Do we like C. V. Raman?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A towering scientist with real good deeds, set against a documented gender bar in his institute and a record of fights with colleagues.
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in Trichinopoly in 1888. He took his degrees at Presidency College in Madras, then spent about a decade as a government accountant while doing physics on the side. In 1917 he took the first Palit Professorship of Physics at Calcutta University, where the work behind the Raman effect came together.
The idea began in 1921 on a ship from Southampton to Bombay, when he studied the blue of the Mediterranean with simple optical tools and wrote to Nature from on board. That work won him the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first scientific Nobel for an Indian. He was so sure of winning that he reportedly booked his passage to Stockholm before the announcement.
The scandal that sticks is the Kamala Sohonie story. According to Scroll and Physics World, Raman, as director of the Indian Institute of Science, refused her a place in his institute because she was a woman. He relented only after she kept pushing, and he attached humiliating conditions. Years later she said, “I can never forget the way he treated me just because I was a woman.”
That's the harm check, and it's the main mark against him. Scroll reports that he publicly backed women's education, yet he admitted three women to his lab and kept them away from male students. Nothing we found shows him campaigning against any group or touching conspiracy theories, and he died in 1970. It's a real stain on the harm test, not a pattern of campaigning, so it's an asterisk, not a fail.
The other pattern is a prickly personality. Scroll's account has him pushed out of Calcutta amid regional rivalries and a 1932 row over his appointments. It also reports that he lost the secretaryship of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science after his plans to control its membership leaked. Physics World's biographer talks of a “Himalayan ego”, and the profile concludes that his personality turned more people against him than his science won over.
At IISc, Citizen Matters reports, he invited Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany, including Max Born and Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger declined, but Born came to Bengaluru. Colleagues accused him of wasting money on gardens and of appointing Born without consulting the governing body. A review committee criticised his budgeting, and he resigned as director in 1937 but stayed on as a professor.