Father Eugene Lafont of St. Xavier`s College, Kolkata and the Contemporary Science Movement

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

It is indeed very gratifying when a piece of research initiated at a young age, during the beginning of a career, achieves fulfilment and completion more than forty years later, at the very end of the same career. This is what has happened to the present author.

Saint Xavier's College (SXC), Kolkata, where the present author had studied for four years (1948-1952) was about to celebrate its centenary in 1960. A year earlier, I had started working on Reverend Father Eugene Lafont (1837-1908) of the Society of Jesus (S.J.), the eminent teacher who had taught in the same college India's first famous scientist in the modern era, Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose.

My article on Father Lafont was published in the January 1960 issue of the famous, now extinct, periodical Mod- ern Review. That was the first article on Father Lafont in fifty years since a few obituaries had appeared way back in 1908. My mentor, the eminent historian, Dr. Kalidas Nag strongly urged that I should fully devote myself to the studies on history of science. But I had made up my mind to pro- ceed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A. and pursue my main line of research in surface chemistry, mineral engineering and archaeometallurgy. So, Dr. Nag relented and predicted that I would come back to the studies on history of science during the end of my career. This is precisely what has happened.

The Asiatic Society is pleased to publish a critical study on Reverend Father Eugene Lafont, S.J. (1837-1908) of the St. Xavier's College (SXC), Kolkata, the famous teacher of Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose and the co-founder of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). For more than forty years (1865-1908), Father Lafont was well- known as one of the architects of modern science in Indin, and this is amply testified in the 1908 obituary on him pub. lished in the British magazine Nature.

Unfortunately, there was no attempt for half a century. since the obituaries appeared in 1908, to record and assess the life and works of Father Lafont. Professor Arun Kumar Biswas took up this challenging job in 1959 when he was a doctoral student, and it has taken him forty years to complete his job, chiefly because he had to perform many other professional tasks during this long period. For three years (1996-1999) his project, going on at our Society, was financed by the History of Science Division, Indian National Science (INSA), New Delhi. We are deeply indebted to INSA for kindly allowing us to publish this monograph.