South Asian Scientists Part 2: Cultivating Transregional Excellence

Welcome back to Part 2 of our April Photos of the Month (which admittedly has stretched into two months) where we are showcasing photographs of some of the many remarkable South Asian scientists in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives . In the previous post , we focused on the early days of India’s scientific modernization, specifically how scientists in Calcutta (now Kolkata) turned the city into a vibrant hub of scientific advancement. In this post, we shift to the post-Independence era and the rise of India as a nuclear power. We will also learn about other scientists who left the subcontinent, especially those who came to the United States and made huge contributions to the US scientific enterprise.

Homi J. Bhabha (1909-1966) and M.G.K. Menon (1928-2016)

While Part 1 of this series focused on the rise of Calcutta as an early intellectual powerhouse, we now cross the subcontinent to Bombay (now Mumbai) during a time when India was establishing itself as a newly independent nation. Here we see Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar (M. G. K.) Menon and Homi Jehangir Bhabha hosting Emilio Segrè (namesake of our Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) at the inauguration of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research’s (TIFR) newly-built permanent location in 1962. The Institute was founded by Homi Bhabha with support from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust on June 1, 1945. Originally housed in the Cosmic Ray Research Unit within the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (now Bengaluru), the TIFR moved to Bombay later that year where it was housed in several different locations before finding its permanent home.

The Cambridge-trained Bhabha was raised in a loving and tight-knit wealthy Parsi family in Bombay; his father was educated at Oxford and trained as a lawyer, while his grandfather was the Inspector of General Education in the princely state of Mysore. His upper-class upbringing and education gave him resources and connections, both international and domestic, which would serve him well later in life. Of particular help was the industrialist Tata family, who were distant relatives of the Bhabhas and founders of Tata Sons and the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. J. R. D. Tata was a personal friend of Homi Bhabha’s, so when Bhabha had the idea of starting a fundamental research institute, he wrote to Tata who helped convince the Trust of the idea’s merits.

Later in his career, Bhabha’s friendship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave him additional political clout and resources to make the TIFR, and later the Atomic Energy Establishment, powerhouses of Indian science with support that was unmatched by any other institution in the country. The two institutions Bhabha founded would eventually lead the way in transforming India into a nuclear nation.

M. G. K. Menon (who often went by Goku, a combination of the first syllables of his given names) was another English-trained physicist from an upper-class family. He received his PhD in elementary particle physics from University of Bristol under Nobel laureate Cecil F. Powell. He was invited by Bhabha to join the TIFR in 1955, then located at the Old Yacht Club in Bombay and already well-known for cosmic ray studies, theoretical physics, nuclear physics, and mathematics. He would eventually take over the directorship of the TIFR after Bhabha’s untimely death in 1966, which earned him further political recognition from the likes of Nehru’s successor Indira Gandhi. He later served two terms as president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, as president of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1974 to 1976, and was nominated as a member of India’s parliament and minister of state for science and technology, and for education.

Regarding this particular photo of Menon, Segrè, and Bhabha, we know that Segrè most likely visited the TIFR for the festivities surrounding the opening of the Institute’s permanent location, and that he delivered a lecture and enjoyed a cup of tea there. While I could not discover the exact topic of the lecture, the Emilio Segrè papers held at UC Berkeley contain a folder of correspondence between Segrè and Menon regarding the TIFR from 1958 up to the year of the event in 1962. The folder’s contents would likely shed a great deal of light on the event—perhaps one of our friendly Bay Area-based readers would like to take a trip to the Bancroft Library to take a look and tell us about it?

Lalitha Chandrasekhar (1910-2013) and Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)

When we met Nobel laureate astrophysicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (“Chandra”) in Part 1 of this series, he was a 4^th-year student in Madras (now Chennai) acting as a tour guide for Werner Heisenberg. By the time of the first photo here he would have recently accepted a position at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. The second photo was taken later in his career when he was living in Chicago. Much has been written about Chandra, including in Ex Libris Universum, at least five biographies and selected works , and multiple times in Physics Today magazine (including in 2006 and in 2010 at least). AIP even has oral history interviews with him from 1977 (session I , session II , session III ) and one from 1987 . Because of this abundance of pre-existing scholarship about him, I am instead going to focus on his wife Lalitha, herself a trained physicist and a fascinating individual who rarely gets the recognition she deserves.

Most of what I was able to easily learn about Lalitha comes from the finding aid to her papers at the University of Chicago—a testament to the power of archivists to illuminate the histories of those whose stories often go untold. From it, I learned that she was born Doraiswamy Lalithambal in Madras in 1910 to a family that highly valued education for women. She received her BA in physics from Presidency College in 1931, where she first met Chandra. The two of them maintained correspondence while he was away in England. During those years she taught at various institutions in India and spent some time working at a lab at Presidency College, where she also received a Master’s Degree in Physics in 1934. The following year, she worked at a lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

She and Chandra married in 1936 upon his return from England, and after their subsequent move to Wisconsin, Lalitha did not continue to work in a formal physics environment but was still highly active in her community. She gave lectures about Indian culture, delivered musical performances on the veena (a stringed instrument similar to a sitar - see what it looks and sounds like in this video ), and was active in many progressive political causes. You can read more of the biographical information in the finding aid yourself, but I think that even just by looking at the names of the folders in the collection, one can get a much deeper sense of who Lalitha was as a complete individual beyond simply “wife of Chandrasekhar.” About four boxes are dedicated to her activity with the American Association of University Women. Multiple folders hint at her deep involvement with music and the arts. We can tell she was likely an avid gardener who loved African violets in particular. Nine boxes are dedicated to her global travels. From the enormous correspondence series we see everything from several folders worth of letters back and forth between her and Chandra to letters with world leaders and famous physicists. She likely had some connection with, or at least significant support for, the Civil Rights Movement. I will leave you with a few of my favorite folders and items:

• Box 35, Folder 12. “Vulgarity” catalog clippings, 1956
• Box 36, Folder 4. [Correspondence with] African Violet Society of America, 1960-1977
• Box 49, Folder 4. Mother – recipes, 1947
• Box 108, Folder 6. “Handbook for Foreign Students in America (that I intended to write but didn’t),” handwritten, and related correspondence, 1949-1950
• Box 170. VHS video cassette – “The Amazing Romantic Story of Ramanujan’s Math,” by George E. Andrews, 1990
• Box 178. Personal – rolled items, including copies of Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, instrument of surrender of Japanese government in 1945, and extracts from the will and testament of Jawaharlal Nehru; 1963 Scandinavian Airlines calendar
• Box 186, Folder 14. Personal – clipping, Loch Ness Monster, Germany, 1934
• Box 198, Folder 24. Personal – sewing – sari patterns, 1950-1981
• Box 212. Chandra corsage, undated

These are just a few particular names that stuck out to me, but I highly encourage you to take a look to get a sense of what an interesting person Lalitha was. And of course, if you happen to be in Chicago, maybe consider making a trip to the library to experience her collection for yourself!

Narinder Singh Kapany (1927-2020)

Born October 31, 1927 in the town of Moga, Punjab province, Narinder Singh Kapany came from a well-to-do Sikh family where he became aware at an early age that his life was one full of possibilities. Despite the early hardships in his life brought about by Partition and aimlessly “drifting like a somnambulist from course to course” for his first three years at Agra University, the possibilities opened to him when he became obsessed with disproving his beloved introductory physics professor’s assertion that “light can only travel in a straight line.” This led to a lifetime of remarkable work in the field of optics, as well as the title of his memoir The Man Who Bent Light .

More than just a physicist, Narinder Singh Kapany was also a highly accomplished entrepreneur, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. Reading through his Sikh Foundation obituary and his Optica obituary , it is clear that he was a man not content to stay in the laboratory, but who was dedicated to ensuring that his scientific endeavors served the public good. He was often given the moniker of “the father of fiber optics” not only for his work at Imperial College London in 1954, where he collaborated with Professor Harold Hopkins to transmit images through bundles of tiny glass fiber cables, but also for the way he relentlessly promoted this discovery outside the lab to academic, corporate, and government leaders. He founded several Silicon Valley companies dedicated to fiber optic technology, including Optics Technology Inc. in 1960, Kaptron in 1973, and K2 Optronics in 2000. He took Optics Technology Inc. public in 1967, making him the first Sikh Indian to take a company public in the Silicon Valley. His work with fiber optics played a crucial role in bringing about the Internet age.

In addition to his evangelism for fiber optic technology, Kapany was a devoted Sikh who spent his life and fortune supporting Sikh causes. The same year he took Optics Technology Inc. public, he also founded the Sikh Foundation, which to this day strives “..to share the stories, art, and wisdom of Sikhism across generations and cultures by creating inclusive and engaging programs guided by Sikh ideals.” He was a prolific collector of Sikh art and established the first permanent Sikh art exhibitions in the United States at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and in Canada at the Montreal Museum of Art. Alongside an endowed chair in Opto-Electronics and a professorship in Entrepreneurship at UC Santa Cruz, Kapany also donated his collection of Sikh books to UCSC and dedicated a new reading room there, and endowed three more chairs of Sikh studies and Punjabi language studies at California universities.

Abdus Salam (1926-1996)

Although Abdus Salam has appeared on Ex Libris Universum before, given that 2026 marks the centennial of his birth, I would be remiss if I did not bring him back to our blog. In addition to his scientific research which earned him the honor of being the first Muslim and first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize in science, he was also a tireless champion for scientists from less-developed countries, for advancing international collaboration to promote peace between nations, and for the use of science and technology to eliminate poverty. In a 1964 essay , he wrote of the need for someone to lead a “crusade,” who “can preach that in this age when technological miracles are indeed possible, the raising of living standards everywhere to a decent human level is first and foremost a moral problem, and a collective world responsibility.” In writing those words and in his subsequent work, he himself became, at least in part, that person.

There is so much that could be, and has been, said about Salam. One could speak of his Nobel-winning scientific research, of his founding of the International Centre for Theoretical Research in Trieste, Italy, or his founding of the Third World Academy of Sciences. One could speak of his work to promote scientific development in his home country of Pakistan, or his subsequent flight from that country after its government declared his religion, Ahmadi Islam, to be non-Muslim, and his firm belief in the reconcilability between religion and science. All of these come together in a theme that I noticed over and over while reading his non-scientific essays, which is a constant calling out of the immense wealth and opportunity gap between developed and under-developed countries, and the need for science to be done not for the sake of science itself, but rather to alleviate poverty and suffering in the world. My description thus far may sound inspirational and positive, and indeed I think one could derive much inspiration from Salam, but his writings are also full of pessimism and frustration as much as they are filled with hope and wonder. In that same 1964 essay, he writes:

What I find most inspirational about Salam is not so much his work itself, but the fact that despite his unabashed disappointment and frustration with the injustices of the world, he never stopped working to make things better.

Venkatesh Narayanamurti (1939-)

Like Abdus Salam, Venkatesh (or “Venky” as he is most often known) has spent much of his career advocating for scientific advancement to be used for practical, positive purposes. This photograph was taken around 1985, when he was the chairman for the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs Subcommittee of International Scientific Activities. Venky was involved in the Subcommittee activities of the time such as the APS Chinese-American Cooperative Program in Atomic, Molecular and Condensed Matter Physics, which brought senior Chinese scientists whose careers had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution to the US to improve scientific relations. The Subcommittee was also involved in hosting and supporting conferences for scientists from underdeveloped countries at the International Centre for Theoretical Research, founded by Salam.

Having served in many leadership roles in scientific institutions, both industrial and academic, Venky has long advocated for a more holistic approach to how science is done and how scientists are trained, insisting that the distinction between theoretical and applied physics is actually a hindrance to scientific advancement and that scientific advancement should be used for tangible good. In his 2021 oral history interview , he says:

Now the Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy Emeritus at Harvard University, Venky recently wrote two books exploring the enterprise of scientific research and how it can be improved, drawing on his decades of experience leading science organizations. He discusses his latest book, The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research in a 2025 interview with Yinuo Li , and while watching I couldn’t help but wonder how I had not heard more about him. As an archivist at AIP, I am immersed in science history and interact with historians of science on a near-daily basis. Bell Telephone Laboratories of course is a common topic of conversation, and yet until I started my own research into the APS China program last year, I had never heard Venky’s name before, despite his nearly 20 years at Bell Labs where he became head of the Semiconductor Electronics Research Department in 1976 and served as Director of the Solid State Electronics Research Laboratory from 1981 to 1987. He describes his time there in detail during the interview, among his many other accomplishments, so I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in an insider’s view of one of America’s most storied research institutions (note that the video’s introduction is in Chinese until around 3:19, after which the actual interview is in English).

Arati Prabhakar (1959-)

Throughout her career, Arati Prabhakar has thrived by departing the “standard track” for scientists, as she explains in her 2020 oral history interview . Early in her education, she knew the “normal” science career track (that is, getting your PhD, working in a lab, doing research, maybe getting tenure, etc.) was not the life for her. Leaving this path led to a remarkable career at the intersection of scientific research and public service. As she explains herself:

Solve problems and create new things she did. Her first foray into public service was with a Congressional fellowship at the Office of Technology Assessment, which led her to a job as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at age 27. She went on to be a founding Director of DARPA’s Microelectronics Technology Office. At age 34 she was appointed as the first female director of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), where she served for four years.

After Prabhakar’s time at NIST and DARPA, she went on to spend 14 years in private industry in the Silicon Valley—this photograph was taken during her first Silicon Valley role at Raychem Corporation. She worked in many industry and venture capital roles in California, but as she says: “I loved and felt that I gave my whole to society when I was working in the public sector, and in the private sector I learned a lot that later helped me do good for society again, but I didn’t enjoy it.”

She would have her opportunity to “give her whole” to society in the public sector again. After 19 years away, she got the call asking her to return to DARPA, where she became director in 2012: “That was without question the most satisfying and I think in time, it will prove to be the most impactful slice of my professional life.”

Prabhakar said this quote just two years before being appointed by President Joseph Biden to serve as the 12th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2022, as well as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). I wonder how her views on her societal impact have changed since then, and what she would say were her interview to be held now (Arati if you’re reading this and want to be interviewed for our blog, feel free to reach out to us at nbl@aip.org).

So the next time you feel like you can’t quite figure out your career path, or that the path laid out for you is not the path you want to follow, maybe you can find inspiration from Arati Prabhakar. As a Clueless Millennial™ who certainly struggled with finding my way through my twenties career-wise, I certainly wish I had heard her words of wisdom when I was younger:

Epilogue

I hope you have enjoyed this journey learning about these fascinating individuals with me. I certainly enjoyed learning and writing about them. Yet, the entire time I was writing I couldn’t help but be bothered by something: the story is incomplete. While of course I can only say so much in a blog post, and I could not write about every South Asian person in our photo archives, it bothered me that in this entire series only three women were mentioned, and of those three, only one pursued STEM as a life-long career. This was not for lack of trying to find a more diverse pool of photographed individuals. Systemic underrepresentation is an issue that nearly every library and archive is grappling with, and the Niels Bohr Library & Archives is no exception. Dr. Shohini Ghose puts it well in her Ex Libris Universum interview with AIP Research Director Trevor Owens when she said of the lack of female representation: “... the mainstream history of physics and astronomy is neither accurate, nor complete. ”

The good news is you can join us in building a more accurate and complete history of the physical sciences, particularly for women. If you have pictures of yourself or your colleagues in the lab, at a conference, or even just out having fun, we encourage you to share them through our photo submission tool . If you are more of a writer, you could tell your story in the form of a manuscript biography . As someone who works in the field of history, I often hear people say things like “Oh I’m not that interesting, I don’t think anyone would really care about what I did.” Almost always I hear that from the most fascinating people you can think of. So as someone who does this for a living, let me tell you: your story matters.

References

Venkataram, G. Bhabha and his Magnificent Obsessions. Sangam Books,1994.

Chowdhury, Indira and Ananya Dasgupta. A Masterful Spirit: Homi J. Bhabha, 1909-1966. Penguin Books India, 2010.

Chowdhury, Indira. Growing the Tree of Science: Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016.

Physics Today. “Homi Bhabha master builder of nuclear India.” September 1, 2018. https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/homi-bhabha-master-builder-of-nuclear-india (DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.4021)

Government of India, Department of Atomic Energy, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. “About Us.” Accessed March 24, 2026. https://www.barc.gov.in/about/index.html

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. “History and Vision.” Accessed March 24, 2026. https://www.tifr.res.in/portal/history.php

Cowsik, Ramanath. “Mambillikalathil Govind Kumar Menon. 28 August 1928 - 22 November 2016.” Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society. 1 December 2021; 71 399–422. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2020.0013

Spicer, Dag. “Narinder Kapany: Hidden Figure of Fiber Optics.” Computer History Museum, July 1, 2024. https://computerhistory.org/blog/narinder-kapany-hidden-figure-of-fiber-optics/

“In Loving Memory: Dr. Narinder S Kapany 1926 – 2020.” Sikh Foundation, 2020. https://sikhfoundation.org/dr-narinder-s-kapany-120320/

“In Memoriam: Narinder S. Kapany, 1926-2020.” Optica, December 4, 2020. https://www.optica.org/about/newsroom/obituaries/2020/narinder_s_kapany/

Kapany, Narinder S. The Man Who Bent Light. Roli Books, 2021.

Beall, Abigail. “Abdus Salam: The Muslim Science Genius Forgotten by History.” BBC News, October 14, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191014-abdus-salam-the-muslim-science-genius-forgotten-by-history .

Stokes, Maria. “Breaking the Barrier: Dr. Abdus Salam.” Ex Libris Universum, October 5, 2020. https://www.aip.org/library/breaking-the-barrier-dr-abdus-salam .

Marie Curie Library. Abdus Salam: Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979. Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 2013. https://www.ictp.it/sites/default/files/attachments/AbdusSalamBooklet-eng.pdf

Salam, Abdus. Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam (Second Edition). Edited by C H Lai. World Scientific Publishing, 1987.

Physics Today. ““Venky” Narayanamurti: Technology development is a public good.” March 18, 2012. https://physicstoday.aip.org/news/venky-narayanamurti-technology-development-is-a-public-good (DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0083)

“Venkatesh Narayanamurti.” Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Accessed May 7, 2026. https://seas.harvard.edu/office-dean/history-office/venkatesh-narayanamurti

“OSTP Director: Arati Prabhakar.” National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed May 13, 2026. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/directors-office/ .

Erickson, Miriam. “An Interview with Dr. Arati Prabhakar.” Association for Women in Science. Accessed May 13, 2026. https://awis.org/resource/an-interview-with-dr-arati-prabhakar/