Meghnad Saha - Early Life

Early Life

Meghnad Saha was born in a small village named Seoratali, about 40 km from Dhaka (in present Bangladesh). The youngest of the five sons of Jagannath Saha and Bhubaneswari Debi, Meghnad belonged to a poor family and struggled to rise in life. His father was reluctant to allow him to undergo higher education; he wanted him to assist him in shopkeeping. With some persuasion from his eldest son Jayant and Meghnad's primary school teachers, he relented. Despite being raised to a religious family, he was said to be an atheist. Meghnad went to the neighbouring village to live there and attend an English-medium school. Here he was lucky in that one Mr. Ananta Kumar Das, a medical practitioner, took interest in Meghnad and offered him free boarding and lodging. In 1905, he joined the Dhaka Collegiate School. Here he not only received a free studentship, but also a stipend. However he lost both his free studentship and stipend when he participated in a boycott against the then British Governor of Bengal Sir Bampfylde Fuller when he came on a visit to Dacca. He managed to pull through by joining the Kishorilal Jubilee School where he again received a free studentship and a stipend. Around this time Saha joined the Bible classes run by the Dacca Baptist Society. In a test that was conducted, Saha stood first and won a handsome prize of Rs.100/- plus a beautifully bound copy of the Bible. In 1909 Saha passed the Collegiate entrance exam, standing first among the students from East Bengal, with highest marks in Mathematics, English, Sanskrit and Bengali. This got him entry into the Intermediate Dhaka College, where he spent two years studying Intermediate. During this time he also took private lessons in German which later was to stand him in good stead.
In 1911 he ranked third in the ISC exam. In the same year Saha came to Calcutta and joined the Presidency College to study for the B.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics. Presidency College by then had spawned numerous luminaries, and Saha found himself surrounded by many: Satyendra Nath Bose, Jnan Ghosh, N.R. Sen, and J. N. Mukherjee were his classmates, P.C. Mahalanobis was one year his senior, N. R. Dhar was senior by two years, while Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was one year his junior. His teachers included Jagadish Chandra Bose in physics, Prafulla Chandra Roy in chemistry, D.N. Mallik and C. E. Cullis in mathematics. After B.Sc. came M.Sc. and once again S.N. Bose was his classmate. In M.Sc. and B.Sc. Saha secured the second rank, while Bose stood first, while in the M.sc. exam both stood first, Bose in pure mathematics and Saha in Applied Mathematics.
While in college during 1913 through 1915, Meghnad got involved with Anushilan Samiti to take part in freedom fighting movement. Bagha Jatin, a famous freedom fighter, was used to visit his hostel for building student organization., Saha flirted a bit with the idea of joining hands with revolutionaries in their fight against the British. However he soon gave up on the idea, his goal was to get a job, earn money and support his family. After college he tried to enter the Indian Finance Service, but he was denied permission to appear in the exam as he was suspected of having contacts with revolutionaries; besides, there was also the boycott he had participated in as a school student. In order to procure some income, he started giving private tutions. It was around this time that Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee became the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, and he opened a new College of Science for post-graduate studies and research - this was made possible because of the magnificent donations of two eminent lawyers of Calcutta, Tarak Nath Palit and Rash Behari Ghose. He offered lecturerships to both Saha and Bose in the Department of Mathematics in this college but because they could not get along with Dr. Ganesh Prasad, the professor, he transferred them to the Physics Department where C.V. Raman had been appointed the Palit Professor. In later life he was close to Amiya Charan Banerjee, a renowned mathematician at Allahabad University.