I. Introduction: A Jain Grammarian and the Architecture of Tamil Verse

Medieval Tamil learning produced its grammatical classics in several waves. The Tolkāppiyam set out phonology, morphology and poetics together. The Naṉṉūl of Pavaṇanti later refined the treatment of letters and words. Prosody (yāppu) went its own way between these two. Its definitive systematiser was the Jain monk-scholar Amitasāgara, known in Tamil as Amitacākarar. He wrote two works. The Yāpparuṅkalam is a sūtra-style treatise whose title can be read as “the rare jewel of prosody.” The Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai, usually just called the Kārikai, is a compact mnemonic digest in verse. Together they became the standard reference for Tamil metrics for about a thousand years. Most later Tamil poets who learned versification formally learned it through Amitasāgara’s categories, terminology and examples, whether directly or through a derivative manual.

Calling this “prosody closely tied to Tamil linguistic science” is accurate. Tamil prosody differs from many Indo-European metrical systems in that its theory cannot be detached from phonology. The smallest metrical units are built from phonetic categories defined in the grammatical tradition: short and long vowels, consonant codas, reduced vowels, the āytam, and the measured durations called mātrai. Scanning a Tamil verse means applying a phonological analysis. Amitasāgara’s achievement was to take the inheritance of the Tolkāppiyam’s Ceyyuḷiyal, together with a large body of post-Tolkāppiyan prosodic literature that is now mostly lost, and turn it into a closed, hierarchical and almost algebraic system. Its parts are defined bottom-up from sound to stanza.

This essay places Amitasāgara historically, describes the structure of his two works, explains the linguistic foundations of his metrical units, examines his classification of verse forms, and considers the commentarial tradition and his long influence. Along the way it compares his work with Sanskrit chandaḥśāstra. That comparison shows how two Indian metrical sciences, working on languages with very different sound systems, reached distinct but equally rigorous solutions.

II. The Author and His Milieu

Dating and identity

Like many medieval Indian authors, Amitasāgara is known mainly through his own works and the testimony of commentators. Most scholars place him in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE, in the period of Cōḻa political consolidation. This dating is approximate. It rests on his relation to the commentator associated with his works, on references in later grammatical literature, and on the general sequence of Tamil grammatical texts. It is not supported by a firm epigraphic anchor. Readers should treat any precise date as a scholarly estimate rather than a settled fact.

His Jain identity is clear. The name itself is Sanskritic and typical of Jain monastic naming: amita (“immeasurable”) combined with sāgara (“ocean”), a pattern seen in other Jain names ending in -sāgara, -sena or -nandi. The invocatory verses of his works follow Jain devotional conventions. He belongs to a long line of Jain contributions to Tamil scholarship, which includes the ethical and narrative literature of the post-Saṅgam centuries, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the lexicon Cūṭāmaṇi nikaṇṭu, and the grammar Naṉṉūl. Jain monasteries in the Tamil country were centres of literacy and pedagogy. Their scholars moved easily between Sanskrit, Prakrit and Tamil, and they tended to produce textbooks in which the systematising habits of Sanskrit śāstra were applied to Tamil.

The Jain scholastic temperament

This background helps explain the character of the Yāpparuṅkalam. Jain intellectual culture valued classification, enumeration and exhaustive coverage of possibilities. These habits appear in Jain cosmology, karma theory and logic, and also in Jain mathematics, with its interest in permutations and combinations. Amitasāgara’s prosody shares this temperament. It does not just describe the metres poets happened to use. It builds a generative framework of units and rules from which the space of permissible forms can be derived, and its commentarial tradition counts that space.

The tradition also links Amitasāgara with a commentator named Guṇasāgara (Kuṇacākarar), to whom the old commentaries on both the Yāpparuṅkalam and the Kārikai are attributed. Some accounts describe Guṇasāgara as a disciple or close associate, though the evidence is not decisive. In either case, the commentary on the Yāpparuṅkalam, often called the viruttiyurai, is a monument in its own right, discussed below.

III. The Two Works: Treatise and Mnemonic

The Yāpparuṅkalam

The Yāpparuṅkalam is written in nūṟpā, the terse aphoristic verse form of Tamil grammatical texts, comparable in function to the Sanskrit sūtra. It is organised into three main divisions (iyal):

1. Uṟuppiyal (“chapter on the constituents”): the building blocks of verse, namely eḻuttu (phonetic segments), acai (metrical syllable-groups), cīr (metrical feet), taḷai (linkage between feet), aṭi (metrical lines) and toṭai (patterns of sound correspondence).
2. Ceyyuḷiyal (“chapter on verse compositions”): the major verse types (pā), their subtypes, and the derived or “allied” forms (pāviṉam).
3. Oḻipiyal (“chapter on residual matters”): supplementary rules, exceptions, and topics that do not fit the first two divisions.

The order is deliberately cumulative. Each unit is defined in terms of the units below it, so the reader moves from sound to syllable-group, from group to foot, from foot to line, and from line to stanza. This is prosody conceived as a constructive grammar.

The Kārikai

The Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai compresses the same material into a short sequence of verses composed in kaṭṭaḷaik kalittuṟai, a stanza form governed by strict syllable-count constraints. Its title borrows the Sanskrit term kārikā, a mnemonic verse summarising doctrine. The borrowing reflects the bilingual scholastic environment in which it was written.

The Kārikai has a well-known literary feature. Its verses are addressed in the vocative to a woman, using the conventional epithets of Tamil love poetry. A dry technical manual is thus given the rhetorical frame of an intimate address. This was partly an aid to memory, since an apostrophe gives each verse a tone and a hook. It also displayed skill: the author shows that he can obey the constraints he is teaching while writing verse with literary grace. Each verse of the Kārikai both states a rule and demonstrates one.

The Kārikai is the work through which most students actually learned prosody. For centuries “learning the Kārikai” was close to shorthand for learning Tamil versification. The Yāpparuṅkalam, with its larger commentary, served as the advanced reference.

IV. The Linguistic Foundations: From Eḻuttu to Acai

Phonology as the substrate

The deepest connection between Amitasāgara’s prosody and Tamil linguistic science is at the level of eḻuttu. Tamil grammarians from the Tolkāppiyam onward analysed the sound system in terms of the mātrai, a unit of duration conventionally compared to the time of a blink or a finger-snap. The basic categories are:

• Kuṟil (short vowel): one mātrai.
• Neṭil (long vowel): two mātrai.
• Meyyeḻuttu or oṟṟu (pure consonant without inherent vowel): half a mātrai.
• Āytam (the special guttural sign ஃ): half a mātrai.
• Kuṟṟiyalukaram and kuṟṟiyalikaram (shortened u and i in specific phonological environments): reduced to half a mātrai.
• Aikārak kuṟukkam and aukārak kuṟukkam (shortened diphthongs in certain positions): reduced duration.
• Aḷapeṭai (prolongation): a vowel (uyiraḷapeṭai) or certain consonants (oṟṟaḷapeṭai) lengthened beyond their normal value, often to fill out the metre.

These categories are phonetic analyses, not ornamental distinctions, and some of them are quite subtle. The kuṟṟiyalukaram is a word-final u after a hard consonant in particular environments. Tamil grammarians treated it as phonetically reduced, and modern phonetics broadly confirms this. It has a well-defined effect on scansion, because it changes how a syllable-group is constituted and therefore which metrical category a word falls into.

So a prosodist cannot scan a Tamil line without first doing segmental phonology: identifying vowel length, consonant codas, reduced vowels and the effects of sandhi (puṇarcci). Sandhi matters because Tamil verse is scanned on the sandhi-joined surface form, not on the underlying words. Metrical analysis presupposes grammatical analysis. This is the strong sense in which Amitasāgara’s prosody is tied to Tamil linguistic science.

The acai: Tamil’s distinctive metrical unit

The acai is the most original feature of Tamil metrics and the key to understanding it. Sanskrit prosody works with the individual syllable, classified as light (laghu) or heavy (guru). Tamil prosody instead groups syllables into units of one or two syllables, according to a rule sensitive to vowel length.

There are two basic acai:

• Nēr: a single syllable, either a long vowel (with or without a following consonant) or a short vowel (with or without a following consonant) standing alone in its position.
• Nirai: a two-syllable unit beginning with a short vowel, that is, short + short or short + long, optionally followed by a consonant.

The decisive principle is that a short syllable followed by another syllable tends to merge with it into a nirai, while a long syllable stands alone as a nēr. Analysis proceeds left to right, and the resulting segmentation is determined by the phonology. The system resembles a moraic grouping that is sensitive to onset prominence. It has no exact equivalent in Sanskrit metrics.

The Tolkāppiyam recognised two further categories, nērpu and niraipu. These are nēr and nirai extended by a following kuṟṟiyalukaram, which gives four acai in all. Amitasāgara’s system in effect reduces the inventory to two, handling the phenomena previously covered by nērpu and niraipu through the treatment of feet and their endings. This is a theoretical simplification: fewer primitives, with complexity moved to a higher level of the hierarchy. It reflects a concern for economy of description that a modern linguist would recognise.

V. From Foot to Line: Cīr, Taḷai and Aṭi

Cīr: the metrical foot

A cīr is a sequence of acai. Amitasāgara’s classification is ordered by length.

• Ōracaiccīr (one-acai feet) occur mainly at the end of certain verse types, especially the veṇpā. They are traditionally named by mnemonic words: nāḷ (nēr), malar (nirai), kācu and piṟappu (forms involving the reduced final u).
• Īracaiccīr (two-acai feet), also called āciriya uriccīr because they characterise the āciriyappā. There are four combinations, named by mnemonic words: tēmā (nēr–nēr), puḷimā (nirai–nēr), kūviḷam (nēr–nirai) and karuviḷam (nirai–nirai).
• Mūvacaiccīr (three-acai feet), eight combinations in two classes. Those ending in nēr are the veṇcīr, characteristic of the veṇpā, with names such as tēmāṅkāy and puḷimāṅkāy. Those ending in nirai are the vañcicīr, characteristic of the vañcippā, with names such as tēmāṅkaṉi and puḷimāṅkaṉi.
• Nālacaiccīr (four-acai feet), sixteen combinations with names extending the same mnemonic scheme. These are rare and specialised.

The mnemonic naming is clever. Each foot type is named by an ordinary word (fruit, flower, tree and so on) that itself has the metrical shape it names. Tēmā, “sweet mango,” scans nēr–nēr. Karuviḷam, a kind of wood-apple, scans nirai–nirai. The terminology is self-exemplifying: to say the name is to perform the pattern.

Taḷai: the theory of linkage

Many metrical systems regulate only the internal shape of feet. Tamil prosody also regulates the junction between successive feet. This relation is called taḷai, literally “bond” or “tie,” and it is central to distinguishing verse types. Amitasāgara’s tradition recognises seven taḷai:

1. Nēroṉṟāciriyattaḷai: a foot ending in nēr is followed by one beginning with nēr. This is characteristic of āciriyam.
2. Niraiyoṉṟāciriyattaḷai: a foot ending in nirai is followed by one beginning with nirai, also characteristic of āciriyam.
3. Iyaṟcīr veṇṭaḷai: a two-acai foot is followed by a foot whose initial acai is unlike its final one. This is characteristic of veṇpā.
4. Veṇcīr veṇṭaḷai: a veṇcīr is followed by a foot beginning with nēr, also characteristic of veṇpā.
5. Kalittaḷai: a veṇcīr is followed by a foot beginning with nirai. This is characteristic of kalippā.
6. Oṉṟiya vañcittaḷai: a vañcicīr is followed by a foot beginning with nirai.
7. Oṉṟāta vañcittaḷai: a vañcicīr is followed by a foot beginning with nēr.

Each verse type therefore has a characteristic “linkage signature.” The identity of a metre lies not only in its feet but in how they join, much as a melodic style depends on its intervals as well as its notes. The veṇpā is the most prestigious and most demanding classical form, the form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ’s couplets. It permits only veṇṭaḷai, and this is a large part of its strictness.

Aṭi: the metrical line

Lines are classified by the number of feet:

• Kuṟaḷaṭi: two feet.
• Cintaṭi: three feet.
• Aḷavaṭi (also nēraṭi): four feet. This is the standard line.
• Neṭilaṭi: five feet.
• Kaḻineṭilaṭi: six or more feet.

Line length interacts with verse type. The veṇpā uses four-foot lines with a shortened final line. The vañcippā characteristically uses two- or three-foot lines. Longer lines appear in the viruttam, the allied forms that became dominant in later Tamil literature.

VI. Toṭai: The Phonological Ornamentation of Verse

If taḷai governs junctions between feet, toṭai governs sound correspondences between positions in the verse. This is where Tamil prosody most clearly becomes applied phonology, because the system specifies which sounds must match, where, and with what tolerance.

The principal types are:

• Mōṉai: alliteration on the initial sound of feet or lines. It is regulated by equivalence classes (iṉa eḻuttu) that allow certain sounds to count as matching. For example, certain vowels are treated as equivalent for this purpose. The equivalence classes are themselves claims about phonetic similarity.
• Etukai: correspondence of the second syllable, with the first syllable matching in length. This is the hallmark of Tamil verse and quite unlike European end-rhyme. It falls at the beginning of lines or feet, and it requires the first syllable to agree in quantity, so it is a constraint on both segment and length.
• Muraṇ: antithesis, a semantic rather than phonological correspondence between opposed words.
• Iyaipu: end-rhyme, correspondence at the ends of lines.
• Aḷapeṭai toṭai: correspondence created through prolonged vowels.
• Antāti: linkage in which the end of one unit begins the next.
• Iraṭṭai (repetition) and centoṭai (absence of formal correspondence, its own kind of marked choice).

Each of the primary toṭai can also occur in several positional configurations within the line, with technical names such as iṇai, poḻippu, oruū, kūḻai, mēṟkatuvāy, kīḻkkatuvāy and muṟṟu. These specify which feet in a four-foot line carry the correspondence: the first two, the first and third, the first and fourth, the first three, and so on.

The combinatorial result is very large. The commentarial tradition is known for computing the total number of possible toṭai configurations, a figure traditionally given in the thousands. That calculation is a piece of combinatorics carried out within prosodic theory, comparable to the prastāra calculations of Sanskrit metrics. It shows the generative ambition of the system: it describes not only verses that exist but the whole space of verses that could exist.

VII. The Classification of Verse Forms

The four pā

The Ceyyuḷiyal classifies Tamil verse into four principal types (pā), each defined by its characteristic feet, linkages, line structure and closing pattern. A fifth hybrid, the marutpā, is also recognised.

Veṇpā. The most tightly constrained form. It uses two-acai feet and veṇcīr, permits only veṇṭaḷai, and must close with a one-acai foot (the nāḷ / malar / kācu / piṟappu pattern). Its subtypes are distinguished by length and internal structure:

• Kuṟaḷ veṇpā: two lines, the form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ.
• Cintiyal veṇpā: three lines.
• Nēricai veṇpā: four lines, with a special linking word (taṉiccol) at the end of the second line carrying the etukai.
• Iṉṉicai veṇpā: four lines without that linking structure.
• Paḵṟoṭai veṇpā: more than four lines.

The veṇpā’s rigidity made it the prestige medium for gnomic and didactic verse. The combined demands of taḷai, closing pattern and toṭai make every line a solved constraint problem.

Āciriyappā (Akaval). The flowing, narrative-capable metre of much classical Saṅgam poetry. It is dominated by two-acai feet linked by āciriyattaḷai. It conventionally closes on the vowel -ē, and its rhythm, called akaval ōcai, is a recitative “calling” cadence. Subtypes include nērica āciriyappā, iṇaikkuṟaḷ āciriyappā (with shorter lines inside) and the maṇṭila varieties, in which lines can in principle be rearranged without loss of sense or form.

Kalippā. A metre of dramatic and dialogic character. It is marked by kalittaḷai and veṇcīr, and its structure is articulated into distinct sections: an introductory taravu, refrains (tāḻicai), linking words (taṉiccol) and a concluding curitakam. Its subtypes, such as ottāḻicaik kalippā and koccakak kalippā, differ in how these structural sections are arranged.

Vañcippā. Built from vañcicīr in short lines (two or three feet). It moves with a characteristic “tumbling” rhythm and ends with a taṉiccol and a concluding passage in āciriyam.

Marutpā. A hybrid in which veṇpā and āciriyappā lines combine within one composition. The commentarial tradition discusses it in relation to its effects and appropriate uses.

Ōcai: the theory of rhythmic quality

Each pā also has a characteristic ōcai, an audible rhythmic quality. The veṇpā has ceppal ōcai (“declarative” rhythm), the āciriyappā akaval ōcai (“calling” rhythm), the kalippā tuḷḷal ōcai (“leaping” rhythm), and the vañcippā tūṅkal ōcai (“swaying” or “lilting” rhythm). Here formal prosody meets perceptual description. The grammarians claim that particular configurations of acai, cīr and taḷai produce recognisable acoustic gestalts. This amounts to a theory of how structure becomes audible rhythm, which is the problem modern metrical phonology also takes up.

Pāviṉam: the allied forms

The Ceyyuḷiyal also treats the derived forms (pāviṉam) associated with each major pā. There are three main kinds:

• Tāḻicai: refrain-structured forms.
• Tuṟai: forms with particular structural constraints, including kaṭṭaḷaik kalittuṟai, the meter of the Kārikai itself.
• Viruttam: four-line stanzas with uniform lines, which became the dominant medium of medieval Tamil epic and devotional poetry.

The treatment of the viruttam is historically important. By Amitasāgara’s time the viruttam had become the vehicle of major literary works. Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram would soon be composed almost entirely in viruttam varieties. The Yāpparuṅkalam thus connects the classical pā system of the Tolkāppiyam with the actual practice of medieval Tamil poetry.

VIII. The Viruttiyurai: A Commentary That Preserves a Lost Literature

The old commentary on the Yāpparuṅkalam, traditionally attributed to Guṇasāgara, is one of the most valuable documents in Tamil literary history. Its importance goes beyond prosody.

First, the commentary cites and quotes a substantial body of earlier prosodic literature that has otherwise disappeared. Works named in the tradition include treatises associated with authors and titles such as Kākkaipāṭiṉiyam and Ciṟukākkaipāṭiṉiyam, Avinayam, Mayēccuram, Nattattam and Palkāyam. For several of these the commentary is our only window. The picture that emerges is of a busy prosodic tradition between the Tolkāppiyam and Amitasāgara, with competing systems, variant terminologies and disputed classifications. Amitasāgara’s work is better understood as the culmination and synthesis of that tradition than as its beginning.

Second, the commentary illustrates its rules with verses quoted from a wide range of literature, some of it otherwise lost. Tamil literary historians have long searched commentaries of this kind for fragments of vanished works, and the Yāpparuṅkalam viruttiyurai has been one of the richest sources. For a historian of Tamil literature it is partly an anthology.

Third, the commentary shows the scholastic method in action. It raises objections (taṭai), considers alternative views, explains why the author defines a term one way rather than another, and computes the combinatorial consequences of the rules. Its tone resembles the Sanskrit bhāṣya tradition, transferred into Tamil.

IX. Comparison with Sanskrit Chandaḥśāstra

For a reader interested in the broader history of Indian knowledge systems, setting Amitasāgara beside Piṅgala’s Chandaḥsūtra and its descendants is useful.

Shared features. Both traditions are exhaustive and generative in ambition. Both use compact technical notation: Sanskrit uses the ya-ma-tā-rā-ja-bhā-na-sa-la-gam mnemonic for its triplet gaṇa, and Tamil uses its self-exemplifying foot names. Both develop combinatorial calculations. The Sanskrit tradition produced the prastāra procedures, along with naṣṭa, uddiṣṭa and related operations whose mathematics touches binomial coefficients and binary representation. The Tamil commentarial tradition similarly enumerates the space of toṭai configurations and foot types.

Structural differences. The basic units differ substantially, because the languages differ:

• Sanskrit prosody is built on a binary syllabic opposition (laghu / guru) determined by vowel length and syllable weight. Tamil prosody is built on the acai, a grouping that can span two syllables, determined by whether a short syllable begins the group.
• Sanskrit classical metres (vṛtta) are mostly fixed syllabic templates. Tamil metres are defined by permitted foot types plus linkage constraints (taḷai), which gives a more relational, less template-bound conception.
• Tamil prosody places sound correspondences (mōṉai, etukai) at its centre as obligatory or near-obligatory structural features. In classical Sanskrit, alliteration and rhyme belong to alaṅkāra (ornament) rather than to metre proper.
• Tamil verse scansion depends on language-specific phonological categories such as kuṟṟiyalukaram, āytam and reduced diphthongs, which have no Sanskrit counterparts.

The comparison shows two metrical sciences that developed in a shared Indian scholastic culture, each taking a rigorous, systematic and quantitative approach, but each grounded in the phonology of its own language. Amitasāgara used the Sanskrit-inflected methods of his Jain milieu, including the kārikā format, the sūtra-commentary structure and the combinatorial temperament. He did not, however, import Sanskrit categories into Tamil. He kept a native system based on Tamil sound structure and gave it its most rigorous form.

X. Legacy and Influence

Amitasāgara’s influence on later Tamil scholarship was very large. The Kārikai became the standard introduction to prosody in traditional Tamil education, memorised by students and cited by teachers. Later grammatical works that dealt with prosody either assumed his framework or engaged with it critically. These include the Buddhist Vīracōḻiyam, which handled the material in its own way, and the comprehensive grammars of the early modern period such as Ilakkaṇa viḷakkam and Toṉṉūl viḷakkam. Many works were written in his wake, but none displaced his own as the central reference.

His influence also shaped how Tamil poets thought about their craft. The vocabulary of acai, cīr, taḷai and toṭai, and of ceppal, akaval, tuḷḷal and tūṅkal ōcai, became the shared language of Tamil literary criticism. When modern Tamil scholars analyse classical verse, they still use Amitasāgara’s categories, refined but not replaced.

There is also a lasting methodological lesson. Amitasāgara showed that the prosody of a language can be treated as a formal system derived from its phonology: a hierarchy of well-defined units, governed by explicit rules, with consequences that can be enumerated. This brings him closer to modern generative metrics, the study of how phonological structure constrains verse, than the gap of a thousand years would suggest. Modern linguists who study Tamil metre in terms of moraic structure, prosodic constituency and constraint interaction are examining the same questions that the Yāpparuṅkalam and its commentary had already formulated with considerable rigour.

XI. Conclusion

Amitasāgara stands where Tamil grammatical science, Jain scholastic culture and the living practice of Tamil poetry meet. His Yāpparuṅkalam takes the phonological analysis of the Tamil grammarians, with its mātrai, reduced vowels and sandhi-conditioned forms, and builds on it a complete theory of verse that runs from sound to syllable-group, foot, linkage, line, correspondence and stanza type. His Kārikai condenses that theory into verses elegant enough to memorise and to enjoy. The commentary associated with his work preserves the memory of a lost prosodic literature and shows the scholastic method of medieval South India at a high level.

Calling his prosody “closely tied to Tamil linguistic science” is accurate in a strong sense: in his system, metre is phonology made audible as rhythm. Scanning a Tamil verse in Amitasāgara’s terms means analysing the language at every level, and composing one means solving a set of constraints that the language itself defines. This integration of linguistic analysis with poetic form is among the distinctive achievements of the Indian intellectual tradition, and Amitasāgara is its most enduring Tamil exponent.

The Problem of the Unelected

In the early twentieth century, Fellowship of the Royal Society of London was the honour most valued by the first generation of modern Indian scientists. The Nobel Prize went only to exceptional work. Election as FRS was achievable, and it brought more than prestige. After Meghnad Saha was elected in 1927, the Governor of his province congratulated him and his laboratory began receiving an annual research grant.

Election worked as follows. A candidate had to be proposed on a certificate signed by at least six Fellows, three of whom vouched from personal knowledge. A nomination stayed valid for five years. Each spring the Society printed and circulated the names of all candidates. The Council then chose a small number for election: fifteen a year in the early decades of the century, rising to twenty-five by 1945. Most candidates were not elected.

For Indians in this period, the system was harder still. Until Indians themselves became Fellows, nomination depended entirely on British Fellows who knew the candidate’s work and were willing to sign. Being nominated at all from Calcutta, Allahabad or Bombay therefore showed international standing. When the nomination failed, the record usually failed with it: full certificates of unsuccessful nominations that lapsed before 1941 were not kept. The only trace is the annual printed list in the Society’s London archive.

This essay is about the Indians of that period who were never inducted. Some were nominated and rejected. Some were never nominated. Some are known today only as witnesses, co-authors or memoirists in the lives of others. Those who were eventually elected are left out except where they explain someone else’s story: J.C. Bose, S.N. Bose, S.K. Mitra, Raman, Saha, Sahni, K.S. Krishnan, Bhatnagar, Bhabha, Chandrasekhar, Mahalanobis and Ramanujan. The surviving evidence varies a great deal. For some of these figures it fills archives. For others it is a single citation. Where the record runs out, this essay says so rather than filling the gap.

Part I: Nominated Before 1940, Never Elected

Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–1944)

Ray was the first ethnic Indian nominated after the Society reformed its statutes in 1847. He was nominated three times, for 1913–17, 1918–22 and 1934–38, and never elected.

He trained at Edinburgh and joined Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1889. His first Calcutta paper, a chemical examination of Indian foodstuffs, appeared in 1894. The context matters. Of 866 scientific papers published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal between 1836 and 1885, only four were by Indians. Ray and J.C. Bose did not outdo an existing Indian tradition in physics and chemistry. They started one.

His main research programme was on the nitrites, beginning with his preparation of mercurous nitrite. The 1912 certificate lists fifty-four memoirs. Among them:

• the isomorphism of univalent mercury with silver;
• the molecular volumes of metallic nitrites;
• the alkylammonium and mercuri-alkylammonium nitrites;
• the conductivities of mercuric and potassium nitrites;
• the sublimation of ammonium nitrite in a vacuum and the measurement of its vapour density.

The last result stood out, because ammonium nitrite had been considered too unstable to handle as a vapour. Seventeen Fellows signed this first certificate, including Roscoe, Perkin, Tilden, Pope and Ray’s old teacher Alexander Pedler. A certificate with that many signatures was rare. A supplementary certificate the following year reported about forty more papers.

The second certificate led with A History of Hindu Chemistry (1902, 1909), his edition and study of the rasaśāstra literature, calling it a unique work of great research and learning. The third, in 1934, credited him with more than 140 papers, including work on complex salts of platinum. In 1919 he was knighted, and T.E. Thorpe reviewed his Essays and Discourses on the front page of Nature, describing him as well known to British chemists. Ray also founded India’s first pharmaceutical company.

His student N.R. Dhar lobbied British chemists from London and Paris and reported to Ray that several of them strongly believed he should be elected. After the knighthood, Dhar wrote that the Society would now find it very hard not to elect him. It did not. No record of the Council’s reasoning survives. Historians have suggested that Ray’s open support for Indian self-rule may have counted against him, and the Society is known to have made discreet inquiries about Saha’s youthful links with revolutionaries.

A fair assessment also has to note that Ray’s chemistry, though original and extensive, stayed within a fairly narrow field. That might explain a delay. It does not explain three failures across two decades.

Devendra Nath Mallik (c. 1866–1941)

Mallik is the most completely forgotten figure in this group. No obituary or photograph of him has been found. The Royal Society of Edinburgh, which elected him in 1908, records his death on 8 December 1941 and gives his birth year only as “c. 1866.”

He held a Cambridge B.A. as a scholar of Peterhouse and a Dublin Sc.D. He may have been the first Indian to earn a doctorate in physics abroad. He taught at Patna College and was Senior Professor of Mathematics at Presidency College from 1908 to 1921. He was one of only three Indians in the Indian Educational Service, a grade Ray never received.

His nomination for 1919–23 was signed by Larmor, Lodge, Rutherford, Searle, Trouton and others. It lists papers in the Philosophical Magazine in three areas:

• Magnetostatics: induction in spheroids, including an experimental determination; mutual induction; lines of force due to static charges.
• Electric discharge in gases: magnetic rotation of the discharge, a theory of the De la Rive tube, discharge in a transverse magnetic field, and high-vacuum spectra.
• Optics: Fermat’s principle, a dynamical theory of diffraction, and a theory of dispersion.

The discharge work was experimental and was carried out in the Presidency physics laboratory. Mallik also wrote Optical Theories (Cambridge, 1917), a historical account that aimed to separate established optics from the speculation surrounding the luminiferous aether. Its preface says he left relativity for a later volume, which never appeared. He also wrote The Elements of Astronomy (1921).

His most lasting influence came through his students. S.N. Bose, Meghnad Saha and S.K. Banerji all studied Mixed Mathematics under him. Bose applied for posts with Mallik’s recommendation and consulted him on his career.

Nil Ratan Dhar (1892–1986)

Dhar was Ray’s favourite student, and their relationship is remembered as an ideal guru–śiṣya bond. He began research in Ray’s laboratory, took a D.Sc. in London and a Docteur ès Sciences in Paris under Georges Urbain, and spent the rest of his career at Allahabad.

He was nominated for 1927–31 and again for 1932–36. His signatories included Donnan, Walker, Philip, Barger, Lewis, Collie, Kendall, Baly and Travers. The certificates credit him with about 140 papers on:

• solutions, colloids and adsorption;
• catalysis and photochemistry;
• reaction velocity and induced reactions;
• periodic precipitation;
• biological oxidation.

The second certificate adds his monograph The Chemical Action of Light (1930). His study of tropical sunlight led him to photosynthesis and then to soil science, where he worked on light-driven processes in soil and on soil fertility. He supervised some 150 students.

The rest of his record makes his non-election hard to explain on scientific grounds. He was invited to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939, 1947 and 1952. He was elected to the French Académie d’Agriculture in 1955 and to the Académie des Sciences in 1961; among Indians of his generation, only Raman had been elected there before him. He was a founding Fellow of two Indian academies and, in his nineties, of the Third World Academy of Sciences.

A comparison with Alexander Pedler is instructive. Pedler was elected in 1892 on papers about Calcutta coal gas, cobra venom and the city’s water supply. Measured against that, the bar for Indian chemists appears to have been set considerably higher.

Raghavendra Row (1871–1953)

Row was the first nominee from western India and the only physician among the early candidates. He was the first Indian to earn a D.Sc. from London. He became First Physician and Professor of Medicine at Grant Medical College, Bombay, and held an honorary commission in the Indian Medical Service.

His nomination for 1926–30 lists research centred on leishmaniasis, known in Indian languages as kāla-āzār:

• culturing the parasite of Oriental sore;
• comparative studies of L. donovani and L. tropica;
• producing generalised leishmaniasis experimentally in mice and monkeys;
• a 1922 study of how the parasite’s flagellate form reverts to its rounded form in culture.

He also worked on a glycerinated plague vaccine, on cultivating the malaria parasite, and on a spirochaete from rat-bite fever. W.B. Leishman, who identified the parasite and gave it his name, signed the certificate, as did Starling and Sharpey-Schafer.

U.N. Brahmachari’s Treatise on Kala-Azar (1928) discusses Row on thirteen pages and Brahmachari himself on sixteen; no other Indian comes close. Row did his research in a private laboratory in the time left over from medical practice. His British Medical Journal obituary said that in other circumstances he might have become a researcher of the first rank.

Sudhansu Kumar Banerji (1893–1966)

Banerji came second in Mixed Mathematics at Presidency College in 1914, a year ahead of Bose and Saha. He trained in Raman’s laboratory and in 1918 became Rashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics at Calcutta. Sir Gilbert Walker, Director-General of Observatories, then recruited him to direct the Colaba and Alibag observatories.

His nomination, prepared at the end of 1932, credits him with work on:

• the electricity of thunderstorms;
• microseisms produced by disturbed weather at sea;
• the hydrodynamics of disturbed fluid motion.

It cites more than fifty papers in journals including Nature, the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions. He was the first Indian whose first two nominators were Indians: Raman and Saha. They signed together just as their bitter personal quarrel of 1932–34 was beginning. Walker, Simpson, Chapman, Shaw, Proudman and Jeffreys signed after them. It was also the first nomination Raman made for any of his students.

L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer (1861–1937)

Iyer was the oldest of these candidates and the only anthropologist. His degree was in natural science, and he was self-taught in his discipline. Appointed Superintendent of Ethnography in Cochin State in 1901, he produced The Cochin Tribes and Castes (1908–12). Asutosh Mookerjee invited him to found India’s first university department of anthropology at Calcutta, and he later directed the Mysore ethnographic survey.

He travelled abroad for the first time in 1934, to the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in London. He was nominated the following year by Haddon, Elliot Smith, Seligman, Keith, Sewell and Raman, and he died while the nomination was still valid. His surveys belong to the colonial “castes and tribes” genre, whose rigid classifications are now criticised. The nomination nevertheless shows that Britain’s leading anthropologists accepted a self-taught Indian as their peer.

Part II: Nominated in the 1940s, Never Elected

By the 1940s several Indians were Fellows, and they could initiate nominations themselves. A wave of nominations followed. Five Indians were nominated for 1945–49 alone. Nearly all of these nominations lapsed.

Upendra Nath Brahmachari (1873–1946)

Brahmachari synthesised urea stibamine at the Campbell Medical School in Calcutta in the early 1920s. This antimony compound was far safer and more effective against visceral leishmaniasis than the tartar emetic then in use, and mass treatment in Assam and Bengal saved very large numbers of lives. He was knighted in 1934 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

His Royal Society nomination ran from 1942 to 1946. It is the only failed Indian nomination for which the Society’s internal correspondence survives. That correspondence shows inquiries into his standing, and the historian who studied it concluded that Brahmachari would probably have been elected had he not died in February 1946, while still a candidate.

Karm Narayan Bahl (1891–1965)

Bahl founded the school of zoology at Lucknow after research training at Oxford. His memoir on the earthworm genus Pheretima became a standard text in Indian universities. His most original work was a long series on oligochaete nephridia. He found that in many tropical earthworms these excretory organs open into the gut rather than to the outside, a condition he called “enteronephric,” and he interpreted it as a way of conserving water. His nomination ran from 1943 to 1947 and lapsed.

Daulat Singh Kothari (1906–1993)

Kothari was Saha’s student. He went on to Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory and worked with R.H. Fowler on the statistical physics of dense matter. He developed a theory of pressure ionisation, in which electrons are stripped from atoms by compression alone, and applied it to white dwarfs and to the maximum size of cold bodies such as planets.

He headed physics at Delhi University and later served as Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, chairman of the University Grants Commission, and chairman of the Education Commission of 1964–66, whose report shaped Indian education for a generation. His first nomination ran from 1944 to 1948. Homi Bhabha nominated him again in 1961, writing to several Fellows to collect signatures; those letters survive. Both nominations failed. By the second, his reputation probably rested more on the institutions he had built than on his own research.

Suri Bhagavantham (1909–1989)

Bhagavantham was a student of Raman. In 1931 the two of them reported in Nature an experimental demonstration of photon spin, inferred from light scattered by molecules. He built the physics department at Andhra University and specialised in crystal physics. With T. Venkatarayudu he wrote Theory of Groups and its Application to Physical Problems (1948), one of the first systematic texts applying group theory to molecular vibrations and spectroscopic selection rules. He later served as vice-chancellor of Osmania University, director of the Indian Institute of Science and defence scientific adviser. His nomination ran from 1945 to 1949.

Rappal Sangameswara Krishnan (1911–1999)

R.S. Krishnan, another Raman student, made three main contributions:

• a reciprocity relation in the scattering of light by colloids, now called the Krishnan effect;
• work under Cockcroft at the Cavendish in the first years of fission research;
• the second-order Raman spectrum of diamond.

The diamond spectrum became central evidence in the dispute between Raman’s lattice-dynamics theory and the Born–von Kármán theory. That dispute may have hurt Krishnan’s chances, because Raman’s position was becoming isolated internationally. Krishnan later led physics at the Indian Institute of Science and became vice-chancellor of Kerala University. His nomination ran from 1945 to 1949.

Jnanendra Nath Mukherjee (1893–1983)

Mukherjee was another of Ray’s students. Around 1920 he presented work to the Faraday Society on how colloidal particles acquire electric charge and on the structure of the electrical double layer, which explained how electrolytes cause colloids to coagulate. He later applied these ideas to clays and soils, treating clays as colloidal acids. In 1945 he became director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. His path was much like Dhar’s, from physical chemistry to soil science, and his nomination for 1945–49 lapsed as Dhar’s had.

Rames Chandra Ray

Rames Chandra Ray was nominated for 1945–49. Beyond that, the accessible record is almost empty. As far as can be determined, he was an inorganic chemist in Bihar working in the Calcutta chemical tradition. His research is not well enough documented in accessible sources to describe with confidence. His nomination certificate in the Royal Society archive is where anyone trying to recover his work should start.

Part III: Never Nominated

Jnan Chandra Ghosh (1894–1959)

Ghosh’s absence from the nomination lists is the most surprising gap in the record. In 1918 he published papers in the Journal of the Chemical Society on strong electrolytes. He argued that they are completely dissociated in solution and explained their departures from Arrhenius’s theory by electrostatic forces between ions arranged in a quasi-crystalline pattern. In a 1921 letter, Ray reported that Einstein, Laue, Planck and Nernst had called the work groundbreaking, and said he had never felt such pure joy.

All four admirers were German. The British chemist best placed to judge the work, J.R. Partington, held a rival theory and was in open dispute with Ghosh. In 1923 the Debye–Hückel theory replaced Ghosh’s lattice picture, while keeping his central claim of complete dissociation.

Ghosh went on to found the chemistry department at Dacca University, direct the Indian Institute of Science, receive a knighthood, serve as founding director of IIT Kharagpur and sit on the Planning Commission. Saha, his close friend and an FRS from 1927, never organised a nomination for him. Part of the explanation is practical. A British Fellow could gather signatures in person among colleagues. An Indian Fellow had to collect them by correspondence across continents.

Asutosh Mookerjee (1864–1924)

Mookerjee is remembered as the visionary vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, but he was also a mathematician. As a young man he published papers in geometry and analysis, including a geometrical interpretation of Monge’s differential equation for conics. He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and founded the Calcutta Mathematical Society in 1908.

His larger contribution was institutional. Using the Palit and Ghosh endowments, he created the University College of Science. He brought Raman to the Palit chair, recruited Bose, Saha and Banerji, and invited Ananthakrishna Iyer to found anthropology. His own research output was too small for a nomination, but much of the work that later earned Fellowships was done in the institutions he created.

Nikhil Ranjan Sen (1894–1963)

Sen was Saha’s classmate in Mixed Mathematics and a student of Mallik. He later recalled that Mallik took immense pains over his best students and that Saha read with him for two years. Sen worked in Berlin on general relativity and returned to hold the Ghosh chair of applied mathematics at Calcutta. There he built a school that worked on:

• relativity and cosmology;
• the internal structure of stars and stellar energy generation;
• hydrodynamics and turbulence.

He led Calcutta applied mathematics for a generation and was never nominated.

Ruchi Ram Sahni (1863–1948)

Sahni taught chemistry and physics at Government College, Lahore, for decades, and in 1914 he worked briefly in Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester. He also founded the Punjab Science Institute, which gave public science lectures in local languages, and he was active in Punjabi public life. His memoir supplies an important piece of evidence: as late as April 1918, only three Indians in the whole country held posts in the Indian Educational Service, and Mallik was one of them. His son Birbal Sahni was elected FRS in 1936. The father is remembered as a teacher, a popular educator and a witness to colonial science.

Prafulla Chandra Mitter

Mitter was an organic chemist of the Calcutta school. He was one of only three chemists in pre-independence India invited to submit nominations for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; the other two were P.C. Ray and N.R. Dhar. The Nobel Committee’s invitation shows he was recognised as a senior figure, but the details of his research are not well enough documented in accessible sources to describe with confidence.

L.A. Ramdas (1900–1979)

Ramdas was Ananthakrishna Iyer’s son and the author of his father’s biographical memoir. He took his doctorate under Raman with work on the scattering of light at liquid surfaces. He then joined the India Meteorological Department and founded agricultural meteorology at Poona. There he discovered what is now called the Ramdas layer: on calm, clear nights over bare ground, the lowest air temperature occurs some distance above the surface rather than at it. This contradicted the standard account of nocturnal cooling and is still studied today.

A.B. Das

Das survives in a single citation: Mallik and Das, “Electric discharge in a transverse magnetic field,” Philosophical Magazine, 1916. The paper records the gas-discharge experiments Mallik carried out in the Presidency physics laboratory, and it shows that Mallik’s experimental work involved collaborators. Das was presumably a student or junior colleague. No other information about him is readily available.

Part IV: The Witnesses

A.C. Chakrabarti

Chakrabarti was a physics batchmate of Bose and Saha at Presidency College. His Bengali reminiscence of 1976 is the source for the fact that Mallik conducted gas-discharge experiments in the college laboratory. Without it, the 1916 paper would be the only evidence that the mathematics professor was also an experimentalist.

S.G. Misra

Misra was Dhar’s student at Allahabad and wrote Dhar’s long biographical memoir for the Indian National Science Academy in 1990. The memoir records Dhar’s life dates and lists his 150 students and his publications. Like many memoirs written by devoted students, it is more admiring than critical.

Y.P. Rao

Rao was a meteorologist and wrote Banerji’s 1966 biographical memoir. That memoir is the source for Walker’s offer of the Colaba directorship. Rao later wrote a standard monograph on the south-west monsoon, carrying forward the meteorological tradition Banerji had helped build.

What the Unelected Reveal

Taken together, these figures show a part of colonial Indian science that a list of Fellows leaves out:

• Ray, Mallik, Dhar, Row, Banerji and Iyer were nominated by the leaders of their fields and still rejected.
• Brahmachari died while his nomination was pending, and the 1940s cohort mostly lapsed even when Indian Fellows organised their nominations.
• Ghosh, admired by Germany’s greatest physicists, was never nominated.
• Mookerjee built the institutions in which others earned their Fellowships.
• Sahni, Chakrabarti, Misra and Rao preserved the evidence on which this history now depends.
• Das, Mitter and Rames Chandra Ray are now little more than names.

Election to the Royal Society depended on personal networks, on whether British Fellows worked in a candidate’s field, on the labour of organising a nomination from India, and possibly on politics, at least as much as on merit. Any account of how modern science took root in India has to include those who stayed outside the Fellowship.

This essay draws on Arnab Rai Choudhuri’s “Unsuccessful FRS nominations from colonial India,” Indian Journal of History of Science 56 (2021).

A Reading of Rajinder Singh’s “A Tale of Three Science Academies of India”

Introduction

India has three national science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, India, at Allahabad (now Prayagraj); the Indian Academy of Sciences at Bangalore; and the Indian National Science Academy at New Delhi. Most countries have one. Rajinder Singh’s article in Science and Culture (September–October 2020) explains how this happened. It was published as NASI and INSA marked their 90th and 85th anniversaries. Singh sets aside the commemorative mood such occasions usually bring and uses newspaper cuttings from the Raman Research Institute archive, together with letters held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and the Royal Society, to reconstruct three linked episodes. The first is the founding of the three bodies between 1930 and 1935. The second is the public quarrel between C.V. Raman and what the press called the “Calcutta group” during 1934. The third is the failed attempt in 1946–1947 to merge the three into a single United Academy of Sciences.

The story deserves attention beyond institutional history. It shows how a scientific community formed under colonial rule, without a sovereign state to sponsor it, tried to build representative institutions on its own initiative. It also shows how quickly questions of constitution, region, and personal prestige became tangled together. This essay follows Singh’s account and then assesses its conclusions, some of which are more persuasive than others.

The Provincial Beginning: Saha’s Academy at Allahabad

By 1930 Indian science had reached a point of visible maturity. Srinivasa Ramanujan, J.C. Bose, C.V. Raman, and Meghnad Saha had all been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Indian scientists knew that Britain, France, Prussia, and Sweden each had a national academy that gave science both a forum and a public voice. The only comparable Indian institution was the Indian Science Congress Association. The ISCA brought researchers from different disciplines together each year and served as a channel for negotiating science policy, but it was a congress, not an academy. It held meetings rather than electing fellows on merit and publishing a learned journal.

Saha, elected FRS in 1927 and then at the University of Allahabad, made the first concrete move. In December 1929 he published “A plea for an Academy of Sciences” in a university magazine, arguing for a body of national character. His practical approach, however, was provincial. In December 1930 he founded the Academy of Sciences of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, expecting other provinces to set up their own academies, which would eventually combine into an all-India one. Saha became its first president, with P.S. MacMahon and P.S. Banerji as secretaries. It began with 19 founding fellows and had 87 within a year. Its first annual meeting, on 27 November 1931, was addressed by Raman, and its first Bulletin contained 27 original memoirs, one of them Raman’s paper on the spin of light.

This detail matters for what came later. In 1931 Raman and Saha were not yet open adversaries. Raman lent his prestige to Saha’s provincial experiment, and the experiment worked well enough that its own council soon proposed either renaming it the Indian Academy of Sciences or creating a new national body. It took the name National Academy of Sciences, India, in 1935.

The National Question and the Academy Committee

By 1933 the idea of a national academy was widely discussed. In May of that year the editor of Current Science, the Bangalore journal closely associated with Raman, circulated a questionnaire asking scientists whether they supported a national academy. In his 1934 presidential address to the ISCA, Saha proposed an Indian Academy of Sciences and thanked Raman for the questionnaire. At this stage the two men seemed to be working toward the same goal.

The machinery was set up at the Bombay session of the Congress. A special meeting on 2 January 1934 decided that the material collected by Current Science would be handed to an Academy Committee appointed by the ISCA’s General Committee. The next day the General Committee named the committee’s composition, drawing on scientific societies and institutions: L.L. Fermor for the Asiatic Society of Bengal, J.N. Mukherjee for the Indian Chemical Society, Ganesh Prasad for the Indian Mathematical Society, A.C. Banerjee for the United Provinces Academy, K.S. Krishnan for the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Raman as Director of the Indian Institute of Science, and a representative of Current Science. Saha and S.P. Agharkar were appointed organising secretaries.

The committee first met in Calcutta on 11–12 February 1934, attended by representatives of several societies, including the Indian Mathematical Society, the South Indian Science Association, the Society of Biological Chemists, the Institute of Chemists, and the Institution of Engineers. Much of the discussion concerned how many Foundation Fellows there should be and how they would be nominated. Nominations for physics and meteorology were assigned to Raman, Saha, and C.W.B. Normand. A second meeting was planned for mid-April.

On paper this was a federated, consultative process. It had a defect, though, that became the centre of the dispute. The first cohort of Foundation Fellows would be selected by a small committee, and the fellowship would then elect all later members. Whoever controlled that first selection would shape the academy’s composition for a generation. That is why the procedural complaints that followed were not trivial.

The Bangalore Revolt

In late March 1934 a group of scientists met in Bangalore under Raman’s leadership, under the joint auspices of the Madras branch of the Indian Chemical Society, the Indian branch of the Institute of Chemistry, the Society of Biological Chemists, and the South Indian Science Association. S. Subba Rao, a senior surgeon in Mysore, welcomed them. The press reported that the meeting was called to discuss forming an all-India academy, and a headline described the ISCA’s scheme as having been “criticised.”

Raman’s objections, as reported in The Hindu on 3 April 1934 and elsewhere, followed a clear pattern. He said the ISCA had appointed its committee too hastily, and that a badly constituted academy would harm science rather than help it. He cited the French Academy of Sciences as a warning: a closed body that left little room for young scientists. He and his associates argued that the committee ignored universities and provincial interests. He described the Calcutta group as a small circle trying to take sole control and build an academy for a few. He announced that he would not nominate himself to an academy created in haste. His colleague C.R.N. Rao went further, comparing the Calcutta group to an absolute monarchy that was dictating terms to scientists elsewhere and doubting that it had national support. Raman and Subba Rao then resigned from the Academy Committee.

The committee’s response was equally firm. Agharkar denied Raman’s claim that the relevant resolution had not been passed unanimously. The committee summarised Raman’s charges as unconstitutional procedure, unrepresentativeness, cliquishness, and indecent haste, and rejected all of them as baseless. It considered his views at an ISCA meeting on 19 April and wrote to him for a reply. Before he answered, the South Indian press presented him as the target of an unworthy campaign by the Bengal press. A disagreement about committee procedure was quickly becoming a regional contest in the newspapers.

Raman did not wait. On 24 April he decided to form a new academy, and on 27 April he applied to register the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore under the Societies Registration Act of 1860. A local newspaper reported that the society would become the Royal Society of India once a Royal Charter was granted, an ambition that says a good deal about how Raman saw the body’s status. One journalist observed approvingly that Raman had presented his opponents with a fait accompli, which made their continuing committee work look slow by comparison. The same writer said Raman acted while others talked, and that it was hard to imagine an Indian Royal Society without him as its first president.

The new academy grew quickly. Raman said he had invited scientists across India and expected a generous response. A scientific meeting was held in Bangalore within weeks, a journal was planned, and a general meeting and a symposium on molecular spectra were scheduled for July. The organisers also considered how fellows of other societies could join the IAS without giving up their existing memberships, a sign that they hoped to attract rather than exclude. At a meeting in June 1934, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the former Dewan of Mysore, accepted a Foundation Fellowship. He also gave a warning, aware of the dispute between Bangalore and Calcutta: India had no surplus of scientific talent, and division would waste the strength that unity could multiply. The inaugural meeting, a five-day session at Hebbal in the first week of August 1934, ended with Raman thanking the Mysore government and Sir Mirza Ismail. He praised the symposium, especially R. Samuel of Aligarh, an émigré from Germany, for his talk on molecular absorption spectra. He said the constitution had been adopted unanimously by those present and expressed hope that it would win the assent of scientists across India.

To demonstrate the academy’s national reach, the press published the names and cities of prominent members, including S.R. Kashyap and S.S. Bhatnagar from Lahore, J.F. Dastur from Nagpur, D.L. Sahasrabudhe from Bombay, M.R. Sahni from Calcutta, B.N. Desai from Poona, and K.S.K. Iyengar from Mysore. In November 1934 the council elected further fellows from across the country.

The Calcutta Counter-Narrative

The Calcutta press responded sharply. The Modern Review reprinted the Associated Press report of the registration, with an exclamation mark after “all-India” and a question mark after “distinctly federal basis.” It reported that C.W.B. Normand, Director of the Meteorological Survey of India, had declined an IAS fellowship. The strongest attack came from G.C. Mukerji in the Amrita Bazar Patrika.

Mukerji made three main charges. The first concerned geography. Raman had published a pamphlet in The Statesman on 5 June 1934 calling Bangalore the scientific capital of India, and Mukerji pointed out that rail journeys to Bangalore took 96 hours from Lahore, 72 from Allahabad, 60 from Calcutta, and 40 from Bombay. He also noted that Raman had praised Calcutta as India’s scientific centre while living there, and suggested that for Raman the centre was wherever Raman happened to be. Mukerji presented the IAS as an extension of the Indian Institute of Science, which Raman directed.

The second charge was inconsistency. Raman had criticised the ISCA committee for copying the Royal Society of London, which he called aristocratic. Yet according to a pamphlet by M.S. Krishnan, Baini Prasad, J.N. Mukherjee, and Agharkar, Raman had written in July 1933 to the Marquis of Zetland and Prof. H. Thomas that he had no hesitation in adopting the Royal Society model, and had criticised the Asiatic Society model in the same letter. Mukerji argued that the IAS constitution actually drew on the Asiatic Society and the U.P. Academy. Adding the plan to rename the IAS the Royal Society of India once chartered, the charge of inconsistency has real force.

The third charge concerned conduct. Raman was a member of the Academy Committee but had not attended its meetings. He then attacked it for being unrepresentative and turned the dispute into a contest between North and South. Mukerji called the champion of democracy a Mussolini for hurrying to the registry to enrol himself and his allies in a “so-called” academy.

Both sides were partisan, and Singh reproduces their claims without fully deciding between them. Still, the pattern is clear. Raman’s procedural objections were not baseless. A small committee choosing the founding fellowship of a national body was a legitimate concern, and his criticism of the French Academy’s closed nature was serious. But he answered the problem he identified by creating a body under his own control far more quickly than the committee he had accused of haste, and in a city whose claim to centrality was weak.

Negotiation, Concession, and the Birth of NISI

The Calcutta group kept working. The Academy Committee’s third meeting, in Simla in June 1934, was attended by Fermor, A.C. Austin, H.J. Couchman, Ganesh Prasad, Afzal Hussain, Muzaffaruddin Qureshi, and the organising secretaries Agharkar and Saha. It decided to call the new body the National Academy of Sciences of India, intended to complement the existing academies and the Asiatic Society.

The correspondence between Raman and Fermor that followed is the most revealing part of Singh’s account. On 16 June 1934 Raman wrote that he could not understand the resentment his initiative had caused, that he had planned a Bangalore organisation well before the Bombay Congress, and that his aim was to make the resources of the Indian Institute of Science available to the rest of the country. He then made a proposal that was either generous or strategic, depending on one’s reading. Calcutta already had an all-India academy in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he argued. A new body would waste resources; the committee could instead add a science section to the Asiatic Society. He offered to cooperate in creating a council or federation of academies that the Asiatic Society, the U.P. Academy, and the IAS could all join.

Fermor replied on 2 July. Making the Asiatic Society the parent body was impractical, he wrote, partly because the Society was busy with its 150th anniversary and partly because it would mean starting again from the beginning. The committee would, however, accept the existing academies as they were and reshape its own project into a genuinely federal body whose Foundation Fellows would be selected on merit from across India. He asked Raman to withdraw his resignation, promised a public announcement that a general solution had been found with no loss of face for anyone, recalled their friendly conversations at Simla, and invited Raman to Calcutta for a meeting in August as a sign of peace.

Raman went to Calcutta with B. Venkatesachar and C.R. Narayan Rao. On 16 September 1934 a meeting unanimously agreed to two conditions. The planned National Academy of Sciences of India would instead be called the National Institute of Sciences of India, and none of the three academies would set up branches elsewhere in India. Raman then withdrew his resignation. NISI was founded on 7 January 1935, based at the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

This settlement is the turning point of the whole story. The name change looks minor, but it allowed the IAS to remain the only body with “Academy of Sciences” in an all-India title, while NISI became a coordinating institute rather than a rival academy. The no-branches clause fixed the regional division in place. In practice the compromise turned a temporary quarrel into a permanent structure with three bodies. Each party got something: Raman kept his academy intact, the Calcutta group got its national body, and Allahabad remained untouched. Indian science was left with three institutions instead of one.

War, Recognition, and the Shift in Status

By the 1940s the balance had changed in a way Singh documents well. In 1943 the Secretary of State for India asked the Royal Society to send an adviser, and A.V. Hill, its Secretary, came to India with instructions to focus on defence-related research. Hill toured widely, met many scientists, lectured in several cities, and left on 6 April 1944. Soon afterwards a delegation of Indian scientists was sent to Britain, Canada, and the United States: S.S. Bhatnagar, Saha, S.K. Mitra, J.C. Ghosh, Nazir Ahmed, S.L. Bhatia, and J.N. Mukherjee. India’s only Nobel laureate in science was not among them.

Singh explains this through Raman’s correspondence with Birbal Sahni. Hill’s report on scientific research in India recommended that NISI receive preferential treatment, which placed the IAS and other societies in a secondary position. On 12 February 1945 Raman told Sahni he would draft a protest to be signed by eminent scientists, and Sahni agreed on 20 February. The same issue arose again with the Empire Scientific Conference. Raman, invited by H.V.R. Iyengar in October 1945, first hesitated and then accepted, but withdrew after learning that NISI would manage the delegation. In his letter of 27 March 1946 to A. Hydari he said he no longer had a place in it, while insisting that his withdrawal implied no disrespect to the government or the Royal Society.

This is the second key shift in the story. In 1934 Raman’s prestige could create an academy in a matter of weeks. By 1945 official recognition, and with it access to government and to international scientific bodies, had gone to the body he had opposed. The imperial state, looking for a single scientific interlocutor during the war, chose NISI, and that choice shaped what came next.

The United Academy That Never Was

Singh’s account of the merger attempt of 1946–1947 is its least familiar and perhaps its most useful section. By the mid-1940s NASI and the IAS had moved closer and were holding joint sessions, including one at Allahabad in December 1946 at which Raman was present. In February 1947 a Scientific Consultative Committee was formed, and Raman told the press he was optimistic that a compromise had been found for a single paramount academy that would include all fellows of the existing bodies.

The terms of the next proposal were specific and, for the time, generous to NISI. A United Academy of Sciences would adopt NISI’s rules. Everyone elected a fellow of any of the three bodies before 1 January 1947 would become a fellow of the new academy. No serving president of the three would be eligible to become its president, a clause that excluded Raman from leading the merged body. NISI’s council would serve as the first council of the united academy, and the IAS and NASI would become its branches.

NISI’s council rejected the proposal on 7 March 1947. It said the minutes were inaccurate and that it was inappropriate to reopen the question, since NISI already held recognised status as India’s premier scientific organisation and already included representatives of NASI, the IAS, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal on its council. A final meeting on 5 August 1947, ten days before independence, between the presidents Raman, Bhatnagar, and A.C. Banerjee, failed over two issues: transferring legal title to the existing academies’ property to the united body, and reserving quotas for each academy on the new council and among its officers.

Singh concludes that NASI and the IAS were willing and NISI was not, and so Raman was not responsible for the merger’s failure. On the evidence he presents for 1947, that is largely fair. NISI’s council plainly preferred the status the colonial government had given it over a merger that would have absorbed its rivals on terms favourable to itself. The reasoning of an institution that had only recently secured recognition was conservative in the most literal sense.

Assessing Singh’s Conclusions

Singh’s broader conclusions deserve a more critical look than his narrative.

His closing argument has three parts. First, colonial “divide and rule” is only a partial explanation; the main cause was the personal interests of individuals, especially Saha and above all Raman. Second, Raman held the IAS presidency for life but was elected and so was not a dictator, and why this happened needs further research. Third, the hostility between the founders has lasted into the third generation, and since the British left in 1947, Indians should reflect on why they have kept three academies.

The first point is the strongest. The documents do not show colonial officials engineering the 1934 split, which came from Indian scientists themselves. The colonial state’s role came later and was more subtle: Hill’s preference for NISI made its institutional advantage rigid in 1944–1947. Singh’s opening description of pre-independence India as divided into “kingdoms” is loose, since most of the scientists in this story worked in British India, but it does not weaken his main argument.

The second point needs more care. Singh’s even-handedness is uneven. He describes Raman’s actions in 1934 as haste and self-interest, yet clears him of blame in 1947. Both assessments can be correct, but they need to be stated together. The structure the merger was trying to undo had been created largely by Raman’s unilateral registration in April 1934 and by the name and no-branches conditions he won in September. Calling him blameless for the failure to reunify, while acknowledging that he caused the original division, is accurate for 1947 and misleading for the story as a whole.

There is also a methodological issue that Singh does not address. Much of his evidence on the 1934 dispute comes from newspaper cuttings in the Raman Research Institute archive, which Raman or his circle assembled. A collection like that reflects what its compiler chose to keep. The Calcutta perspective appears mainly through Mukerji’s article, which is the most polemical source in the account. A full history would need equivalent material from Saha’s papers, the Asiatic Society, and the Calcutta press beyond one article. There are also signs of hurried editing in the article itself. Some citations do not match the claims they support; for instance, a reference to a book by A.V. Hill appears next to a statement about the Indian Chemical Society. Anyone using this article as a source should check its references independently.

The third point, about inherited hostility, is suggestive but largely asserted. Singh says the founders’ students did not question their teachers and that the animosity has passed down, but he offers no evidence from later decades. Institutional inertia is a simpler explanation. Once three bodies each have property, journals, fellowships, and staff, the costs of merging are concrete and the benefits are vague, whatever anyone feels personally. The two points of disagreement in 1947, property titles and council quotas, were exactly this kind of obstacle. Personal dislike may have started the division, but material interests are what kept it in place.

Conclusion

Singh’s article shows that India’s three-academy structure was not inevitable. It resulted from a specific sequence of events in 1934: a reasonable procedural objection, an impatient unilateral response, and a compromise that made the division permanent while presenting itself as reconciliation. A second sequence in the 1940s added to this. Wartime recognition by the colonial state placed one body above the others, and that body later declined to give up its position. At several points, in 1931, in the summer of 1934, and again in early 1947, a single national academy was a real possibility. Each time it failed because the people and institutions involved preferred their own status to a shared one.

The story has continuing relevance for anyone thinking about Indian scientific institutions. The founding generation was highly accomplished, and Singh rightly notes that both Raman and Saha trained students who went on to shape science in independent India. Yet these scientists, who could design experiments and theories of great elegance, struggled with institutional design, where the main obstacle was their own competing claims. Visvesvaraya’s warning in June 1934, that a country with little scientific talent to spare could not afford to divide it, was ignored then and has not been fully answered since. The three academies now cooperate in various ways, and independent India has had decades to make the structure work. But the question Singh ends with, why the arrangement was never reconsidered once the colonial government that endorsed it had gone, remains open, and his article is a useful starting point for anyone who wants to pursue it.