ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the culture of the bhadraloks and the making of Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose. The interconnectedness between Bose and Einstein depicts Indian science as a complex form of cultural hybridization between the local and the global, including the broad notion of a visvajaneenata cosmopolitanism. Bose–Einstein statistics and bosons are examples of this type of local visvajaneen cosmopolitanism. By cosmopolitanism, it is meant a non-hierarchical mode of coexistence of the local and the global in landscapes with a power differential. The category of the bhadraloks is somewhat similar to the German “mandarins,” what Russell McCormmach calls Kulturträger (“culture-bearer”), or the Prussian Bildungsbürgertum (educated members of the German bourgeoisie) in late nineteenth-century Wilhelmian Germany. Bose’s early career is discussed and how he became a bhadralok scientist. The period around 1919 is examined and how relativity was received in India. Bose and Saha were not only the first to translate Einstein’s original papers into English, they also came to be viewed as the first theoretical physicists in India, whose work and research strategies followed the model of this new branch of science, which had already been firmly established in Germany and in Central Europe. The chapter examines Bose’s life as a scientist attracted to his field by the growing nationalist movement, by the lure of modernity, and as a participant in the web of debates within Western scientists. The chapter describes Bose’s social role as a bhadralok scientist, belonging to a distinctly new and evolving group in colonial India.
