Igniting the nationalist mind
PRIYADARSI DUTTA
Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray will forever be remembered as the doyen of modern chemistry in India. Besides being a teacher who inspired his students, he was a nationalist who made his mark as an entrepreneur, social reformer and philanthropist. He established Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals and wrote the path-breaking A History of Hindu Chemistry. His 150th birth anniversary is being observed today
Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944), a contemporary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, may not receive a fraction of the tribute that the poet is being proffered on his 150th birth anniversary. But that does not diminish his work and legacy in any manner. Like Tagore, he appeared a sage recalled from the age of the Upanishads. Unlike Tagore, he worked out of Presidency College and College of Science & Technology in Kolkata and not sylvan Santiniketan.
Tagore, in his appreciation of Ray in 1932, said, “It is stated in the Upanishads that The One said, ‘I shall be Many’. The beginning of Creation is a move towards self-immolation. Prafulla Chandra has become many in his pupils and made his heart alive in the hearts of many. And that would not have been at all possible had he not unreservedly made a gift of himself. The glory of this power in Prafulla Chandra as teacher will never be worn out by decrepitude. It will extend further in time through the ever-growing intelligence of youthful hearts; by steady perseverance they will win new treasures of knowledge.” But Ray was also a practical man who ventured into the chemical industry and wanted to turn job-worm Bengalis into self-reliant entrepreneurs.
A pioneering scientist of modern India, Ray was born on August 2, 1861 in his ancestral home at Raruli-Katipara, Jessore district (now in Bangladesh) and educated in Kolkata. At the age of 21 he secured the Gilchrist scholarship which enabled him to study for six years and secure ‘Doctor of Science’ from University of Edinburgh. On his return he discarded Western clothes in favour of a dhoti and chador which remained his trademark attire unto the last. On July 1, 1889 he was appointed lecturer of chemistry in Presidency College, Kolkata. He was apparently the first Indian teacher of modern chemistry. He rendered yeomen service to popularise the study of chemistry, initiate original research and apply it to industrial production. Until the age of 75, teaching chemistry remained his profession. It is only in the last decade of his life that he abandoned it completely in favour of literature.
In July 1894, through Ray’s effort, Presidency College got its new Chemistry laboratory. His first series of serious experiments pertained to a menace of modern civilization, namely the adulteration of edible items. Ray later wrote a famous Bengali essay “Chaa paan naa bish paan” (Drinking tea or poison?). He was particularly impressed, during his various sojourns in Europe, by the hygienic agricultural and cattle-rearing practices there. But his early recognisable achievement in the laboratory was the discovery of mercurous nitrate. It put him on the international map.
During the 1890s he remained involved in a project to establish a chemical industry. He wanted it to be a source of employment generation for the educated youth of Bengal who were battling soaring unemployment. Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals was set up in 1901 as a joint-stock company. With its business growing, the company acquired a 3.3 acre plot of land for setting up its manufacturing facility in Maniktala in 1905. Subsequently its manufacturing facilities spread to Kanpur, Bombay and other places.
This first chemist of modern India single-handedly exhumed the history of chemistry in ancient India. Ray’s magnum opus, A History of Hindu Chemistry (of which Volume I was published in 1903 and Volume II in 1929), began as a monograph at the request of French savant Marcellin Berthelot in 1898. Berthelot, famous French chemist and politician, had wanted to know about contributions made by ancient Hindus to chemistry. Roy collected old and moth-eaten manuscripts from places like Madras, Tanjore, Alwar, Kashmir, Varanasi, Kathmandu and Lhasa to write the book.
In a lecture at Madras University in February 1918 on “Chemistry in Ancient India”, Ray clarified that rasayana was not exactly the equivalent of chemistry. “Strictly speaking, rasayana does not mean chemistry. Its meaning is medicine which promotes longevity, retentive memory, health, virility, etc. In other words, it is the elixir vitae of the alchemists of the middle ages.”
In the accompanying lecture, “Antiquity of Hindu Chemistry”, in which he dealth with metallurgy, Ray said, “Chemistry was vigorously pursued in India during Mahayana phase of activity of Buddhism and a fragmentary work of this period on this subject has been recovered, entitled Rasaratnakaraand, ascribed to Nagarjuna. From this treatise we can glean much valuable information about the progress of chemistry in India before the Mohammedan invasion of north India… It will suffice to state that colleges attached to the monasteries of Nalanda, Vikramshila and Udandapur... were recognised seats of learning and chemistry was included in the curriculum of studies.”
In the 1890s, Ray became a member of the Brahmo Samaj and took on the task of organising the Brahmo Bandhu Sabha and Sandhya Sammilan. But he always refrained from delivering sermons from the pulpit. Occasionally he used the Brahmo Samaj pulpit to deliver addresses on nationalism, inequities in society and the need for women’s emancipation.
His frail health did not suit a political life. Yet his burning patriotism kept him close to politics. During the 1901 Calcutta Congress, he met Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Ray organised a lecture for Gandhi at Albert Hall for which a large audience was mobilised at a time when he was practically unknown in India.
Ray believed, as he wrote in his essay “Bengali Brain and its Misuse”, that the intellectual decline of Hindu civilisation had preceded the Islamic invasion. No fresh intellectual impetus was discernable during the medieval ages even in parts that remained outside Islam’s ambit, like south India. We went only round and round the mulberry bush with rarefied metaphysics and philosophy. The West, in the meanwhile, took path-breaking strides in the fields of science, technology, politic and economic theory.
It was our contact with the West, Ray said, that revived the Indian instinct for knowledge. The Bengal Renaissance was made possible by British rule. But the Bengali rush to secure education for white collar jobs was subject to the law of diminishing returns: It saturated the job market. He admired the success of “national education” in Gujarat (as against in Bengal) because entrepreneurial Gujaratis did not link education with jobs. He wanted Bengalis to imbibe the entrepreneurial spirit to be self-reliant.
Ray never married, lived an abstemious life, and donated his income for public causes he held so dear to his heart.
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