new delhi

Ill-tempered remarks by an unnamed British professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in the 1930s about the motivation of scientists fleeing Hitler's Germany may have deprived India of a “golden opportunity” to boost its world status as a scientific nation.

The remarks were made in a lecture at a time when Max Born and other scientists were considering emigration to India — then under British rule — to take up faculty positions at the invitation of the late Nobel prizewinner C. V. Raman, who had just become the institute's first Indian director. (Earlier directors were all British.)

Others whom Raman hoped to attract included the physicists Erwin Schrödinger, Rudolf Peierls and Hans Bethe, and the chemist Georg von Hevesy. Born's interest has been recorded by Sivraj Ramaseshan, Raman's nephew and biographer, and editor of Current Science, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences. In a recent issue of the journal, Ramaseshan reveals the contents of a letter drafted by Born in reply to Raman's job offer.

In 1934, Raman offered Born a full professorship at the institute. He also invited him to share the directorship of the physics department at a “much higher” salary than Born was receiving as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. “I have considered [the offer] carefully,” Born said in his reply. But he suggested that he “could decide better” if he had “the opportunity of visiting your country, giving lectures for some months”.

Raman created an extraordinary visiting chair, and Born went to Bangalore with his wife Hedi. According to Ramaseshan, both soon overcame their doubts about educating their children in India. Born found his students at the Indian Institute of Science intelligent and his lectures were well received. Urged on by Ernest Rutherford, chairman of the institute's selection committee, Born accepted Raman's original offer.

But Raman's delight was to be short lived. According to Ramaseshan, at a meeting organized to welcome the German scientist to the institute, a little known professor referred disparagingly to Born as someone “who was rejected by his own country, a renegade and therefore a second-rate scientist unfit to be part of the faculty, much less to be the head of the department of physics”.

“After this public insult Born could not possibly accept Raman's offer,” says Ramaseshan. Raman's hopes of getting the other scientists who had expressed an interest in coming to India were also dashed. “India, I feel, missed an incredible golden opportunity,” says Ramaseshan.