Overview

In 1871 the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, the first of two centers for modern science in India, was founded to give young Indians the opportunity, discouraged by the colonial British government, to conduct laboratory research. The second center was a college of science established at the University of Calcutta by an amateur mathematician whose fundraising was so effective that he was able to endow two professorial chairs, in physics and chemistry, for qualified Indian scientists. In 1930 the first occupant of the chair in physics became the first Indian as well as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize.

Background

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) received a master's degree in science and joined the Indian Finance Department in 1907. He took up a post in Calcutta and, discovering a local scientific association, began to conduct research outside of his...