Thread by @sheshapatangi1

He asserted—perhaps only poetically—that trees could grieve, suffer poverty, steal, assist others, form friendships, and sacrifice themselves for their children
#Thread
Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose and Vedantic Science.
"There will soon rise a Temple of Learning where the

teacher cut off from worldly distractions would go on with his ceaseless pursuit after truth, and dying, hand on his work to his disciples".
Nothing would seem laborious in his inquiry; never is he to lose sight of his quest, never is he to let it go obscured by any

terrestrial temptation. For he is the Sanyasin spirit, and India is the only country where so far from there being a conflict between science and religion, knowledge is regarded as religion itself.
In a 1916 address at Benares Hindu University, Bose called attention to the

intellectual achievements at the ancient Indian universities in Nalanda & Taxila with their international reputations. While recalling the past brilliance of Indian intellectual life, Bose was also adamantly forward looking, warning students at Benares Hindu University, he said

‘Let us not talk of the glories of the past till we have secured for her true place among the intellectual nations of the world’
Bose had struggled a lot to prove his worth because International recognition of Indian scientific achievements would bolster the view that Indians

were capable of self-rule.
His-Story Never Revealed by his Own, but from a White-Man C. Mackenzie Brown of Trinity University.
“The real is one: wise men call it variously.”
Utilizing this celebrated declaration of the Rig Veda as an epigraph in his first scientific monograph,

Response in the Living & Non-Living, (1902), the audacious J C Bose intimated to the Western scientific world that his electrographic discovery of the unity of life—that the animate and the inanimate world are one—was an affirmation of the insights of the ancient Vedic seers.

Bose’s father was a devotee of Vishwakarma, Years after his father’s death, Jagadish recalled “I remember the deep impression made on my mind by the form of worship rendered by the artisans [at the schools] to Viswakarma, God in his aspect as the Great Artificer:

His hand it was that was moulding the whole creation; and it seemed that we were the instruments in His hand, through whom He intended to fashion some Great Design” and it is ‘Mahashakti, by whom the nonliving and the living, the atom and the universe are all powered’.

He was one of many English-educated Hindus, especially in Bengal, responding to the momentous challenges of modern science coming from the West. These responses were profoundly shaped by the colonial context of 19th- and early 20th-century India.
Bose’s role is especially

significant as he was among the first generation of Indians trained in the methods of modern science and the first to gain international recognition for his discoveries, beginning with his work on microwave radiation.
He affirmed, for example, that “even a speck of protoplasm

has a faculty of choice”. And he spoke of the similarity of the death-experience in man and plant, both undergoing great contractile and electrical spasms as recorded by his ‘Morograph’ (‘Death Recorder’) and concluded,
These mute companions, silently growing beside our door,

have now told us the tale of their life-tremulousness and their death-spasm, in script that is as inarticulate as they.
In his 1901 discourse at the Royal Institution, Bose claimed that ‘electrical response is regarded as the criterion between the living and non-living.

Where it is, life is said to be; where it is not found, we are in presence of death, or else of that which has never lived...’.
He went on to add that advances in science ‘have been always towards a clearer perception of underlying unity in apparent diversity’ and then closed

with his famous statement,
“It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self-made records, and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things—the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns

that shine above us—it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago— ‘They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of the universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth,

unto none else, unto none else!’ .
Those ancient sages saw all of reality pervaded by soul or consciousness, and not just manifesting similar responses to various stimulations.
Bose’s insistence on the unity of the living and non-living arose from a deeply held philosophical

position, Vedanta in inspiration, a monism that regarded the world as a single unified entity, where mind and matter were aspects of the same thing.
The notion of Brahman, the supreme consciousness, involving itself into evermore gross forms of matter, to eventually reemerge

through a physico-spiritual evolution, was a common notion among Bengali intellectuals in Bose’s time, epitomised in the writings of Aurobindo Ghose. And it deeply affected J.C. Bose.
The intuitive and synthetical Indian understanding of life, according to Bose, allowed Indians

to develop more sensitive approaches to their subject matter than Western scientists “‘whose approach was aggressive and crudely materialistic, and whose tendency constantly to subdivide scientific fields precluded them from seeing the underlying unity”
Thus in 1921,

Bose claimed “India is, perhaps through her habit of mind, better fitted to realise a wider synthesis. One of the greatest contributions in the realm of science would undoubtedly be the establishment of a great generalisation, not merely speculative, but based on actual

demonstration of an underlying unity amidst bewildering diversity”.

DO YOU KNOW WHY BOSE WAS MADE FORGOTTEN AND FOR WHAT REASON?
The LEFT INTELLECTUALS WHO SAT ON EDUCATION BOARD SAID
But what has been the long-term value of his own scientific contributions? Most scientifically

informed critics of Bose like Dasgupta see his second and third phases of research, at least in terms of their larger, pan-vitalistic or pan-psychic conclusions, as basically a failure from a scientific point of view.
And another Sen Gupta observes, Bose’s deep philosophical

convictions ‘possibly motivated him to take mental leaps to arrive at some of his scientific conclusions…’ not all of which have ‘stood the test of time…’
Is it true?
V A Shepherd, a renowned plant electrophysilogist stated
Bose’s contention that plants have…

a nervous system, a form of intelligence, and are capable of remembering and learning, was not understood or accepted in its time. However, a hundred years later, concepts of plant intelligence, learning, and long-distance electrical signalling have entered the mainstream

literature.
When Indians were suspicious of ‘Western’ science, seeing it as the means of their own subjugation to the British, as embedded in pernicious ideals of materialism, greed, and aggression, and as destructive of traditional spiritual and moral values, Bose convinced

fellow Indians that since ‘“science” was not “western”, but originally “eastern” and now universal, it could be successfully and legitimately regarded as indigenised for use’.

For Bose, incorporating indigenous perspectives would help to integrate and humanise ‘western’ science.
#AcharyaJagadishChandraBose
#PunyaSmaran
#VandeMataram.