India's first Prime Minister was perhaps among those statesmen who inhabited effortlessly the house of science.
India's first Prime Minister was perhaps among those statesmen who inhabited effortlessly the house of science.
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Part of that ease had to do with his warm and personal friendship with the physicist Homi Bhabha whose centenary is being celebrated this year. Their friendship was unusual: the young scientist addressed Nehru as 'Dear Bhai' and Nehru addressed Bhabha as 'My dear Homi'. Critics have often viewed their relationship as being motivated by a mutual need for control and power - for it was with Nehru's support that Bhabha built India's atomic energy establishment. But their friendship stretched beyond being merely utilitarian.
The circumstances of the first meeting between Bhabha and Nehru are not historically recorded. Their education was similar - both were educated at Cambridge. Nehru, twenty years older than Bhabha, went to Cambridge when Bhabha was still a schoolboy at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay. It is not difficult to imagine that the young Bhabha might have first chanced upon Nehru at the house of his uncle, Sir Dorabji Tata, where many leaders of the Indian National Congress gathered. But the bond they forged just before Indian Independence remained a strong one.
What drew the two men together? Indira Gandhi recollected that Nehru would always find time to talk to Bhabha no matter how late it was not because Bhabha brought to him urgent matters that required his immediate attention but because he found the conversation relaxing. Bhabha recognized that although Nehru was not a practising scientist his personality revealed the essential attributes of a real man of science. Nehru, on the other hand, often spoke about the longing with which he turned to science even after circumstances made him part company with it. It was almost as if Bhabha opened a window to the world of science that he longed for.
A chance remark of the scientist, Patrick Blackett who was a friend to both, reveals that the statesman often sought out intellectual companionship that his political engagements denied him. In an oral history interview with Blackett, the historian B R Nanda had wondered if Nehru's talk with the scientist compensated for his isolation from 'intellectual company'. To which Blackett who often stayed as a house guest at the Prime Minister's residence said that Nehru"liked intellectual company and did not get it except in Homi and people like that."
But as I glance through their correspondence, I notice something else that had escaped me so far. After a visit to Cambridge in 1959, when an honorary Doctor of Science was conferred on him, Bhabha wrote to Nehru describing the event with humour. More significantly, he wrote of his deep longing to spend some quiet time:
"The two days in Cambridge, although very hectic were most refreshing. I sometimes wish I could spend 3 to 4 months there in quiet study and contemplation." By 1959, Bhabha, institution-builder extraordinaire, had stopped writing scientific papers. Although he regularly attended scientific colloquia and interacted with scientists, more often than not he was occupied with organisational work on a massive scale. And it was only to 'Bhai' that he could disclose his unfulfilled need for uninterrupted time for reflection. The sharing of deep concerns was reciprocal. In 1962, two years before he died, Nehru spoke of the exhilaration that he experienced when visiting Bhabha's Institute because "this takes me out of the normal rut in which I live, which is often rather depressing." So 'Bhai' found in Bhabha's world an escape from the frustrations and exhaustions of the workaday world of politics - a world he inhabited by choice.
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