City’s tryst with Nobel laureates

Coimbatore: As the Nobel prizes for this year are being announced in Stockholm, historians said two of the most famous Nobel laureates from India have visited the city at two different instances.

Rabindranath Tagore, literary and cultural polymath who won the 1913 Nobel prize for literature and the first non-European to win the Nobel, visited the city in 1926 as part of a fundraising campaign for establishing Visva Bharathi University at Shantiniketan near Kolkata.

Sir C V Raman, the physicist from Trichy, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 1930, visited the city in 1965 to participate in an industrial and engineering exhibition.

C R Elangovan, a historian who has written a series of books on the history of the city, said Tagore was hosted in the city by R K Shanmukham Chetty, the first finance minister of independent India, and C V Raman was hosted by the innovator and industrialist from the city, G D Naidu.

Elangovan said eminent people from the city such as S P Narasimhalu Naidu knew leaders of Theosophical Society and Brahmo Samaj, such as Debendranath Tagore. “The city had a Bengal connection from the 1890s and Rabindranath Tagore’s visit in 1926 could also have been a result of that,” he said. He must have stayed in the city for a few days and one of the events he participated was held at Sarvajana School, he said. “There was a genuine contribution from the city for Shantiniketan,” he said.

While Tagore’s visit was made possible by the national connections the city’s learned circle nurtured, C V Raman’s visit, on the other hand, happened due to the city’s vibrant industrial and innovation scenario. G D Naidu hosted C V Raman when he visited the city to inaugurate the Industrial and Engineering Exhibition held on October 3, 1965. Elangovan said Raman had also seen the machines and innovations designed by G D Naidu.