Mahendralal Sarkar

The Story

Born in 1833, Sarkar trained as a doctor and built a busy medical practice in Calcutta. But the physician in him was troubled by a bigger question: why should a country of millions depend on others for knowledge of the physical world? He began lecturing publicly on science — experimental physics and chemistry demonstrated before Indian audiences — to show that the subject belonged to them.

In 1876 he founded the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Calcutta, an institute dedicated to original research by Indian scientists. It was a radical proposition in a colony: that Bhārat needed not merely technical training for clerks, but laboratories where discoveries were made.

The association attracted gifted physicists and chemists, and its laboratories in due course produced work that would make Indian science famous — the institute is where C.V. Raman later did some of his early work. Sarkar's faith that Indian institutions could reach world standards was vindicated in his own subject within a generation.

He died in 1904. The IACS still stands on Jadavpur's institutional landscape, one of the country's most respected scientific bodies — the direct inheritance of a doctor who believed his country should do its own thinking.