But Bose’s real story is actually far richer. His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges to make his historical mark. The narrow focus on his ‘accidental’ discovery overlooks the breadth of Bose’s pursuits and the context that shaped him. Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire, facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist: limited resources, isolation from international peers, and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements; instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light. His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone, but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.
Bose was born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of British-ruled India. He was the only, eldest son (among seven children) of a lower-middle-class Bengali family. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant with the East Indian Railways who had a knack for mathematics and science. His mother, Amodini Devi, although barely formally educated, managed the large household. Surendra Nath harboured nationalist sympathies; in 1901, he left his secure railway job, a position with the colonial government, to start a small chemical and pharmaceutical venture with a friend. Hence, Surendra Nath’s quiet defiance of colonial structures, and his turn towards Indian scientific enterprise, likely created a family world where a nascent nationalist milieu could thrive. This, I believe, left an enduring mark on his son.
The Bose family belonged to the Bengali Kayastha caste, which was traditionally excluded from the highest echelons of scholarship. By the late 19th century, however, social reforms of the Bengal Renaissance were loosening such barriers and opening up higher education to non-Brahmins. In this milieu of rising opportunities, young Bose demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science, coming top in his classes at university.
Bose launched his academic career just as a new era in physics was dawning, but also during the tumult of the First World War, which cut off direct intellectual contact between British India and the German scientific centres pioneering quantum theory. Bose, however, was determined to keep up with the latest developments. He taught himself German and, with the help of mentors and colleagues, obtained copies of cutting-edge European research. He devoured papers by the physicists Max Planck and Arnold Sommerfeld, and studied advanced texts, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s and J W Gibbs’s treatises on statistical mechanics. Immersing himself in these resources, Bose stayed abreast of the new quantum ideas, even as some Western scientists remained sceptical of concepts such as the light quantum (the photon). Later in life, Bose reflected that working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies of the European establishment didn’t bind him.
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By the early 1920s, quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures. As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’ that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India, which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.
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Notably, Bose was not a traditional firebrand political agitator; he did not lead rallies or write polemics against British rule. His form of nationalism was expressed through intellectual sovereignty. He showed by example that Indians could innovate at the highest levels of physics, even under the constraints of colonial rule. Moreover, by choosing to develop his career in India and by communicating science in an Indian language, he undercut the notion that one must go abroad or use English to be a successful scientist.
Beyond his famous work in quantum statistics, Bose led a rich and varied scientific life. Upon returning to Dacca after his European sojourn, he threw himself into new projects. One of his significant contributions was in the field of X-ray crystallography. With the know-how he gained in de Broglie’s lab in Paris, Bose established one of India’s first X-ray crystallography laboratories at Dacca University in 1926. Under his guidance, the lab’s students and technicians constructed advanced instruments. By the 1930s, they had built a Weissenberg X-ray camera, a sophisticated device for crystal structure analysis, in the department’s workshop. This was cutting-edge equipment for an Indian institution at the time, and it turned Bose’s Dacca lab into a regional hub of research activity. Not only his students used it, but students from other universities (including some from Calcutta) would travel to Dacca to conduct experiments. In an era when Indian scientists often struggled for resources, Bose’s initiative created rare opportunities for hands-on training within his home country.
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True to the label ‘polymath’, Bose’s interests were never confined to physics alone. His lifelong love of literature, music and philosophy complemented his scientific pursuits. Bose was fluent in several languages, including Bengali and English, as well as French, and had a working knowledge of German from his student days. He enjoyed reading the original works of Western philosophers and actively engaged in the cultural and intellectual debates of his time. Friends and colleagues recall that he could discuss the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore or the essays of Bertrand Russell with equal ease, as he could the latest findings in quantum mechanics.
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