As a schoolboy visiting grandparents in Kerala, I was drawn to a book in their collection, mainly because I mispronounced the author’s name and thought he was Indian. I don’t remember the title, but the author was J.B.S. Haldane, and grandfather explained who he was, how to pronounce his name, and how he did become an Indian citizen living in Kolkata and Bhubhaneswar.
Later I learnt Haldane was that rare individual, a scientist who was a populariser of science, the man who, in the words of Bill Bryson, married “Darwinian principles of evolution to the genetic work of Gregor Mendel to produce what geneticists call the Modern Synthesis.”
His university degrees were in the Classics and Mathematics, and according to his student, the geneticist Krishna Dronamraju, he “was able to divide his attention between two entirely different subjects simultaneously. He was able, for instance, to sit in a lecture room, writing a mathematical paper on evolution while closely paying attention to a lecture on a different topic as he demonstrated during the discussion at the end of the lecture.”
His friend and Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar said, “In some ways (Haldane was) the cleverest and in others the silliest man I have ever known.”
Now Samanth Subramanian – perhaps our finest writer of non-fiction among the post-Ram Guha generation – brings the strands together in the biography of the man who for decades had been at the fringes of my memory. A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J B S Haldane is the story of a scientist and the science of his times. But it is something larger, lighting up the intersection between politics and science.
For Haldane was a member of the Communist Party, an admirer of Stalin and for long an equivocating supporter of the Soviet political biologist (for want of a better phrase) Trofim Lysenko who said what the establishment wanted to hear.
This support from Haldane, a man of rigour, an unsentimental scientist who laid great store by method and proof, confounded people.
Subramanian brings to the incident both nuance and understanding: “A man stepped outside his character,” he writes, “and in doing so, revealed that character to us.” Insight and lucidity come together beautifully.
What Subramanian calls the conflict between scientific integrity and political fealty gains fresh relevance in today’s world where science suffers at the hands of politicians who spout utter nonsense in order to please their masters.
A Dominant Character is a exemplar of the art of the biography. The research goes deep, the subject comes alive for being exhumed from such depths and dressed in such detail. Even the lifelong contrarian Haldane might have sent a note of thanks to his biographer.
Haldane himself wrote with a clarity that invited comparison with George Orwell. “The universe,” he once said, “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” That might be true of Haldane as well, the embodiment of Blake’s dictum: Without contraries there is no progression.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu).
