Genius that defied poverty

Meghnad Saha, a pioneering physicist and educationist, was born on 6th October, 1893 in a remote village of Sheoratoli in the district of Dhaka. He was the 5th child of his parents, Sri Jagannath Saha and Sreemati . Bhubaneshwari Devi. His father was a grocer in the village. Meghnad passed his early life in extreme poverty. After finishing his primary education, he was admitted to a middle school which was seven miles away from his village. Meghnad pursued his education in that school due to the generosity of a local medical practitioner, Ananta Kumar Das, who provided him with boarding and lodging in his house. He stood first in the Dhaka Middle School test. He was admitted to Dhaka Collegiate School. Meghnad got involved in the turbulent politics of the time. In 1905, the British government decided to partition Bengal, but the public opinion was against the decision. At that time, B. Fuller was the governor of East Bengal. One day he came to visit the Collegiate School. Meghnad along with other students boycotted his visit. As a result, he was expelled from the school and his scholarship was cancelled. He got admitted to Kishorilal Jubilee School. In 1909. he passed the Entrance examination from this school and stood first from East Bengal with highest marks in English, Bengali,Sanskrit and Mathematics. He was admitted to Dhaka College and in 1911, he ranked third in the I.Sc examination from that college.
Meghnad Saha went to Calcutta and took admission in the Presidency College. In 1913, he graduated from that college and ranked second from the University of Calcutta. Meanwhile, Meghnad Saha joined Anushilan Samity to take part in the freedom movement and came in contact with revolutionary nationalists like Subash Chandra Bose and Rajendra Prasad. Bagha Jatin, a famous freedom fighter used to visit his hostel to organise student movement at that time. In 1915, Meghnad Saha along with Satyendranath Bose ranked first in M.Sc examination
Meghnad in Applied Mathematics and S.N. Bose in pure Mathematics. S.N. Bose was another great physicist of that time. In 1917, Meghnad Saha joined as a lecturer at the newly established Science College in Calcutta. He taught Quantum Mechanics in the college.
He jointly translated the works of Einstein and Minkowski on relativity with S.N. Bose into English from German. In 1919, his research paper titled "On selective radiation pressure and its application" was published in the American Astrophysical journal. He developed the "ionization formula," which explains the presence of the spectral lines. It proved to be a breakthrough in Astrophysics. He went abroad and worked for two years at Imperial College, London and at a research laboratory in Germany. In 1927, Meghnad Saha became a fellow of London's Royal Society. In 1947, he established the Institute of Nuclear Physics, which later was named after him as Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics.
For the development of science, he decided to join politics and was elected as a member of parliament in 1951.He died on Feb.16, 1956.

The writer is a student of Home Economics College, Dhaka.