On 21 February 1928, in a laboratory at Moscow State University, Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam saw faint new lines in the spectrum of light scattered by a quartz crystal. Seven days later in Calcutta, CV Raman and KS Krishnan saw the same effect in liquids.
Raman and Krishnan published first, in Nature on 31 March; the Muscovites followed in July, in the German journal Naturwissenschaften. Raman received the Nobel Prize in 1930, and the Russians did not, a decision that owed less to the physics than to the itinerary. Through 1928, Raman had been corresponding directly with Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford and CTR Wilson. By the time Landsberg and Mandelstam’s paper appeared in July, he could show the Nobel Committee fifteen other papers already citing his own. Landsberg and Mandelstam had no comparable route into the Western nominating bodies; Soviet science was already beginning to close in on itself.
The committee weighed evidence, but the evidence that reached it had already been filtered by whose letters arrived in Stockholm. India now marks 28 February as National Science Day. Russian textbooks still call the phenomenon combinational scattering, and there are Russian physicists who will tell you, with some justice, that it was discovered a week early in Moscow.
I start with that week because it says something the diplomatic literature on India and Russia usually misses. Long before there was a treaty, a reactor or a rocket, the two scientific traditions were capable of arriving at the same physics at the same moment, by their own roads, and of losing the argument about credit for reasons that had nothing to do with either.
Raman himself received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1957. The relationship that followed has been the deepest India has had with any major power. It has also been, for most of its life, a relationship between governments rather than between scientists, and that is its weakness.
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The human layer
The best moment in the story is small and almost forgotten. In 1962, PC Mahalanobis and CR Rao invited Andrei Kolmogorov, then the greatest living probabilist, to the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. Kolmogorov disliked flying because of trouble with his ears, so he joined a Soviet oceanographic expedition and came by sea. On the voyage, he worked on a question that had preoccupied him: what does it mean for a sequence of numbers to be random?
He arrived in Calcutta and went straight into discussions with research scholars, among them SRS Varadhan, who would win the Abel Prize in 2007, and KR Parthasarathy. The paper that grew out of the voyage, “On tables of random numbers”, appeared in the Institute’s own journal, Sankhyā, in 1963. It became a founding text of what we now call Kolmogorov complexity, one of the foundations of modern computer science.
Parthasarathy went on to the Steklov Institute in Moscow on Kolmogorov’s encouragement. The following year, Kolmogorov founded his boarding school for gifted young mathematicians at Moscow State University, which still bears his name.
The other human layer ran through bookshops. Two generations of Indian students learned their physics from cheap Mir Publishers editions of Soviet textbooks. IE Irodov’s Problems in General Physics is still the book that aspiring engineers fear most, and Yakov Perelman’s Physics for Entertainment made physicists of children in towns that had never seen a laboratory. No other foreign scientific culture reached so far into the Indian classroom.
The state layer
On top of this sat the formal architecture, and it was impressive.
IIT Bombay was established in 1958 with Soviet funds channelled through UNESCO. The two governments signed a science and technology agreement in 1972. In April 1975, India’s first satellite, Aryabhata, went into orbit on a Soviet Kosmos rocket, and in April 1984, Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space, aboard Soyuz T-11.
In July 1987, Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Integrated Long Term Programme of Scientific and Technological Cooperation. The Indian government still describes it as the biggest and most exhaustive scientific collaboration it has ever entered into with another country. It survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and was renewed in 2010 for another 10 years.
Among its several hundred joint projects, the ILTP helped establish a polio vaccine production facility with Russian assistance, contributing to India’s oral polio vaccine production and the Pulse Polio Programme launched in 1995: proof that the state layer, for all its bureaucratic apparatus of joint councils and area coordinators, could occasionally deliver something that reached an ordinary household.
Then came the cryogenic engine. Under a 1991 agreement with Glavkosmos, the Soviet space agency, Russia was to transfer the technology of its upper-stage engine to ISRO. Washington objected, invoking the Missile Technology Control Regime, and in 1993 Moscow agreed under American pressure to supply finished engines instead of the technology. India then spent two decades building its own, which was flight-tested successfully in January 2014. Indian engineers learned more from that denial than from any agreement, and the lesson has shaped how ISRO thinks about partners ever since.
More recently, the two operational Kudankulam reactors in Tamil Nadu have become the largest single piece of Indo-Russian science on Indian soil, with four more in the works. The project’s roots go back to a 1988 agreement, revived in 1998 once Russia agreed to supply VVER-1000 technology.
The four Indian Air Force pilots chosen for Gaganyaan did their first year of training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow. One of them, Shubhanshu Shukla, later flew to the International Space Station last year, though on an American Axiom Space mission rather than a Russian one.
Look at that list again. After Kolmogorov, it is almost entirely made of hardware and agencies: satellites, reactors, engines, training contracts. The traffic of ordinary researchers thinned out.
Today, an Indian physicist is far more likely to write a paper with a colleague in Germany or the United States than with one in Russia. The joint statement from last December’s Modi-Putin summit calls for academic mobility, joint research projects and a science roadmap between the two ministries. But words like these have appeared in joint statements for decades. What has been missing is the Kolmogorov visit: the scientist who turns up, talks to the students and leaves behind a new field.
A chance to renew the human connect
The moment for rebuilding is unusual. Since 30 November 2024, when CERN’s cooperation agreement with Russia was terminated, several hundred scientists affiliated with Russian institutions have lost access to the laboratory. It was a place where Soviet and Russian scientists had worked for seventy years. Sanctions have also made it hard for Russian laboratories to buy equipment.
But Russia still has some of the strongest schools of mathematics and theoretical physics in the world, and a generation of people trained in them who now need partners.
India has what those scientists lack. It has access to European and American collaborations, including its own associate membership of CERN. It has a young and very large scientific workforce, and space and nuclear programmes that are growing quickly. The obvious move is for India to become the place where Russian mathematicians, theorists and space scientists can do open, publishable work alongside Indian colleagues.
This needs to be done with care. India should not trade Geneva for Dubna, and an Indian institute that ties itself carelessly to a sanctioned entity will pay for it in its other partnerships. The point of India in this arrangement is that it can talk to everyone. A partnership built on basic science, whose results are published for the world to read, is the kind that can be defended in any capital.
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A partnership for the region
The more interesting question is what India and Russia could do together for the rest of the neighbourhood. There is already one working model.
At Rooppur, in Bangladesh, the Russian state company Rosatom is building the country’s first nuclear power plant under a trilateral agreement signed with India in 2018. It was the first time India was involved in a nuclear project abroad. Indian specialists from the Department of Atomic Energy trained Bangladeshi engineers in reactor operation, safety and regulation. Fuel loading at the first reactor was completed this May, and Bangladesh is set to become the third country in South Asia to generate nuclear power.
Russian design, Indian training and a neighbour’s first reactor: that is a template for low-carbon power across the region. And it becomes more plausible as India pursues its target of 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047 and talks with Russia about localising reactor equipment and fuel assemblies in India.
Three further things are within reach.
The first is a regional school in mathematics and theoretical physics, built on the Kolmogorov model. Russia has a century of experience in finding and training gifted young mathematicians; India has the institutions, from the Indian Statistical Institute to ICTS in Bengaluru, and a neighbourhood full of talented students with nowhere to go. A Kolmogorov-Mahalanobis school, taught jointly by Russian and Indian mathematicians and open to students from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Central Asia, would cost little and would repay itself within a generation.
The second is the cryosphere. Russia studies the Arctic, where the permafrost is thawing; India and its neighbours depend on the Himalayan glaciers, which are retreating. The two systems are the northern and southern ends of the same Asian climate, and the two countries held the first meeting of their joint working group on climate change last year. Pooling polar and high-mountain data, and training South Asian glaciologists at Russian Arctic stations, would give the whole region better forecasts of water, monsoon and flood.
The third is space. Russia has sixty-five years of experience in human spaceflight and engine design; India has some of the most economical launch vehicles in the world and its own navigation system, NavIC, which could be paired with Russia’s GLONASS constellation. Last December’s joint statement mentions human spaceflight, satellite navigation and planetary exploration. A shared service for the neighbourhood, offering disaster monitoring and navigation data to South Asian and Central Asian countries that cannot build their own satellites, would do more for the region’s opinion of both countries than any summit.
None of this is a bloc against anyone. It is two scientific cultures that have learned from each other for nearly a century putting that experience to work for countries that have had less chance to learn at all.
India will celebrate National Science Day again next February, as it does every year, on the day Raman first saw his lines. It might spare a thought for the week before, and for the two men in Moscow who saw them first, and for the letters to Stockholm that decided whose names history kept. The relationship that began in that week became formidable when scientists crossed the distance between Calcutta and Moscow themselves. It will become formidable again only when they start doing it once more.
Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)