Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya

Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya (Bengali: গোপালচন্দ্র ভট্টাচার্য) (1 August 1895 – 8 April 1981) was an Indian entomologist and naturalist known for his pioneering work on social insects and the role of bacteria in metamorphosis. He is the author of bAnglAr kITa-patanga^[1] (insects of Bengal), which won the Rabindra Puraskar, Bengal's highest literary award, in 1975.

He is also noted for his work on the popularization of science, especially the three-volume text on hands-on science, kare dekha,^[2] lit. kare =do, dekha =see). Over his career, he contributed more than 1000 articles on science to most of the popular Bengali periodicals of the time.

Life and career

Gopal Chandra was born in the village of Lonsing, Shariatpur, (then British India, now Bangladesh), to a poor kulin Brahmin family. His father Ambika Charan Bhattacharya made a scant living as family priest to the indigent villagers. He also worked from time to time in the estates of the local landowners. Gopal Chandra's mother, Shashimukhi Debi, was a housewife.

After finishing upper school, he enrolled for the Intermediate of Arts (I.A., college entrance) degree in 1913, but was not able to finish the course due to the family's need for funds — he took up a job as a teacher in a school. By this time, he had developed a strong interest in literature, and started writing lyrics for jarigan (elegiac music related to muharram) and pala gan (songs related to Bengali folk drama) culture. Around this time, he also published several issues of a handwritten literary magazine.

He had an early interest in nature, and for some time he also experimented on the hybridization of fruits and flowers. In 1918, while he was working as a telephone operator in a mercantile firm, he published the article jaibadyuti (bioluminescence) in the popular magazine Prabasi. This article attracted the attention of leading scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who obtained a lower position for Gopal Chandra at the newly opened Basu Vigyan Mandir (presently Bose Institute). Starting with small jobs like instrument repair, sketching, etc. he soon started to work on his own research projects.

He published his first research papers in 1932, on life events in the body of plants. Subsequently, he also published work on bioluminescence and other botany topics, but gradually his interests shifted to entomology. He became an expert photographer, and photographed many varieties of ants, spiders, small bats and tadpoles.^[3] In total, he published 22 papers in English, including journals such as the Natural History of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1951, he was invited to present his work onon Indian social insects at the international circle meeting at Paris. However, throughout his career, he kept facing discrimination because of his lack of academic degrees; on one occasion, another scientist refused to share a podium with him, labelling him as an amateur.^[3]

Science popularization

In 1948 he worked with Satyendra Nath Bose (of Bose–Einstein statistics fame) to establish the Bangiya Vigyan Parishad (Bengal Science Council), a society for science research.

Along with friends like Pulin Behari Das, he worked tirelessly for popularization of science. In 1950, he officially became the editor of the Bangiya Vigyan Parishad magazine Jnan o vigyan (lit. jnan=knowledge, vigyan=science), which he had been editing anyhow from behind the scenes. In 1977 he became the chief advisor for the magazine. He was also a member of several groups, including one working on a Bengali encyclopedia, the Bharatkosh. It is estimated that he had published more than a thousand articles on popular science across a wide range of magazines and other media.

He retired from his official job in 1965, but continued to work on insects and writing on popular science.

He won the Ananda Puraskar for Bengali literature in 1968, and the highest award for Bengali literature, the Rabindra Puraskar, in 1975.

In 1981, the University of Calcutta awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree^[4] less than three months before he died.

Scientific findings

In 1940, possibly before the fact had been established among naturalists, Gopal Chandra published an article in the Transactions of the Bose Institute of Calcutta, outlining how the queen in social insects such as ants or bees, produces other queens, workers or soldiers, by appropriately altering the nature of the royal jelly fed to the larvae. His observations were based on the Indian variety of ants, Occophylia.^[3] He managed to have the ants make nests inside transparent cellophane so that they could be quietly watched, and he noticed how only a special food, certain newly sprouted leaves and buds, induces the formation of queens. This remarkable finding was published in 1940, but the journal was not well circulated abroad during the war years, and it is only now that Gopal Chandra's pioneering work is being recognized.

He was also an early observer of tool use by animals, particularly how hunting wasps use small stone chips for closing nest holes. He also observed how earwigs in the breeding period, grow a muddy ball (like a boxing glove) on its hind legs, which it uses for defending its eggs from predators. If the mud is washed away, the insect promptly places its hind legs into the mud until a new ‘boot’ is formed. This behaviour is not seen outside the breeding season. Since this observation was reported in a Bengali language article in the 1940s, it was not widely known.

Another important observation by Gopal Chandra involves metamorphosis in amphibians. He showed that administering penicillin inhibits certain bacteria in tadpoles, which then fail to mature into frogs. This was against the then prevalent notions that bacteria are always harmful (pathogenic), and Gopal Chandra may have been among the pioneers in demonstrating the existence of salogenic i.e., health giving, bacteria. This pioneering study was later published by his associates in Science and Culture, a Kolkata-based journal.

His magnum opus, bAnglAr kiTa-patanga (1975), which collects these and many other observations, has yet to be translated.

The Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya Award

In 2005, the government of West Bengal instituted an award for science popularization in his name, the Gopal Chandra Bhattacharyya Smriti Puraskar.^[5] In 2005, the entomologist Debashis Biswas^[6] was awarded this prize for writing several books that describe the biology of mosquitoes and malaria prevention through stories.

List of works

• Adhunik avishkar(Modern Inventions)
• bAnglAr mAkaRShA (Spiders of Bengal, 1949)
• বাংলার কীট-পতঙ্গ (Insects of Bengal, 1975)
• kare dekha (Do and see)
• Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose(Biography) 1963.
• mane paRe (Reminiscences) 1977.
• pashu-pAkhi jIbjantu (Plants and animals)
• bigyAner Akasmik AviShkAr(Accidental Discoveries of Science).
• Translation works on The Atom Bomb, Space Journey.

Awards and citations

• 1951 – Invited to conduct the Indian delegation at the International Union for the Study of Social Insects
• 1968 – Ananda Purashkar
• 1974 – Felicitation at Bose Institute of Science.
• 1974 – Acharya Satyendranath Bose Award
• 1975 – Rabindra Puraskar
• 1979 – Jubilee Medal on the Diamond Jubilee Celebration Of The Bose Institute.
• 1980 – Honorary D.Sc degree by Calcutta University.^[4]

Gopalchandra Bhattyacharya Online Archive

From 1st August, 2014 on 120th birth anniversary of Gopalchandra Bhattacharya বিজ্ঞান(www.bigyan.org.in), a non-profitable online Bengali popular science magazine had announced to make an online archive (গোপালচন্দ্র ভট্টাচার্য সংকলন) for all of his published articles.

References