New Delhi: When Vikram Sarabhai was appointed director of the newly established Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, he knew who he wanted on his team—physicist Bimla Buti.
“Bimla, you are coming and joining us,” he declared when he met her for the first time at a dinner party organised by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at Teen Murti Bhavan in 1968.
Buti, who was already emerging as one of India’s more formidable physicists, thrived at PRL. She joined as associate professor in 1971 and retired as dean of faculty in 1993. She established herself as one of the leading physicists in the area of theoretical plasma physics and launched PRL’s plasma physics programme.
Buti used mathematical models to understand how complex processes work in space and plasma, like the sun’s corona, where certain waves called solitons may help explain its mysterious heating. She also demonstrated how there can be order even in chaotic systems, like Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. She also did stints at NASA’s centres such as the Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In interviews, she acknowledged that it was rare for women of her generation to become physicists. Her father would have probably been happy to see her get married, but he wanted all his children to study.
“But I told him, ‘…If I get married, I will devote time to the family, so obviously I won’t be able to devote 100 per cent to my profession, and I don’t want that.’ He accepted my decision. I was very fortunate to have such an understanding and considerate father,” said Buti in a 2022 interview with Physics Today.
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From Partition to plasma physics
Buti was born on 19 September 1933 in Lahore and migrated with her family to India after Partition. She never studied science, let alone physics, until university. But her interest and aptitude in mathematics were recognised and nurtured by her teacher at the government school for refugees in Delhi’s Daryaganj area.
“She distinguished herself as an ardent student of mathematics; fellow students from her high school remembered her for being a topper and highly intelligent,” wrote physicist Bindu A Bambah in an article for Physics News. Incidentally, her father was a gold medalist in mathematics from Punjab University, although he chose to become a lawyer.
Buti’s love for maths led her to pursue a career in physics. Her work caught the attention of the Ministry of Education, which was impressed by Buti’s outstanding academic performance during her Bachelors and Masters programmes at Delhi University. They recognised her potential and offered her a scholarship to a PhD programme of her choice in the US. She ended up at The University of Chicago.
Particle physics was a ‘fashionable’ field at the time. All the best minds were drawn to it, including her. But Buti changed her mind after attending a lecture by theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar on quantum mechanics at the University of Chicago.
“Impressed by Professor Chandrasekar’s teaching and simplicity, I had made up my mind to work with him for my PhD provided he accepted me,” Butti recalled in a TV interview.
Chandrasekar, who was interested in magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics at the time, frequently commuted between Yerkes Lab and the University of Chicago. To work alongside him, Buti joined the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin to specialise in plasma physics.
For her thesis, she worked on relativistic plasmas. “My way of working has been to first develop a general model and then apply it to problems of my interest in space, astrophysical as well as laboratory plasmas,” she later wrote.
She went on to publish several seminal papers, both as a single author during her PhD years and with her students later at PRL, which are cited even today in the field of theoretical plasma physics.
Apart from her father, Buti acknowledged the impact of Chandrasekhar whom she called Guru Chandra.
“I received absolutely superb training from him during my PhD training. After that training, I was not scared at all to face any audience when I had a chance to give a lecture – I had picked up that much confidence,” Buti said in a 2022 interview with Physics Today.
After completing her PhD in 1962 at the University of Chicago, Buti returned to India where she taught at Delhi University. But her academic career spanned both India and the United States.
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A dedicated scientist and a great leader
For many of her students, including Gurbax Singh Lakhina, former director of the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Navi Mumbai, she was more than just their professor. Buti was their mentor, their guide. He studied under her at IIT Delhi where she was senior scientific officer after returning from her postdoctoral stint at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“[She was] an idol to whom I always looked up to for inspiration and motivation or when in despair!” wrote Lakhina after Buti passed away on 24 February 2024. He had even seriously thought of giving up his quest for a PhD degree. But Buti’s “sound and practical advice” helped get him back on track, he wrote.
Her way of teaching and explaining the fundamentals of plasmas impressed the whole class, wrote Lakhina who was doing his Master’s in Physics at the time. They published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers either jointly or with other co-authors.
Buti’s intellectual brilliance and leadership qualities didn’t just catch the eye of her PhD mentor, Chandrasekhar. It also drew the attention of Pakistani theoretical physicist Professor Mohammad Abdus Salam, also a Nobel Prize recipient.
He offered her the position of Director of Plasma Physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy—a role she held for 18 years, from 1985 to 2003. Headquartered in Vienna, ICTP aims to train scientists from all over the world on the modern aspects of plasma physics with a focus on those from developing countries.
After she retired from research in 2003, she started the Buti Foundation to help young scientists in their careers, computer literacy, and science outreach.
“I am putting more and more effort into reducing the gender gap in STEM,” she said in an interview. “That is my big priority now.”
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Married to science
Buti was a fearless flag bearer for more women in science. She was a woman in a male-dominated field and she never shied away from speaking about the struggle that came with that.
“I suffered professionally both because of this and because of gender bias. But I have no regrets, she wrote in Lilavati’s Daughters (2008), a compilation of essays about nearly a hundred women Indian scientists.
In interviews, she would recount how her family wanted her to pursue medicine, but her aversion to dissecting frogs—a mandatory requirement for the medical field—stopped her from going down this path.
And she consciously chose never to get married for the sake of her profession.
“Being single, I was free to focus on my professional commitments,” she wrote Lilavati’s Daughters.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)