A Living Room in Mylapore, A Lab for Ideas
In the summer of 1958, when Alladi Ramakrishnan returned to Madras, he carried with him the afterglow of a year at the Institute for Advanced Study—an experience that had quietly rearranged his sense of what a life in science could be. At the time, the institute was under the directorship of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project and was responsible for the creation of the atom bomb. Ramakrishnan had participated in seminars where ideas in modern physics were tested, challenged, and sharpened in real time. He found the experience electrifying.
Back home, the young academic with an appointment at the University of Madras found no venue of scientific study that resembled what he had just left behind. He wanted to induct talented students into theoretical physics and expose them to the latest advances in this field. The intellectual ambition he had for his students went beyond the narrow prescriptions of the curriculum — in local parlance, what he proposed was literally “out of syllabus.” So, the professor began giving lectures on quantum mechanics and other advanced topics — called the Theoretical Physics Seminar — in his own home, a tasteful, well-appointed bungalow in Mylapore called Ekamra Nivas. This was no journal club. Ramakrishnan invited eminent scientists — researchers who were published in top journals — passing through India to speak to his small circle of young theorists.
Can you discuss your time at the University of Madras?
T: When I finished [at the Presidency College], I received a gold medal for my work and had a choice of what to do next. At this time, Alladi Ramakrishnan, Member (1957–58) in the School of Mathematics/Natural Sciences, had decided to start a course in theoretical physics at the University of Madras in Chennai. There were three other girls there at that time. We all knew of each other and were waiting for one another to join.
At this point, no one in Chennai had worked on particle physics at all. Ramakrishnan, however, had heard about the field and knew that it was exploding. He knew Homi Bhabha, who ran the Tata Institute in Bombay, and he was able to give us each a paper on particle physics. We spent three months learning about complex variables, of which we had no understanding beforehand. That’s how it started. Ramakrishnan had the idea to collect a bit of money from the students to put towards inviting professors visiting the Tata Institute to come from Bombay to Chennai for lectures. That was how we were able to meet so many scholars, including Robert Marshak, Member in the School of Mathematics/Natural Sciences (1948); Leonard I. Schiff; and Donald Glaser.
Those visiting professors would bring pre-prints with them, which was transformational. Up until that point, we could only receive physical journals in India via sea mail. It would take three months for a paper to arrive. By the time you received a published paper, other scholars with access to pre-prints had already had months to work on problems. By the time we started our research, it would be obsolete. However, when scholars visited, we could talk with them directly. They gave us advice and listened to our ideas. Once we knew these professors, we could write to them and ask them to send us their pre-prints by air mail. Slowly, we could catch up.
Then, we started to write a lot of papers. Every week there was a new particle to discover. Everyone was jumping on problems because there were so many things to choose from. My thesis consisted of a set of fourteen published papers from this period, all related to particle physics, Feynman propagators, and particle interactions.
An elegant solution
The instinct to create such an alternative space for mathematics and theoretical physics in India was shaped even before his stint in Princeton. A gifted mathematician and the son of a successful lawyer, Ramakrishnan—who had graduated in physics and won a gold medal in Hindu Law—seemed destined to continue in his father’s practice. A chance meeting with Bhabha altered that path. At the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, he worked with Bhabha on a problem in cosmic radiation and arrived at an elegant solution. Bhabha chose to pursue his own approach, but Ramakrishnan was grateful for the excellent research problem which he was offered by his mentor and continued to maintain good ties with him.
He left for the University of Manchester to complete his PhD under the British statistician M. S. Bartlett. His earlier solution, the one Bhabha had set aside, was published in a major journal. As a graduate student, Ramakrishnan had attended a 1949 conference in Edinburgh where he met Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and other physicists of renown. Invitations to European universities followed. He toured European science capitals, in the nineteen-fifties —Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen—before returning to India.
In 1952, he accepted a position at the newly formed physics department at the University of Madras, headed by crystallographer G. N. Ramachandran. Theoretical physicist Paul Dirac—regarded by many as Einstein’s intellectual equal—was its first overseas visitor. When Dirac lectured, the Senate Hall at the University of Madras overflowed. Though the man was not known to be a scintillating speaker, people stood in the parking lot to listen on loudspeakers — not because they understood advanced physics, but because the occasion felt historic. Ramakrishnan’s students, however, were talented. When luminaries in physics and mathematics gave guest lectures — the students posed good questions, proof that the city held promise. Given the right conditions, Ramakrishnan knew, Madras too could be home to a center of learning for theoretical physicists and mathematicians: he could nurture original thinkers.
The drift and the persistence
And would the university authorities help such a center emerge? Soon after his return from Princeton after his unpaid sabbatical, Ramakrishnan was transferred to Madurai, then a scientific backwater. He took this banishment from the metropolitan center in his stride. His wife and young son remained in Madras, so he visited when the capital when could and continued the seminars at Ekamra Nivas. When he was asked to join a national committee on the use of Hindi in the physical sciences, he agreed despite not knowing the language. A trip to Delhi meant passing through Madras—another chance to see his family, another seminar, small things that kept him going.
The contrast between the world he had just left and the one he now inhabited could not have been sharper. Princeton had shown him what a community of scientific inquiry looked like; Madurai was the very opposite, but this reality only clarified his purpose. If the institutional setting would not support the scientific culture he envisioned, he would continue building it in the margins—through train journeys, through constant correspondence with the brightest minds of his time, and through informal seminars in the living room of Ekamra Nivas.
The political opening
During one such visit to Madras enroute to Delhi, he was invited to a gathering of international students presided over by the state minister C. Subramaniam, known as “C. S.” from his initials. Ramakrishnan doubted that politicians had any real interest in creative science, but his wife persuaded him to attend briefly. He was asked to address the gathering and he did. Impressed, the minister spoke with him afterward, discussed with him the dream of establishing an IAS‑like institute in Madras, and became an unexpected ally.
Two months later, in January 1960, Niels Bohr visited India as a guest of the prime minister. He dined with Ramakrishnan’s students at Ekamra Nivas and talked with them until midnight. At a press conference, alongside praise for Bhabha’s TIFR, Bohr expressed admiration for Ramakrishnan’s seminar group. Suddenly, the Prime Minister’s Office wanted to know more about Ramakrishnan and his seminars.
With this unexpected validation, Ramakrishnan left for a two‑month academic trip to Europe. Upon his return, he was transferred back to Madras — which was definitely a plus. But was not given an office; his address became “Professor of Physics, c/o the German classroom.” His dream institute remained stalled despite repeated trips to Delhi. He focused on the seminars and used his network to secure postdoctoral positions for his students.
Meanwhile, C. S., the politician and unexpected champion of the sciences, kept the idea alive. In 1961, he met the American physicist Maurice Shapiro, who remarked that the seminar group at Ekamra Nivas reminded him of the gatherings around Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Perhaps, he suggested, the group should directly meet Nehru once.
In his autobiography, The Hand of Destiny, C. S. describes the meeting at the Raj Bhavan in October 1961: “Jawaharlalji was greatly impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the students… and in particular to see four girls among the students. When the students told him that they needed an institution for the development of theoretical physics and mathematics, he asked me to examine the proposal and put up a note for his consideration.”
The professor’s patience and persistence finally met their moment. The Institute of Mathematical Sciences—Matscience—was launched on January 3, 1962. Ramakrishnan served as its director for 21 years. Alongside TIFR, the institute remains a center of excellence in theoretical physics and allied fields. The space Ramakrishnan had wanted when he returned from Princeton—the kind of room where ideas in theoretical physics and mathematics could be tested, challenged, and sharpened in real time — now has a permanent address, thanks to his sheer persistence.
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