 2009). What does this prove? Nothing at all except yet another manifestation of the common phenomenon called coincidence. Rajaji, asked about it once, said the word ‘coincidence’ means ‘concurrent incidence’—a diamond of an explanation.
Reading the C V Raman pages in Mukherjee’s compilation, I was dazzled by the physicist’s observations on the diamond. I devoured the pages skipping the technical bits for a future birth in my cycle. Let me excerpt some diamonds among them:
“They come out perfect from Nature’s crucible. Diamonds are, by common consent, Nature’s most wonderful product in the mineral world.”
“In the olden days, men in India wore them in their ears. Those days, alas, have gone and even turbans are fast disappearing.”
(I have tried in vain to find a picture of Raman wearing diamond studs on his ears, as was a standard practice then, nor any reference to his doing that. Although Lady Raman, the much-respected Lokasundari Ammal, is known to have given her precious diamond nose-stud to her husband for his research, as research-grade diamonds were hard to come by.)
More from Raman: “In 1925, when I was in Russia at the invitation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I visited the famous Kremlin and I remember seeing on a big table there a display of flashing gems. Among them I noticed the Crown of the Empress Catherine. She had a specially large head, and a specially large crown had to be made for her, studded with rubies, sapphires and diamonds. I looked at it very carefully and thought how those diamonds had come to Russia. A photographer asked me to hold up the crown and he took a photograph. He then wanted me to put the crown on my head and photograph it. I demurred by shaking my head and drawing my hand across my throat to indicate I had no desire to share the fate of the former owner!”
If Raman had been photographed wearing the empress’s diamond-studded crown, the Raman Effect would have had its rays scattered among the ruins of famous egos. We may be thankful for small mercies. Almost certainly, he also saw in the Kremlin the same empress’s imperial sceptre. That has embedded in it what is known in Russia as the Orlov or Orloff, so named after Count Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov, Catherine the Great’s luckless paramour. That gem hails from Golconda—stolen, it is said, in 1747 by a Frenchman in Srirangam, where at the famous shrine it illumined the eye of Sriranganathar, and was hot-sold, after many changes of merchant hands, to Orlov by an Iranian millionaire in Amsterdam.
Interestingly, Mahatma Gandhi, who was quite knowledgeable about diamonds, writing in his Satyagraha in South Africa about that country’s Cullinan diamond, says, “The Kohinoor now weighs about 100 carats, and the Orloff, one of the Russian crown jewels, about 200 carats.” It is curious that while Great Britain is from time to time asked to return the Kohinoor to India, no such demand is made of Russia, about the Great Mogul aka Orlov.
Let’s return to Raman and Russia. In 1957, the Nobel laureate was conferred the Lenin Peace Prize for “outstanding services in the struggle for preservation and conservation of peace”. Raman, being the polymath he was, wanted to make his acceptance speech in Russian. An interview in Scroll tells us that S Narayan, then a 27-year-young metallurgist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore who was fluent in the language, taught the 60-year-old some basic Russian using the Potapova primer. Narayan recalled: “He evinced a very keen interest, like a gurukul student of old. Every day he would do his homework and repeat his lessons back to me.” As payment, says the interview, Narayan would get to sit down with Raman and his wife for a breakfast of hot coffee and idlis.
Kaapi and Raman! I can picture—in my imagination, perhaps incorrectly—Lady Raman serving these with her diamond nose-stud back in her possession, scattering its rays to another Raman Effect. “Soon,” says the interview, “Russian was rolling off Raman’s tongue. Dobroe utro, he would say to Narayan, wishing him a good morning.”
Viva Raman, viva Russian.
Endnote: Raman disfavoured artificial diamonds. He was, after all, a natural diamond in himself. Let me conclude with this observation of his from Mukherjee’s book: “If diamonds could be produced today… having lost their rarity, they would at the same time have lost their value.”
Read all columns by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Former Governor of West Bengal and Bihar