India's best students who won the Nobel Prize

Professor C V Raman (1888-1970)
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner for the Raman Effect
BA & MA (Physics and English), Presidency College, Madras

HE was born on November 7, 1888, in Thiruvanaikkaval. His father was a school teacher, and at the age of 13, he won a scholarship and joined the Presidency College. At 15, he passed his BA exam and got gold medals for Physics and English.

At 16, while doing a routine experiment on his college spectrometer, he observed some diffraction bands and wrote his first paper, which was published by The Philosophical Magazine.

He completed his MA in 1907, at the age of 19. He took the Civil Services competitive exam for the Finance Department and topped it, and was appointed as the Assistant Accountant General in the Finance Department in Calcutta.

His heart though was in research, which he conducted at the ‘Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science’ in Calcutta. In 1917, Professor Asutosh Mukherjee offered CV Raman the prestigious Tarakanath Palit Professorship of Physics at the University of Calcutta despite the fact that only a candidate trained in a foreign country could be appointed.

Professor Raman’s work on the scattering of light fetched him the Nobel Prize in Physics, a first for an Indian scholar who studied wholly in India. The Raman Effect confirmed that light was made up of particles known as ‘photons’. In 1934, Raman became director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1949, he established the Raman Research Institute. Until his death in 1970, Dr. Raman actively participated in his the primary passion, research.

Did you know…

At 18, he saw a 13-year old girl called Lokasundari playing the veena and asked for her hand in marriage.
As the director of the Tata Institute (the Indian Institute of Science) in 1933, he approached noted scientist Erwin Schrodinger to take up a job in India.

Awards

Elected Fellow Royal Society of England (1924)
Matteucci Medal by Science Society of Rome (1928)

Subramaniam Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)
Noble Prize winner in Astrophysics
BA (Hons) Physics, Presidency College, Madras, 1930
Graduate studies at the University of Cambridge PhD at Cambridge University, 1933

Subramaniam Chandrasekhar

The third of 10 children, he was tutored by his parents and private tutors at the elementary school level, in Lahore. His first scientific paper was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1928. On the basis of this paper he was accepted as a research student by R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge.

He presented his initial conclusion in the form of a research paper at a meeting of the Astrophysical Society on January 11, 1935. Reputed scientists ridiculed him and rejected his finding. This limit is now known as the Chandrasekhar limit.

He obtained his doctorate in 1933 and was then awarded the Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1937, he accepted the position of Research Associate at the University of Chicago. Chandrasekhar stayed at University of Chicago throughout his career, becoming the Morton D. Hall Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1952.

The very same year, he established the Astrophysical Journal and was its editor for 19 years, transforming it from a local publication of the University into the national journal of the American Astronomical Society.

In 1983, at the age of 73, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for science for his theoretical work on the physical processes of importance to the structure of stars and their evolution. His research explored nearly all branches of theoretical astrophysics and he published 10 books, each covering a different topic, including one on the relationship between art and science.

Did you know…
He was a popular teacher who guided over 50 students to their PhDs. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen Ning Yang won Nobel prizes in Physics, thus making Chandra the only Nobel prize winner with his students following in his league. At the University of Chicago’s physics department, he once took a class and taught only two students.

NASA named its premier space observatory ‘Chandra’ in honour of Dr. S. Chandrashekhar. Names like Newton, Einstein, Kepler, Marie Curie and Asimov were also vying for the title.

Rabindranath Tagore

The fourteenth and youngest child of Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and Sarada Devi, Rabindranath was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta, to a progressive, wealthy family.

Dissatisfied with formal schooling, young Tagore decided to be schooled at home. At home he learned art, history, science, mathematics, Bengali, Sanskrit, Upanishads and Romantic poetry. Tagore wrote his first poems when he was eight. As his father often travelled to promote Brahma Samaj, Tagore wasn’t allowed to venture out much. This, he resisted and often met with insensitive punishment from the house servants.

At 16, he published his first major collection under the pseudonym Bhanushingho. Soon afterwards, he sailed to London to study law at University College London. In 1890, Tagore moved to the large family estate in Shilaidaha, now part of Bangladesh.

His wife Mrinalini Devi and children joined him in 1898. There, while collecting rents from the tenants, he closely observed village life which inspired many of his works. This was one of his most fertile period, where he wrote poems such as Manasi or The Ideal One (1890), and Sonar Tari in 1894. Around this time in 1901, he also he founded Shantiniketan (now known as Visva-Bharati University). After his wife’s death, his first major novel was Ghare-Baire (At Home in the World – 1915).

International fame came to him with his English translations of Gitanjali, for which W. B. Yeats wrote the preface. In 1913, Tagore won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to literature and after which began his extensive tours to many parts of the world. On one such travel to Argentina he met Victoria Ocampo, writer and socialite who became his distant muse.

In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst founded the Institute for Rural Reconstruction, “Shriniketan” (Abode of Peace), near Shantiniketan. Tagore became ill in his mid-seventies and never fully recovered. It is said that during the five years of his illness, he produced his best work.

Rabindranath Tagore died on August 7, 1941 at Jorasanko, his birthplace, leaving behind hundreds of poems and songs, his vast collection of paintings and drawings; and the various dramas, novels, essays, operas, short stories, travel diaries, correspondence and autobiographies.

Did you know?

He was knighted by the British Crown in 1915 but renounced the title after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
National anthem Jana Gana Mana is written and composed by Tagore
Tagore’s song Amar Sonar Bangla (My Golden Bengal) is Bangladesh’s national anthem
He learnt painting at the age of 70

Har Gobind Khurana

He is best known for developing chemical methods to determine the nucleotide sequence of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and for deciphering the genetic code. He was born in the small village of Raipur, and his father was a village employee. Although poor, his father was dedicated to educating his children and they were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people.

He attended D.A.V. High School in Multan (now West Punjab), and received his BSc and MSc degrees from the Punjab University in Lahore. In 1945, the award of a Government of India Fellowship made it possible for him to go to England where he studied for a PhD at the University of Liverpool.

In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. which offered at that time very little by way of facilities, but freedom to a researcher to do what he liked.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code. They established that this code, the biological language common to all living organisms, is spelled out in three-letter words: each set of three nucleotides codes for a specific amino acid.

Prof. Amartya Sen

Born in Santiniketan, the university town established by poet Rabindranath Tagore, a close associate of Sen’s father, Tagore is said to have given him the name Amartya meaning “immortal”. Sen’s ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka, modern-day Bangladesh, and he studied at St Gregory’s School, Dhaka, but partition made a move to India inevitable.

While studying at Presidency College, Calcutta (1951-53), his atcareers360_cmst to understand cultural identity based on clans and class remained a major concern. Leftist debates in an elitist college irked him. In 1953, he moved from Calcutta to Trinity College, Cambridge University, which he described as a battlefield due to the intense debates by opposing parties.

Here he earned a First Class (Congratulatory First) BA (Honours) in 1956 and a PhD in “The choice of techniques” in 1959. He retuned to Calcutta to work under AK Dasgupta on his thesis, and also applied for Trinity College’s Prize Fellowship. He gained four additional years of freedom due to the Fellowship and studied philosophy, logic and epistemology, which always fascinated him.

Images : T.Narayan/outlook Group

He has taught economics at the University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, and at the Delhi School of Economics, Oxford, London School of Economics, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1998 and 2004. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard.

Prof. Sen’s seminal contributions were initially in economic theory, and his work on famines and democracy is widely citied. Along with Dr. Jean Dreze he had also worked on developmental paradigm. One of the most path breaking works in development, named Human Development originated during a collaborative work with another Harvard professor Dr. Martha Nusbum. Dr. Sen also takes active interest in political scenario in India, and has consistently stood up against narrow sectarian considerations.

Did you know…
At Cambridge, he was part of a Secret Society ‘The Apostles’, established in the 1800s, which held discussions and meetings, but the exact purpose of the society remain a mystery. At the age of 23, he was appointed to set up a new department of economics at Jadavpur University, causing an uproar because of his young age.

Awards
Bharat Ratna 1999
Eisenhower Medal 2000

Publications
Choice of Techniques	1960
Collective Choice and Social Welfare	1970
On Economic Inequality	1973
Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation	1981
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Dreze	1995
Commodities and Capabilities	1999
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time)	2006
The Argumentative Indian	2005
Rationality and Freedom	2004
Inequality Reexamined,	2004
Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other essays	2000

VS Naipaul

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, a dot in the Caribbean Sea. His forefathers were indentured labourers on the island, but his father, Seepersad Naipaul, was self-taught and changed the course of his life by becoming a journalist.

Influenced by his father, at the age of 11, Naipaul decided to become a writer, though he barely made the atcareers360_cmst to write anything then. He writes in Literary Occasions (2003) that, “I wasn’t especially good at English composition; I didn’t make up and tell stories at home.”

Despite an unsettled life at home, he was brilliant in studies and won the island scholarship, his only hope for a better life. In Trinidad, prospects were limited as was evident from his father’s professional struggles.

Naipaul arrived in England in 1950 on a scholarship to study English at University College, Oxford. After graduation and trying for a job for long without success, he got a part-time job with BBC’s Caribbean Service. The only money he earned, after deductions, was eight guineas a week.

One late afternoon, in the room where he wrote his radio scripts, he wrote the lines of his first novel, Miguel Street (1959). But it wasn’t until his fourth and most popular book, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), was published that his earlier novels such as Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) received attention.

In 2001, Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his Nobel lecture, he talked of the two worlds he was born into at once: the world inside his home, and the world outside it. Much of Naipaul’s fiction is about identity and how one’s place in the world is an ever changing idea. On writing, he said, “Talent, Proust says. I would say luck, and much labour.”

Did you know…

After Oxford, he worked on a farm to tide over financial difficulties

Awards

Somerset Maugham Award, 1960
Booker Prize, 1971
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2001
Knighthood, 1990

V Ramakrishnan

Born in 1952 at Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu and referred to as Venki by his friends, Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.

After completing most of his schooling in Baroda, and pre-Science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he graduated in Physics in 1971, with the National Science Talent Scholarship. While completing his PhD in Physics (1976) from Ohio University he began reading the Scientific American, a biological sciences journal, which kindled his interest in biology.

His octogenarian father Professor CV Ramakrishnan informed students at the Nirma Institute of Management Studies at Nirma University, “He got married and had two children. But he also wanted to get a good background in biological science and one university (University of California, San Diego) was prepared to admit him for a doctorate in Biological Science. He got a scholarship of $3000 per year.”

Venky’s American wife Vera Rosenberry asked him to go ahead even though funds were insufficient to support the family. So, he did all the integrated courses for two years while his wife managed within their means. “She stopped eating processed foods and grew vegetables in her garden to save money,” his father elaborated. After completing the courses, Yale University offered Venki a scholarship of $30,000-40,000 to work on ribosome along with his fellow Nobel Laureate.

An IIT aspirant when he was young Venki did not make the cut, he told a packed audience. His parents did not believe in coaching classes (in preparation for entrance test) and thought of them as “nonsense”.

Honours & Awards

Fellow of the Royal Society
Member of EMBO and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
2009, Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome
2010, Padma Vibhushan