Author: Priyadarsi Dutta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 1, 2011
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/357584/Igniting-the-nationalist-mind.html
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.
