Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is considered one of those prominent personalities of the 20th century who was not disturbed by the trials and tribulations in life and remained steadfast, thus becoming successful in achieving his aim. He was the first Indian scientist to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent medium, some of the light that is deflected changes its wavelength. This phenomenon is now called the Raman Effect.
C.V. Raman was born on 7 November 1880 at Thiruvanaikkaval near Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu into an orthodox South Indian family. He was a brilliant student. At the age of 11 he completed his matriculation. After graduating from Presidency College, Madras (now Chennai) at the age of 15, he wanted to go to England. But he was disqualified on medical grounds. So after acquiring a master’s degree in Physics from the college in 1907, Raman joined as an assistant accountant general in the finance department of the Indian Government.
He was posted to Calcutta. It was here that he discovered the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, where he began doing his research work, outside office hours. In 1917, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee appointed him the Palit Professor of Physics at the newly-endowed chair in the Calcutta University.
The turning point of his life came when he had the opportunity to go to Europe in 1921 as a representative of Calcutta University at a science meet. He wondered why the water of the Mediterranean Sea had such a dark shade of blue. Light became the subject of Raman’s study. Studying the scattering of light in various substances, in 1928 he discovered that when a beam of light of one frequency illuminates a transparent object — solid, liquid or gaseous — a small portion of the light emerges at right angles to the original direction, and some of this light is of different frequencies than that of the incident light. These so-called Raman-frequencies are equal to the infrared frequencies for the scattering material and caused by the exchange of energy between the light and the material. His discovery was named the “Raman Effect”. He used a mercury arc and a spectrograph for his study.
In 1929, Raman received knighthood. In 1930 he became the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. He described his experience thus, “When the Nobel award was announced, I saw it as a personal triumph, an achievement, a recognition for a very remarkable discovery, for reaching the goal I had pursued for seven years. But when I sat in that crowded hall and I saw the sea of western faces surrounding me, and I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my country and my people. I felt truly humble when I received the prize from King Gustav; it was a moment of great emotion, but I could restrain myself. Then I turned round and saw the British Union Jack under which I had been sitting and it was then that I realised that my poor country, India, did not have even a flag of her own — and it was this that triggered off my complete breakdown.”
In 1933, he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and served as its director until 1937. Next, he was the head of the department of physics until 1947. Then he retired from the Indian Institute and founded the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore. The land was a gift from the then king of Mysore. He founded the Indian Journal of Physics and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He was closely associated with many Indian research institutions of his time.
Raman also did some outstanding research on musical instruments like the violin and the veena. His research on the veena was documented in the work, On the Mechanical Theory of Vibrations of Musical Instruments of the Violin Family.
He was honoured with the Bharat Ratna in 1954. In 1957 he won the International Lenin Prize. He died on 21 November 1970 in Bangalore.