Anglophile scientist, ardent nationalist

Bhabha was born into a wealthy Parsi family (he was related to the Tatas). He studied physics at Cambridge and wrote several well-regarded papers

Homi J Bhabha: A Life

Author: Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy

Publisher: Rupa

Pages: 723

Price: Rs 995

This door-stopping monster would be better described as a history of India’s scientific research establishment with a special focus on one individual, rather than a biography. Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909-1966) died in a plane crash in January 1966, the day before Indira Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister. He was one of a small cohort of experts instrumental in shaping India’s relationship with science, playing a crucial role as organiser, administrator and evangelist.

He coaxed and cajoled the Tatas into creating the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He designed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (renamed in his honour after his death) from the ground up. He is also credited with doing the spadework, both in terms of creating the technical capacity as well as in terms of the political manoeuvring, to set up that first “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974.  

Bhabha was born into a wealthy Parsi family (he was related to the Tatas). He studied physics at Cambridge (switching from mechanical engineering) and wrote several well-regarded papers. He was admitted to the Royal Society as a Fellow at age 31, and nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in the 1950s.  In addition, he was a talented artist, a connoisseur of classical music and gourmet food. He was a design freak and a proto-environmentalist, who micromanaged the architectural master plans of TIFR and BARC, realigning roads and buildings to avoid cutting down trees. He laid out gorgeous gardens with exotic plants sourced from all over the world at both campuses.

Bhabha reconciled the apparent contradictions of being an anglophile, as well as a nationalist. His art was clearly European in its influences, and his musical tastes much more inclined to Beethoven than to Raag Bhairavi. He wore bespoke suits; insisted TIFR staff wore Western clothes with shirts tucked in, and learned to use western cutlery and toilets. In one peculiar way, however, he was absolutely desi  — he was notoriously, habitually, unpunctual. He also had close family connections to the Nehrus, and for good or ill India’s scientific research environment was largely shaped by him.

It is very likely that he would have happily settled down to a life of research in Europe, where he had the opportunity to work in proximity to great men such as Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr and Max Born. He was at least on nodding terms with most great scientists who were near-contemporaries.

But he happened to be on holiday in India when World War II broke out and Cambridge’s loss was India’s gain. Bhabha spent the war years at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), another institution established with Tata money, in Bangalore, with the director C V Raman giving him a free hand. Then he persuaded the Tatas to set up TIFR. He influenced the draft of the legislation that created India’s atomic energy policy, and then he drove nuclear science as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

India’s research establishment was a snakepit in the decades between 1906, when a young audit service officer called C V Raman arrived in Calcutta and started to study physics in his spare time, and 1966, when Bhabha died. Everyone hated the arrogant Raman, including his brother who advised his son, the astrophysics genius Chandrasekhar, to stay out of Raman’s orbit. Meghnad Saha and Satyen Bose were classmates and hated each other, while both did path-breaking work. P C Mahalanobis and S S Bhatnagar had their own agendas as well.

Saha, who was from a low-income, low-caste background, also hated the anglophile patrician Bhabha with his easy access to power and his ability to connect personally with great scientists overseas. Apart from incompatibilities in personality, Saha and Bhabha butted heads because they were fighting for slices of the same, rather small pie.

Funding was tight pre-independence, and dependent on the munificence of benefactors such as the Tatas or the Maharaja of Tripura who funded the Bose Institute. Funding remained tight post-independence and became dependent on the whims of politicians. As a result, there was an unseemly competition between these giants to carve out their own fiefdoms. Bhabha had an edge here due to his easy relationship with Nehru (who had also studied science at Cambridge).

Much is made of the fact that India neglected to spread primary education and focussed on higher education instead. Unfortunately, the infighting meant even higher education didn’t spread widely and evenly. Scientists such as Saha, Bhatnagar and Bhabha looked to establish tight control over their disciplines and to cut off access to funding for research institutes led by rivals. There are other downsides to research driven by one man. Bhabha was wildly overoptimistic about the possibility of generating cheap nuclear electricity, and he was hawkish about “peaceful nuclear explosions”. This meant a misallocation of resources, and eventually, decades of sanctions.

Some of the information in this book is peripheral to the subject, though not uninteresting in itself. While being rigorously researched, it does report the sensational conspiracy theory that Bhabha was murdered by the CIA.

The portrait here is of a man with great gifts, and some jagged edges. This is a good adjunct to the scholarly biography by Indira Chowdhury and Ananya Dasgupta and it counterbalances the populist fictionalisation of The Rocket Boys.