J. B. S. Haldane: an isolated souvenir


Journal of Genetics, Vol. 96, No. 5, November 2017, pp. 733 © Indian Academy of Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-017-0839-y

HALDANE AT 125

J. B. S. Haldane: an isolated souvenir

P. P. DIVAKARAN∗

Riviera Retreat, Thevara Ferry Road, Kochi 682 013, India
∗E-mail: ppdppd@gmail.com.

Published online 24 November 2017

Keywords. Indian Science Congress; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; independent India.

I never met Haldane. That is not surprising since, genet-
ically speaking, I am illiterate. But I saw him once in
performance (no other word will do), at the Indian Science
Congress of 1960 in Bombay (as it then was). The perfor-
mance left an unforgettable memory: partly because of the
times—the glow of our newly-won independence was still
upon us and here was a famous British scientist wishing to
help turn our dreams into reality; partly it was on account
of my impressionable age; but mostly it was down to Hal-
dane’s own extraordinarily communicative personality.
The 1960 Science Congress was a remarkable event.

Among the luminaries who came from abroad—Haldane
did not quite qualify as he was already in Calcutta—the
ones I remember are Niels Bohr, Theodosius Dobzhansky
and a youthful and very impressive Abdus Salam. There
were the usual public lectures (at the Oval, in the shadow
of the Rajabai Tower), of high scientific quality and, in
Haldane’s case, of equal entertainment value. It was of
course the entertainment that stayed in the memory; at
one point, while holding forth on the benefits of a ratio-
nal approach to activities of daily life, he launched into
an attack on the sari as the default garment of working
Indian women, complete with a graphic demonstration of
a sari-clad woman trying to escape from a chasing bull
by climbing over a fence (he was himself dressed in white
kurta–pyjama). Dobzhansky who was sharing the stage [I
think it was] was greatly amused as was the large audience.
Haldane’s more serious message was about why and how

India must break away from the mindset of the colonized
and cultivate science in its own interest and by its own

genius. The message resonated strongly with us: a few stu-
dents from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
who had walked the short distance from the Old Yacht
Club—TIFR had not yet moved to its new campus at the
southern tip of Colaba—looking for reassurance that we
had not made a mistake in choosing a vocation in science.
TIFR itself was an amazingly stimulating place then and
the inspiration came as much from other young people
like us, some of whom were already producing research of
the highest quality, as from our senior mentors with Homi
Bhabha at the head; they were able to persuade the very
best in their fields to undertake long visits to India and
lecture to us. Both Bohr and Salam gave lectures at TIFR
during their Science Congress visit. Salam’s, on the pio-
neering Yang–Mills paper on non-Abelian gauge theory,
had such an impact that the first ever application of the
theory to a problem in particle physics came out of TIFR,
just before the better known work of Sakurai.
It is perhaps natural that this short note which began

with one particular memory of Haldane has transmuted
into a recollection of what it was like to be growing up sci-
entifically in India in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was
a time of great expectations and Haldane’s adoption of
India as his home fitted in well with that optimism. Those
of us just starting out in a life of science in India knew,
even if somewhat indistinctly, that we were privileged.
The scientific landscape has changed greatly since and
the change has not always been in a particularly ‘Indian’
direction. Nevertheless, I think Haldane would have
approved.

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	J. B. S. Haldane: an isolated souvenir