Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893, in the village of Seoratali in the district or Dacca, now in East Pakistan. He was the fifth child of his parents, Jagannath Saha and Sm. Bhubaneswari Devi, who had five sons and three daughters. The family depended for its livelihood on the very meagre income from a petty shopkeeping business, and Saha's early education was beset with many hardships. In the village at that time there was no high school. Even the nearest middle school teaching English was in another village seven miles away, and Saha was able to join it due to the generosity of a local medical practitioner, Ananta Kumar Das, who agreed to provide him with free board and lodging in his house. In 1905 Saha joined the Government Collegiate School in Dacca after securing a Government scholarship for standing first, at the middle school examination, in the Dacca district. This was the year of great political unrest in Bengal caused by the partition of the province against popular opinion, and the school also was not without its share of trouble. The young Saha was drawn into a boycott of the visit of the Bengal Governor to his school, and as a sequel he forfeited the scholarship, and had to leave the Government School with many others. He now joined a private school - the Kishari Lal Jubilee School - and passed the Entrance Examination of the Calcutta University in 1909, standing first amongst the East Bengal candidates. He was a precocious student, and he was equally good in mathematics and the languages. He stood first in the all-Bengal competition examination in the Bible, open to school and college students, conducted by the Baptist Mission. In 1911 Saha passed from the Dacca College, Dacca, the Intermediate Science Examination of Calcutta University. He was first in mathematics and chemistry, but third in order of merit in the whole examination. One of his subjects at the examination was the German language which he studied privately -- the college had no arrangement for its teaching.

Saha now entered the Presidency College, Calcutta. Here he had amongst his contemporaries many who are familiar names in Indian Science, such as S. N. Bose (the author of the quantum statistics that goes by his name), N. R. Sen, J. N. Mukharjee and the late J. C. Ghosh. P. C. Mahalanobis, the distinguished statistician and planning expert, was his senior by a year ; N. R. Dhar was senior by two years. Amongst his teachers Saha had Acharya P. C. Ray in chemistry, Jagadish Chandra Bose in physics, and D. N. Mallik and C. E. Cullis in mathematics. Both in the B.Sc. Examination (1913) with Honours in Mathematics and the M.Sc. (Applied Mathematics) Examination (1915), Saha had the second place, the first position going to S. N. Bose. He intended at one time to take the competitive examination for the Indian Finance Service, but was not granted permission by the Government. He resolved to devote himself to study and research in applied mathematics and physics. To support himself and his younger brother staying with him, he for a few months took to private tuitions of which at one time he was doing as many as three in different parts of Calcutta, covering the long distances on a bicycle. In 1916 the Calcutta University under the dynamic leadership of its Vice-Chancellor Asutosh Mukerjee, a Judge of the High Court, opened a new University College of Science for post-graduate studies and research - this was made possible because of the magnificent donations of two eminent lawyers of Calcutta, Tarak Nath Palit and Rash Behari Ghose. Saha and S. N. Bose were appointed lecturers in the Department of Mathematics with Dr Ganesh Prasad as Professor. He however found it irksome to get on with the Professor of Mathematics, and in 1917 he (with S. N. Bose) was transferred to the Department of Physics. About a year later C. V. Raman joined the Department as Palit Professor of Physics.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 August 2016 17:27