Although the original copy of the letter sent by Travancore University to Albert Einstein in 1937, asking him to be the first vice-chancellor, hasn’t been found, the claim by a historian has an authentic ring. There were towering personalities in India whose vision extended far beyond the country’s borders. Nor is it surprising that the idea of inviting Einstein was that of the legendary diwan of the then princely state of Travancore-Cochin, Sir C P Ramaswami Iyer. Only someone of Sir C P ’s stature could have thought of making the new university announce its presence to the academic world by having the great physicist as its head.
Had he accepted the offer, he would have been someone like J B S Haldane, the well-known British scientist, who made India his home because he felt that his adopted country had something special to offer to the world in terms of culture and civilisation. For much the same reason, another celebrated anthropologist, Verrier Elwin, chose to live and die in India.
The reason for Einstein’s reluctance to take up a new job in India must have had as much to with his unfamiliarity with the locale as with the unsettled conditions in which he was living at the time with World War II only a few years away. He was then unsure of whether to settle down in England or in America. Similarly, the fact that Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 is in the fitness of things — just as the fact that he rejected the offer of being the ceremonial head of a new country in preference for the simple title of a professor in Princeton University. But nothing captured Einstein’s status as a world citizen better than the cartoon after his death, whose caption for the planet earth was “Einstein lived here”.