The Royal Society and India

Or, Robert Moray FRS who recorded in 1663 how people on the Coromandel coast in South Asia cooled their drinks by exposing them to the sun and wind. 

Jaipur remained a place of astronomical and meteorological observations throughout the centuries. 

More traditional architecture was also a subject of great interest to the Royal Society’s Fellows. The library holds a copy of one of the seminal 19th century works on the subject, the ‘Essay on the architecture of the Hindus’ by Ram Raz.

Raz was an Indian clerk who taught himself the basics of Sanskrit, mathematics, geography and astronomy. Posthumously published in 1834, the book contains a wealth of detail derived from ancient Sanskrit treatises. 

This led to the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), a spectacular undertaking begun by William Lambton FRS upon which the modern mapping and surveying of the country is still based.  

From 1818 the project was joined by its most famous employee, George Everest. Everest rose to become superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and Surveyor-General of India, earning Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1827 for championing scientific surveying.

Although the Great Arc took Everest to northern parts of India, it was only the continuation of the survey into the foothills of the Himalayas by his successors that identified the distant ‘Peak XV’ as the world’s highest mountain. The peak was renamed Everest in 1856.

To access the Northern regions of India and into Tibet, the GTS hired several local surveyors, including the heroic Nain Singh Rawat who determined the location of Lhasa, Tibet. Many Indian surveyors such as Narsingh Das named in this table conducted the scientific groundwork.

Cursetjee travelled to England in 1839 to further his studies of marine steam power, which was in the process of transforming navigation and commerce in India.  

Within months of his arrival  Cursetjee had made the acquaintance of the Marquess of Northampton, then President of the Royal Society and was elected to the Fellowship. He was presented to Queen Victoria during his stay in London.

Cursetjee appears to have visited many of the sights of the capital, commenting that a “nuisance of London is the dirty state of the roads compared with those of Bombay”.

Regarded as one of the great mathematical prodigies, Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan was the Royal Society’s second Indian Fellow. A self-taught and precocious child, his mathematical career was almost halted by financial difficulties in his early twenties.

In 1913, Ramanujan began a correspondence with the mathematician G H Hardy FRS, who recognised Ramanujan’s natural genius, ranking him alongside titans such as Euler and Gauss. Hardy’s support led to a five-year stay in Cambridge, during which period Ramanujan was elected FRS.

His 1918 election citation highlighted his “investigations in elliptic functions and the theory of numbers”. Sadly, by then Ramanujan was already suffering from tuberculosis. Despite a return to the Indian climate in a bid to beat the disease, he died in April 1920 at age 32.

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman effect.

His first research papers were written in his spare time while he worked as an accountant in Kolkata. He was to become the honorary secretary of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, India’s oldest research institute established in 1876.

Another of Raman’s scientific interests was the acoustics of musical instruments, including the theory of transverse vibration of bowed strings; he was the first to investigate the harmonics of Indian drums such as the tabla.