- Email: [email protected]
The early years of Srishti Dhar Chatterji
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256 www.elsevier.com/locate/exmath
The early years of Srishti Dhar Chatterji François Labourie Laboratoire Jean-Alexandre Dieudonné, CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France
Received 26 June 2018; received in revised form 3 September 2018
Abstract This small note contains a recollection of the childhood and formation of Shristi Dhar Chatterji. The author thanks Chat’s two remaining brothers, Shyam Sunder Chatterjee and Dharani Dhar Chatterjee, as well as his family, for their help. c 2018 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. ⃝
MSC: primary 01A70; secondary 01A32 Keywords: India; Biography
My father-in-law, Srishti Dhar Chatterji, known as Chat by his friends and colleagues, was born on June 29, 1935, in Parbatipur near Sheakhala in what is now West Bengal, in the district of Hooghly, 35 kilometers to the North-West of Calcutta. This village was the home of his family and he remembered it quite clearly even recently, one time when we were looking at a satellite image of the area. He was however raised in Lucknow, a city of high culture, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the vast and populated northern state in India that follows the Ganges Valley. Historically, Lucknow was the centre of the Mughal culture and is still famous for the Awadhi cuisine, its etiquette and its amazing Shia monuments. At that time, Lucknow was half Muslim, half Hindu. Chat would speak Bengali at home and Hindi in the city, he also learned in Lucknow to decipher Urdu, a language quite similar E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exmath.2018.09.004 c 2018 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. 0723-0869/⃝
254
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
to Hindi but with more Arabic and Persian loanwords and written in a right-to-left script close to Perso-Arabic. Chat’s father, Kali Pada Chatterjee, had been working for the post office in Lucknow since 1926 and retired in 1970 as deputy postmaster. Chat’s father homeschooled his six sons. Chat was very precocious. After his father’s schooling, he was admitted into high school, the “Boys Anglo-Bengali Intermediate College”, at age ten, and completed this at age thirteen in 1948, the first in his class in the troubled times of India’s independence and partition. His subjects were English, Arithmetic, Geography, Bengali, Mathematics, General Science and Civics with distinction in Arithmetic, all subjects that have remained sources of fascination for him during his entire life. This secondary education was followed by two more years at the end of which Chat passed his “Intermediate examination” in the subjects of Elementary Hindi, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and English (which was optional). Compared to typical students, Chat was three to four years in advance. During these years, he learned English while listening to the BBC and proudly kept his BBC British accent all his life. Chat then entered Lucknow University, one of the oldest public colleges in India, founded in 1864. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1952, at age 17, in Physics, Mathematics, Statistics and Elementary English, and obtained his Master of Science in Mathematical Statistics in 1954 at age 19. During that time, he also obtained a Certificate of Proficiency in French from the University of Lucknow (in 1953). In 1954, Chat then moved to the prestigious Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. This was a natural move for Chat, since many of his relatives were living in Calcutta and Chat stayed with them. At ISI, Chat wrote his first research paper (the first article in his list of publications in this volume) but also began to learn German in the Goethe Institute in St Xavier’s College, a still renowned French Jesuit school, for six months, two hours per week. He later added two more languages, Danish and Italian, to this already impressive linguistic palette. ISI was, and still is, an important research centre. The scientific life of the Institute in those years has been described in vivid details by Prof. Varadarajan in [1] who together with R. Ranga Rao, K. R. Parthasarathy, and S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan were famous alumni mathematicians from the ISI in the late fifties under the supervision of the celebrated statistician C.R. Rao. Chat overlapped only very shortly with this group but remained close friends with them during all his life. Scientific life in ISI was very intense at that time and the institute enjoyed the visits of famous mathematicians both from the West and the East, notably Yuri Linnik, Sir Ronald Fisher and Andre¨ı Kolmogorov. Most importantly for Chat, Norbert Wiener visited ISI during Chat’s stay there and recommended him for a Ph.D. position in the University of Syracuse, New York State, with Kai Lai Chung. Chat was just 21 years old. Now, after travelling from Lucknow to Calcutta, roughly following the Gange valley, he had to undergo a much longer voyage: cross the Ocean from Calcutta to Syracuse, a month long boat trip. Chat took a loan from a wealthy uncle on his mother’s side, S.N. Mukerjee, an importer–exporter, whose company is still running today (we found a letter from his uncle acknowledging the last repayment of his debt in 1958). He travelled on a cargo ship, the “Indian Navigator” (from the Indian Steamship Company, based in Calcutta). We have a
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
255
Fig. 1. S.D. Chatterji and several family members, in August 1956. Chat is standing behind the children, the third man from the left. Source: Printed with the permission of Dharani Dhar Chatterjee.
very moving family picture of him and his family from Calcutta, on the dock of Diamond Harbour, in front of the ship on the day of his departure in August, 1956: see Fig. 1. The ship’s route took him through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean and the Gibraltar Straits. Unfortunately, we were not able to find her route precisely. However, passing through the Suez Canal in 1956 was quite an adventure. Indeed, the year 1956 was the time of the Suez Crisis: Nasser had nationalised the Canal in July, provoking one of the last colonial bouts of France and the United Kingdom who tried to regain the control of the Canal in November before being sternly pressured by the United States and the Soviet Union to withdraw. Chat did not witness these events, happily since some ships were sunken in the Canal by Nasser, but Chat was stuck there for a while in mid September, due to the shortage of pilots before the Anglo-French intervention. He nevertheless took the opportunity of his forced stay to visit the pyramids with some fellow Bengali travellers. The fate of the Indian Navigator was ultimately tragic: she sunk a few years later due to the explosion of her sulphur cargo hold. Chat always considered this trip as anecdotic in his life, but I have been fascinated by it, imagining the very young Srishti Dhar coming from what he was still calling “Les Indes”
256
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
in his last days, starting from the hot, humid and overcrowded Calcutta, all through the world, before arriving on the East Coast of the United States, finally to settle in the frigid Upstate New York. I always wanted to get a serious account of this trip from him, but his sudden demise caught us all off guard.
References [1] V.S. Varadarajan, Some mathematical reminiscences, Methods Appl. Anal. Soc. 9 (3) (2002) v–xviii. Special issue dedicated to Daniel W. Stroock and Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan on the occasion of their 60th birthday.
ScienceDirect Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256 www.elsevier.com/locate/exmath
The early years of Srishti Dhar Chatterji François Labourie Laboratoire Jean-Alexandre Dieudonné, CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France
Received 26 June 2018; received in revised form 3 September 2018
Abstract This small note contains a recollection of the childhood and formation of Shristi Dhar Chatterji. The author thanks Chat’s two remaining brothers, Shyam Sunder Chatterjee and Dharani Dhar Chatterjee, as well as his family, for their help. c 2018 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. ⃝
MSC: primary 01A70; secondary 01A32 Keywords: India; Biography
My father-in-law, Srishti Dhar Chatterji, known as Chat by his friends and colleagues, was born on June 29, 1935, in Parbatipur near Sheakhala in what is now West Bengal, in the district of Hooghly, 35 kilometers to the North-West of Calcutta. This village was the home of his family and he remembered it quite clearly even recently, one time when we were looking at a satellite image of the area. He was however raised in Lucknow, a city of high culture, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the vast and populated northern state in India that follows the Ganges Valley. Historically, Lucknow was the centre of the Mughal culture and is still famous for the Awadhi cuisine, its etiquette and its amazing Shia monuments. At that time, Lucknow was half Muslim, half Hindu. Chat would speak Bengali at home and Hindi in the city, he also learned in Lucknow to decipher Urdu, a language quite similar E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exmath.2018.09.004 c 2018 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. 0723-0869/⃝
254
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
to Hindi but with more Arabic and Persian loanwords and written in a right-to-left script close to Perso-Arabic. Chat’s father, Kali Pada Chatterjee, had been working for the post office in Lucknow since 1926 and retired in 1970 as deputy postmaster. Chat’s father homeschooled his six sons. Chat was very precocious. After his father’s schooling, he was admitted into high school, the “Boys Anglo-Bengali Intermediate College”, at age ten, and completed this at age thirteen in 1948, the first in his class in the troubled times of India’s independence and partition. His subjects were English, Arithmetic, Geography, Bengali, Mathematics, General Science and Civics with distinction in Arithmetic, all subjects that have remained sources of fascination for him during his entire life. This secondary education was followed by two more years at the end of which Chat passed his “Intermediate examination” in the subjects of Elementary Hindi, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and English (which was optional). Compared to typical students, Chat was three to four years in advance. During these years, he learned English while listening to the BBC and proudly kept his BBC British accent all his life. Chat then entered Lucknow University, one of the oldest public colleges in India, founded in 1864. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1952, at age 17, in Physics, Mathematics, Statistics and Elementary English, and obtained his Master of Science in Mathematical Statistics in 1954 at age 19. During that time, he also obtained a Certificate of Proficiency in French from the University of Lucknow (in 1953). In 1954, Chat then moved to the prestigious Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. This was a natural move for Chat, since many of his relatives were living in Calcutta and Chat stayed with them. At ISI, Chat wrote his first research paper (the first article in his list of publications in this volume) but also began to learn German in the Goethe Institute in St Xavier’s College, a still renowned French Jesuit school, for six months, two hours per week. He later added two more languages, Danish and Italian, to this already impressive linguistic palette. ISI was, and still is, an important research centre. The scientific life of the Institute in those years has been described in vivid details by Prof. Varadarajan in [1] who together with R. Ranga Rao, K. R. Parthasarathy, and S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan were famous alumni mathematicians from the ISI in the late fifties under the supervision of the celebrated statistician C.R. Rao. Chat overlapped only very shortly with this group but remained close friends with them during all his life. Scientific life in ISI was very intense at that time and the institute enjoyed the visits of famous mathematicians both from the West and the East, notably Yuri Linnik, Sir Ronald Fisher and Andre¨ı Kolmogorov. Most importantly for Chat, Norbert Wiener visited ISI during Chat’s stay there and recommended him for a Ph.D. position in the University of Syracuse, New York State, with Kai Lai Chung. Chat was just 21 years old. Now, after travelling from Lucknow to Calcutta, roughly following the Gange valley, he had to undergo a much longer voyage: cross the Ocean from Calcutta to Syracuse, a month long boat trip. Chat took a loan from a wealthy uncle on his mother’s side, S.N. Mukerjee, an importer–exporter, whose company is still running today (we found a letter from his uncle acknowledging the last repayment of his debt in 1958). He travelled on a cargo ship, the “Indian Navigator” (from the Indian Steamship Company, based in Calcutta). We have a
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
255
Fig. 1. S.D. Chatterji and several family members, in August 1956. Chat is standing behind the children, the third man from the left. Source: Printed with the permission of Dharani Dhar Chatterjee.
very moving family picture of him and his family from Calcutta, on the dock of Diamond Harbour, in front of the ship on the day of his departure in August, 1956: see Fig. 1. The ship’s route took him through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean and the Gibraltar Straits. Unfortunately, we were not able to find her route precisely. However, passing through the Suez Canal in 1956 was quite an adventure. Indeed, the year 1956 was the time of the Suez Crisis: Nasser had nationalised the Canal in July, provoking one of the last colonial bouts of France and the United Kingdom who tried to regain the control of the Canal in November before being sternly pressured by the United States and the Soviet Union to withdraw. Chat did not witness these events, happily since some ships were sunken in the Canal by Nasser, but Chat was stuck there for a while in mid September, due to the shortage of pilots before the Anglo-French intervention. He nevertheless took the opportunity of his forced stay to visit the pyramids with some fellow Bengali travellers. The fate of the Indian Navigator was ultimately tragic: she sunk a few years later due to the explosion of her sulphur cargo hold. Chat always considered this trip as anecdotic in his life, but I have been fascinated by it, imagining the very young Srishti Dhar coming from what he was still calling “Les Indes”
256
F. Labourie / Expo. Math. 36 (2018) 253–256
in his last days, starting from the hot, humid and overcrowded Calcutta, all through the world, before arriving on the East Coast of the United States, finally to settle in the frigid Upstate New York. I always wanted to get a serious account of this trip from him, but his sudden demise caught us all off guard.
References [1] V.S. Varadarajan, Some mathematical reminiscences, Methods Appl. Anal. Soc. 9 (3) (2002) v–xviii. Special issue dedicated to Daniel W. Stroock and Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan on the occasion of their 60th birthday.