The Meghnad Saha Archive and its Lessons

In this colloquium, I shall, by recounting the history of the Meghnad Saha Archive to date, point out the general difficulties of building and maintaining an archive in India, especially if it is attached to a research institute. I shall try also to point out the steps that should be taken to salvage every little item that can help us relive the past as far as scientific and technical progress of a country is concerned.

About the Speaker:

Atri Mukhopadhyay (born 1946), a PRS (1975), Ph D (1978) in Physics from the University of Calcutta had held several visiting positions in UK, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. Having served in the faculty of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics from 1985  he retired as a professor in 2006.  He worked in the field of electron structure theory of atoms and molecules resulting in about 40 research papers in international journals.

Apart from carrying out research and teaching, Mukhopadhyay is deeply interested in history of science. He is responsible for restructuring and enriching the Meghnad Saha Archives of the Saha Institute. His book entitled Abinash Meghnad Saha (Meghnad Saha the Invincible, Anushtup, 2012) in bengali is an in-depth analysis of the life and work of Meghnad Saha vis-a-vis the contemporary scientists in colonial India. He is also the coauthor (with Purabi Mukherji) of the book History of the Calcutta School of Physical Sciences (Springer, 2018). He was the General Secretary of the Indian Physical Society for several consecutive terms and the Editor of its quarterly organ Physics Teacher for several years. His extra-curricular interests include Indian and European literature, and music, especially the songs of Tagore. He has written a number of articles in English and Bengali on science and society and a few on the Indian classic Mahabharata. He translated T S Eliot’s The Waste Land into Bengali.