J.C. Bose

Sir J.C. Bose has been resurrected in many fields recently,
more than five decades after his death. In the late 1990s, Bose was
acknowledged as one of the inventors of the radio, alongside Marconi. We
now know Bose held the first patent for a semiconductor device and he
was the first to have used millimetre waves for radio communication,
presently used in 5G technology. In plant neurobiology, scientists
realized that Bose had claimed plants can feel pain, like animals and
humans do, in the early 20th century.

Bose
lived during a turbulent phase in India’s history. Closely connected to
Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and two extraordinary European
women, Bose’s life is a labyrinth of remarkable relationships
unexplainable in conventional terms. Both favoured and disfavoured by
the English, loved and hated by his acquaintances, mythified and
forgotten by his countrymen, Bose was a contronym. This book is an
attempt at demystifying the ‘Boseian’ myth.