From the biography: When Jagadish Chandra Bose’s father put his young son under an ex-pirate’s care

Bose’s father was the District Magistrate of Faridpur in the Bengal Presidency. His residence was burnt down by a gang of dacoits to avenge the capture and imprisonment of their leader. The Elder Bose then moved with his family to a larger and better fortified place, very close to a creek. The mighty Padma River releases a stream westward, which takes the shape of a sickle and circumambulates the town of Faridpur before flowing south.

The little Bose developed a friendship with this stream that flowed under an old wooden bridge at the end of the large meadow in front of their house. Every evening he would go and sit at the edge of the pool observing the moving water, circling an obstruction at one place and gushing rapidly through a narrow channel formed between two fallen tree trunks at another. When the darkness thickened and the din and bustle became silent, he could hear many words in the burble song of the water.

While re-enacting scenes that he had seen in the jatras, the open-air musical dramas performed at local village fairs, he would mimic:

‘River, where do you come from?’
‘The matted hair of Shiva.’
‘And where do you go, River?’
‘To the feet of Shiva.’

This was young Bose’s first acquaintance with the cycles of life and nature, the simultaneous coexistence of beginning and end – the river coming from and going to the same Shiva, the Creator and the Destructor.

The symbolism of a bridge as a unifier is quite old. The small bridge that the young Bose spent so much time on became a lifelong symbol and was his inspiration to unite the two sides, create a link between them, and maintain harmony. His science became the quest to unite seemingly disparate things: living and non-living, visible and invisible, voiced and unvoiced, the moving and the still. His search for unity probably stemmed from his need to reconcile the two opposite ends at home, since his father was a liberal Brahmo and his mother an orthodox Shakto.

Also, duality was at the root of Shaktoism, too. Bose’s mother herself signified two counter aspects – tenacious and rigid in her adherence to Shakto rituals, yet tender, loving and indulgent towards her son.

Perhaps it was the riverine culture of Bengal which saw its many rivers as ruthless destructors in some seasons, and nurturers and carers in others that made the dualism of Shaktoism appeal to its people, especially the mothers of Bikrampur. They did not coddle their offspring in their laps like other mothers, but easily threw them into the fiery workshop of the world, commanding them, “Return to me only when you earn a name, might and manliness in the battleground of life.”

When Bose was a little boy, his father, the magistrate, had sent a pirate to jail. After his release, the man went to see the Elder Bose. “What will I do now?” he asked the baffled magistrate. “Who will give a pirate a job?”

The fearless son of Bikrampur immediately replied, “Come with me. You will work in my household,” and put the young Bose in the care of an ex-pirate.

Every day the man carried the child on his shoulders to the village school founded by the Elder Bose, keeping him engrossed in the adventurous stories of the river pirates.

A fisherman’s son in the school told stories about how his father and his fellow fishermen braved the monsoon storms in the ocean-like Padma. Incidents about fighting snakes and rogue buffaloes and bulls were narrated by a farmer’s son. The orderly’s son, who lived in the outhouse of the Bose residence, recounted his father’s encounters with dacoits and thugs and how the brave government servant had captured them and many a time foiled their attempts at escape. Bose the child was unaware of the difference in status between him and the others in the village school. To him they were only his classmates, playmates and chroniclers of heroic tales.

Once the Boses were travelling to Bikrampur by boat along the swollen Padma. When night fell, they noticed a few dinghies approaching them menacingly. To the young Bose’s delight, his attendant sprang up and let out a peculiar, shrill cry. At once the approaching dinghies retreated. The cry, the ex-pirate explained, was the pirates’ call to others to identify themselves.

The young Bose’s belief in the pirate’s stories increased manifold.

Mythological tales as told in the jatras fascinated the young lad. He fell in love with Karna, the unapologetic, loyal, principled man of grit and determination, who could have been at the helm of the victorious side had he not been wronged by fate and his mother. To the lad’s young mind the fact that Karna did not fear defeat was indeed admirable.

In one of the jatra performances, Bose heard Karna say, “I can see the end, full of peace and emptiness,” and he often repeated these and several other lines to himself. Some of Karna’s dialogues remained with Bose throughout his life and became a guiding force at critical moments.

As Bose grew older, he began to see shades of Karna’s character in his father, especially in his attitude towards failure and defeat. The Elder Bose had started or invested in many a venture, as diverse as a People’s Bank in Faridpur, stock farming in the Terai, tea plantation in Assam, a technical school in Bengal, a textile mill in Bombay, and many more. He was driven more by a sense of social responsibility than by the urge to make money. Though many of his initiatives failed miserably and landed him in serious debt, he remained unapologetic and unfazed and ventured again into something else that he felt he ought to do. Bose recognised this and learnt to look at success and failure as one, and that sometimes defeat could be greater than victory.

Excerpted with permission from Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Reluctant Physicist, Sudipto Das, Paper Missile/Niyogi Books.