Reflections

A letter to the editor published in the Bengali Desh magazine drew attention to one of the forgotten pioneers of study of natural history in this country. Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya was born in the Faridpur District of erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1885. He came from a modest background; his father eked out a living as a village priest in their native village of Lonsing. He studied until the matriculation and passed it in the first division. However by this time he had lost his father and family circumstances made it impossible for him to study further and he became a schoolteacher in order to provide support to his family. He later began to work at a mercantile firm as a telephone operator and it was at this time that he published his first article on bio-luminescence in the then popular Bengali periodical Prabasi. This attracted the attention of none other than Dr Jagadish Chandra Bose who, realizing his potential, organized a position for him at the Basu Vigyan Mandir...