C. V. Raman

• 1. Introduction

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  C. V. Raman, the Indian physicist, bought two steamship tickets to Stockholm in July 1930. One was for himself and one was for his wife. The Nobel Prize announcements were not due until November. Raman knew that the voyage to Sweden by sea took so long that he could not afford to wait for the news. So he booked early, and every day he scanned the newspaper for the announcement. If the paper did not carry it, he tossed it away. Where did this certainty come from? How had a researcher working in India, far from the great European laboratories, come to believe that the world's highest scientific honour was already his? And once the world agreed with him, why did so many colleagues, students and officials end up as his bitter opponents?

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• 2. Prodigy to Professor

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  Ten rupees a month was the salary of Raman's father in Tiruchirappalli on the 7th of November 1888. That was the day his second child was born. Raman later joked about it. He recalled: "I was born with a copper spoon in my mouth. At my birth my father was earning the magnificent salary of ten rupees per month." He was the second of eight children of Chandrasekhar Ramanathan Iyer and Parvathi Ammal. In 1892 the family moved to Visakhapatnam, where his father took a post teaching physics at Mrs A.V. Narasimha Rao College.

  At St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School in Visakhapatnam, Raman raced ahead of his classmates. He passed matriculation at the age of 11. At 13 he passed the First Examination in Arts with a scholarship, placing first in both. In 1902 he entered Presidency College in Madras, where his father had been transferred to teach mathematics and physics. He took his B.A. from the University of Madras in 1904, standing first and winning gold medals in physics and English.

  A paper titled "Unsymmetrical diffraction bands due to a rectangular aperture" appeared in the British journal Philosophical Magazine in 1906. Its author was 18 and still a graduate student. His second paper, on the surface tension of liquids, ran in the same journal in 1907, the year he earned his M.A. with highest distinction. It was printed alongside a paper by Lord Rayleigh on the sensitivity of the ear to sound. Rayleigh began writing to him afterwards and courteously addressed him as Professor.

  Rhishard Llewellyn Jones, his physics teacher, insisted that the young man continue his research in England. Jones arranged a physical inspection by Colonel Gerald Giffard, because Raman often had poor health and was considered a weakling. Raman later recalled the verdict: "Giffard examined me and certified that I was going to die of tuberculosis... if I were to go to England." England would have to wait.

  His elder brother, Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, had joined the Indian Finance Service, and Raman followed him. He took first position in the entrance examination in February 1907. In June of that year he was posted to Calcutta as Assistant Accountant General. There he discovered the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, founded in 1876 as the first research institute in India. He quickly befriended Asutosh Dey, who would become his lifelong collaborator, and Amrita Lal Sircar, the association's secretary and the son of its founder, Mahendralal Sircar. A third friend, Ashutosh Mukherjee, was an executive member of the association and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta.

  With their backing, Raman won permission to do research there in his own time, even at what he later called "very unusual hours." The institute had so far hired no regular researchers and produced no research paper. Raman's article "Newton's rings in polarised light," published in Nature in 1907, became its first. It inspired the association to launch its own journal, the Bulletin of Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, in 1909. Raman was its major contributor.

  In 1909 the Finance Service sent him to Rangoon in British Burma as currency officer. After only a few months he returned to Madras, because his father had died from an illness. The funeral rituals kept him there for the rest of the year. He was posted to Nagpur in 1910, and before a year was up he was promoted to Accountant General in 1911 and sent back to Calcutta.

  In 1915 the University of Calcutta began assigning research scholars to work under him at the association. The first was Sudhangsu Kumar Banerji, who later became Director General of Observatories of the India Meteorological Department. From the next year other institutions followed, including the universities of Allahabad, Rangoon and Madras, and Queen's College in Indore. By 1919 Raman had guided more than a dozen students. Sircar died that year, and Raman received two honorary posts at the association, Honorary Professor and Honorary Secretary. He called this stretch the "golden era" of his life.

  On the 30th of January 1914 the senate of the University of Calcutta had named him to a Palit Professorship of Physics, a chair endowed by Sir Taraknath Palit. Ashutosh Mukherjee had first offered the post to Jagadish Chandra Bose, who declined, so Raman was the second choice. The First World War delayed his start. He joined Rajabazar Science College only in 1917, after reluctantly resigning from the civil service following a decade there. People described it as a "supreme sacrifice," since a professor's salary would be roughly half of his government pay. The university recorded his terms. He accepted on condition that he would not be required to go out of India. He would also not be made to take M.A. or M.Sc. teaching at the expense of his own research.

  Some senators, especially the foreign members, objected to the appointment because Raman had no PhD and had never studied abroad. Mukherjee answered by arranging an honorary DSc, which the University of Calcutta conferred in 1921. That year Raman travelled to Oxford to lecture at the Congress of Universities of the British Empire, hosted by the Nobel laureates J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924. When Mukherjee asked about his future plans, Raman replied: "The Nobel Prize of course." Two years later he founded the Indian Journal of Physics and served as its first editor. Its second volume would carry the article that made his name.

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• 3. Sound Before Light

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  Hermann von Helmholtz wrote The Sensations of Tone, and Raman came across a copy soon after joining the Calcutta association. The book set him on a path through the physics of music. Between 1916 and 1921 he published on the subject prolifically. He worked out a theory of the transverse vibration of bowed string instruments, based on the superposition of velocities. One of his earliest studies concerned the wolf tone in violins and cellos.

  His subjects ranged widely. He examined the acoustics of violins and related instruments, including Indian stringed instruments, and even the sounds of water splashes. One of his papers bore the title "Experiments with mechanically-played violins."

  Two Indian drums, the tabla and the mridangam, also drew his attention. His analyses of the harmonic nature of their sounds were the first scientific studies of Indian percussion. He also wrote a critical study of the vibration of piano strings. It took aim at what was known as Kaufmann's theory, the first scientific description of how musical strings vibrate, set out by the German physicist Walter Kaufmann in 1895.

  The dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London holds a Whispering Gallery that produces unusual sound effects. Raman studied how sound travels there during a brief visit to England in 1921. His acoustics work became an important prelude to his later work in optics and quantum mechanics, in both experiment and concept. Optics took hold of him in 1919, when he began to investigate the scattering of light.

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• 4. The Blue Sea

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  In September 1921 the steamship S.S. Narkunda carried Raman home from England across the Mediterranean Sea. He had only a pocket-sized spectroscope and a Nicol prism, and the deep blue of the water held his attention. The best explanation available came from Lord Rayleigh in 1910. Rayleigh had correctly explained the blue sky through what is now called Rayleigh scattering. He argued that the blue of the deep sea is "simply the blue of the sky seen by reflection." Scientists accepted this without much question.

  A Nicol prism let Raman look into the water without the glare of sunlight reflected from the surface. Through it the sea looked even bluer than usual, which contradicted Rayleigh. He could see the track of the sun's rays entering the water and appearing to converge at a point far below.

  As soon as the ship docked in Bombay Harbour, now Mumbai Harbour, he finished an article called "The colour of the sea." Nature published it in November 1921. In it he called Rayleigh's explanation "questionable by a simple mode of observation." He asked what it was that diffracted the light and made its path visible. His suggestion was that the diffracting particles might be, at least in part, "the molecules of the water themselves."

  In Calcutta he asked K. R. Ramanathan, a student from the University of Rangoon, to carry out further research at the association. By early 1922 Raman reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that he urged "an entirely different view." As with the colour of the sky, he argued, molecular diffraction determines the luminosity of the sea and in great measure its colour. Ramanathan published detailed experimental findings in 1923. His study of the Bay of Bengal in 1924 supplied the full evidence.

  Later science added a correction. The intrinsic colour of water is now attributed mainly to selective absorption of the longer red and orange wavelengths. It comes from overtones of the stretching of the oxygen-hydrogen bonds in water molecules, which absorb infrared light.

  Raman's own experiments in 1923 had also turned up an oddity. When sunlight was filtered through violet glass into certain liquids and solids, the results hinted that other light rays formed in addition to the incident ray.

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• 5. The Raman Effect

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  K. R. Ramanathan thought the extra rays were only a "trace of fluorescence." In 1925 K. S. Krishnan, a new research associate, noted the theoretical grounds for an additional scattering line beside the usual polarised elastic scattering in liquids. He called it "feeble fluorescence." For the next two years every theoretical attempt to explain the phenomenon went nowhere.

  Arthur Compton at Washington University in St. Louis had found evidence in 1923 that electromagnetic waves can also be described as particles. By 1927 scientists widely accepted this, Raman included. He had not always agreed. At the 1924 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Toronto, Compton presented his findings. William Duane of Harvard University answered with evidence that light is a wave. Raman took Duane's side and told Compton: "Compton, you're a very good debater, but the truth isn't in you." Compton later recalled that this debate probably led Raman to his discovery.

  The announcement of Compton's Nobel Prize in Physics came in December 1927. Raman was ecstatic and told Krishnan: "Excellent news... very nice indeed. But look here Krishnan. If this is true of X-Rays, it must be true of Light too." He went on: "There must be an Optical analogue to Compton Effect. We must pursue it and we are on the right lines. It must and shall be found. The Nobel Prize must be won."

  Krishnan began the experiments at the start of January 1928. On the 7th of January he found that every pure liquid he tried produced polarised fluorescence within the visible spectrum. Raman was astonished that he had never noticed it in all his years of work. That night the two men named the phenomenon "modified scattering," a name that echoed the Compton effect. On the 16th of February they sent Nature a manuscript, "A new type of secondary radiation." It appeared on the 31st of March.

  The 28th of February 1928 brought the clearest evidence. That day they obtained spectra of the modified scattering, separate from the incident light. Until then, difficulty in measuring wavelengths had forced them to judge by eye the colours that sunlight produced through a prism. Raman had built a type of spectrograph to detect and measure electromagnetic waves. Of it he later remarked: "When I got my Nobel Prize, I had spent hardly 200 rupees on my equipment." His total spending on the whole experiment was obviously far higher. With the instrument they sent monochromatic light from a mercury arc lamp through transparent material and recorded the spectrum. The lines of scattering could now be measured and photographed.

  Raman announced the discovery to the press that same day. The Associated Press of India reported it on the 29th of February under the headline "New theory of radiation: Prof. Raman's Discovery." The report said the discovery promised to be "of fundamental significance to physics." When matter is excited by light of one colour, it explained, the atoms emit light of two colours. It added: "The astonishing thing is that the altered colour is quite independent of the nature of the substance used." The Statesman reproduced the news on the 1st of March.

  Formal publication followed quickly. On the 8th of March Raman sent Nature a three-paragraph report, printed on the 21st of April. The data went to the same journal on the 22nd of March and appeared on the 5th of May. On the 16th of March he gave the detailed description, titled "A new radiation," to the South Indian Science Association in Bangalore. The lecture came out in the Indian Journal of Physics on the 31st of March. On that day a thousand reprints were mailed to scientists in different countries.

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• 6. Proof, Prize and Credit

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  Georg Joos at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena wrote to Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. He asked whether Raman's work on the optical Compton effect in liquids was reliable. He added: "The sharpness of the scattered lines in liquids seems doubtful to me." Many French and German physicists were sceptical in the same way. Sommerfeld tried to reproduce the experiment and failed.

  On the 20th of June 1928 Peter Pringsheim at the University of Berlin succeeded where Sommerfeld had not. In articles over the following months he coined the terms Ramaneffekt and Linien des Ramaneffekts, and the English "Raman effect" and "Raman lines" followed immediately. Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University became the first American to confirm the effect, in early 1929. After a series of experiments he called it "one of the most convincing proofs of the quantum theory." The effect was one of the earliest proofs of the quantum nature of light, and the field of Raman spectroscopy grew out of it. In 1930 Ernest Rutherford, as President of the Royal Society, presented Raman with the Hughes Medal. He described the discovery as "among the best three or four discoveries in experimental physics in the last decade."

  Raman was disappointed when the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Owen Richardson in 1928 and to Louis de Broglie in 1929. Rutherford nominated him in 1930, and that year the prize honoured "his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him." Raman was the first Asian and the first non-white person to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Rabindranath Tagore, also Indian, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Asked in an interview what would have happened had he made his discovery earlier, Raman said he would have shared the prize with Compton. He added: "I would rather receive the whole of it."

  Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam at Moscow State University independently found the same effect in 1928. They published in the July issue of Naturwissenschaften and presented at the Sixth Congress of the Russian Association of Physicists, held at Saratov between the 5th and the 16th of August. In 1930 they were nominated for the Nobel Prize alongside Raman. The Nobel Committee proposed only Raman. It noted that the Russians cited Raman's article and so had not reached an independent interpretation. They had also seen the effect only in crystals, while Raman and Krishnan saw it in solids, liquids and gases, which proved it universal. Evidence surfaced later that the Russians had been first. A letter from Mandelstam to Orest Khvolson says they observed the spectral line on the 21st of February 1928, a week before Raman and Krishnan.

  Krishnan was never nominated, even though he was the main researcher in the discovery. He alone first noticed the new scattering. He co-authored all of the 1928 papers on the discovery except two, and he wrote all the follow-up studies by himself. He never claimed to deserve the prize. Raman admitted later that Krishnan was co-discoverer, yet remained openly hostile to him. Krishnan called this "the greatest tragedy of my life." After Krishnan died, Raman spoke to a correspondent from The Times of India. He said: "Krishnan was the greatest charlatan I have known, and all his life he masqueraded in the cloak of another man's discovery." Years later Krishnan would appear among the leaders of a rival national science body.

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• 7. Feuds and Rivals

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  Three benefactors paid for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, King of Mysore, Jamsetji Tata and Nawab Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad, all contributed lands and funds. The Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, approved the project in 1909, and the British government appointed Morris Travers as the first director. Rutherford recommended Raman for the directorship in 1932. Raman left Calcutta in 1933 as the fourth director and the first Indian one. At Bangalore he recruited G. N. Ramachandran, who became a distinguished X-ray crystallographer.

  Max Born arrived at the institute in October 1933 as Reader in Theoretical Physics, on an invitation Raman had sent early that year. Born was a refugee from Nazi Germany, temporarily employed at St John's College, Cambridge. In one lecture he presented his theory of lattice dynamics, based on thermal properties. Raman had developed a different theory and claimed that Born's contradicted the experimental data. Their debate lasted for decades. Most physicists backed Born, and Raman's theory was judged of only partial relevance. Raman refused to concede. As editor of Current Science he rejected articles that supported Born's theory. Born later said that Raman probably thought of him as an "enemy." Born was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for his lattice theory. He won it in 1954 for his statistical work on quantum mechanics.

  A wider revolt was brewing inside the institute. Raman was accused of favouring physics while ignoring other fields. His nephew S. Ramaseshan, later director of the institute, remembered that Raman went in there "like a bull in a china shop." Born himself observed that Raman "found a sleepy place where very little work was being done by a number of extremely well-paid people." At a Council meeting Kenneth Aston, professor in the Electrical Technology Department, sharply criticised Raman and his recruitment of Born. Aston also attacked Born personally. Raman had every intention of making Born a full professor.

  In January 1936 the Council set up a review committee, chaired by James Irvine, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews. By March it reported that Raman had misused funds and had shifted the institute's "centre of gravity" entirely toward physics. It also judged that making Born Professor of Mathematical Physics was not financially feasible, although the Council had approved the plan in November 1935. The Council gave Raman two choices. He could resign from the institute from the 1st of April, or step down as director and stay on as Professor of physics. If he chose neither, he would be dismissed. Raman leaned toward the second.

  In 1933 the Indian Science Congress Association planned a national science body that could advise the government. Sir Richard Gregory, editor of Nature, visited India and suggested that Raman, as editor of Current Science, establish an Indian Academy of Sciences. Raman wanted its membership to be exclusively Indian, against the general view that British members should be included. He objected that of 15 British members on a council of 30, "only two or three are fit enough to be its Fellows." On the 1st of April 1933 he convened a separate meeting of South Indian scientists, and he and Subba Rao resigned from the Association. He registered the new Academy on the 24th of April under a provisional name. The plan was to change it to the Royal Society of India once a Royal Charter was approved.

  The Government of India did not recognise the Academy as an official national body. The Association instead created the National Institute of Sciences of India on the 7th of January 1935, renamed the Indian National Science Academy in 1970. Its leaders included Raman's foremost rivals Meghnad Saha, Homi Bhabha, S. S. Bhatnagar and Krishnan. Raman remained president of his own Academy from 1933 until his death. Its journal, the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences, later split into three titles.

  Kamala Sohonie applied to the Indian Institute of Science for a research fellowship in 1933. Raman turned her down on the grounds that women were not competent enough to pursue research. She held a satyagraha protest outside his office, and he granted her admission, though with what she considered humiliating stipulations. She became the first woman admitted to the institute. She later said: "Though Raman was a great scientist, he was very narrow-minded." She added that he did not even admit her as a regular student. After a year, many women were admitted.

  A bust of Jawaharlal Nehru ended up smashed on the floor by Raman's hand. The physicist despised the Prime Minister and his science policies. In another outburst he broke his Bharat Ratna medallion to pieces with a hammer, because the Nehru government had given it. When Nehru visited the Raman Research Institute in 1948, Raman showed him gold and copper under ultraviolet light. Nehru was tricked into believing that the copper, which glowed more brilliantly than any other metal, was gold. Raman remarked: "Mr Prime Minister, everything that glitters is not gold." Nehru offered financial assistance, and Raman flatly refused. He replied: "I certainly don't want this to become another government laboratory."

  Raman objected to government control of research, as in the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the Defence Research and Development Organisation and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He remained hostile to Bhabha, Bhatnagar and his once favourite student, Krishnan. He even dubbed such programmes the "Nehru-Bhatnagar effect." In 1959 he proposed another research institute in Madras. The Government of Madras advised him to seek central funds. He told C. Subramaniam, a minister in the Madras government, that a request to Nehru's government would meet with a refusal. So the plan ended.

  On the 9th of March 1968 Raman tendered his resignation as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Council accepted it on the 4th of April. He is the only Indian Fellow ever to have resigned. The exact reason was never documented. One possibility was his objection to "British subjects" as a category of Fellows. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar recalled that The London Times once printed a list of Fellows that left Raman out. Raman demanded an explanation from the society's president, Patrick Blackett, and was dejected to be told that the society had no role in a newspaper. Krishnan named another cause, a disapproving review of a manuscript Raman had submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society. His resignation letter said only: "I have taken this decision after careful consideration of all the circumstances of the case."

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• 8. Faith, Family and Legacy

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  Lokasundari Ammal, daughter of S. Krishnaswami Iyer, Superintendent of Sea Customs at Madras, married Raman in 1907. Popular accounts put the wedding on the 6th of May. His great-niece and biographer Uma Parameswaran gave the date as the 2nd of June 1907. It was a self-arranged marriage, and according to Parameswaran the bride was 13. Her obituary in Current Science supports that, giving her age as 86 at her death on the 22nd of May 1980. Lokasundari was playing the veena when they first met. She later joked that the match owed less to her music than to the extra allowance of INR 150 that the Finance Department gave its married officers. Soon after they moved to Calcutta, rumours spread that the couple had converted to Christianity. They often visited St. John's Church, Kolkata, where she loved the music and he was drawn to the acoustics.

  They had two sons, Chandrasekhar Raman and Venkatraman Radhakrishnan, a radio astronomer. Raman cut his ties with the elder son after ideological disputes. His nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, son of Raman's elder brother, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.

  A small handheld spectroscope went with Raman almost everywhere. Over his life he gathered stones, minerals and other materials with interesting light-scattering properties, from his travels and as gifts. The collection and his spectrograph are on display at the Indian Institute of Science. In 1932 he and Suri Bhagavantam determined the spin of photons, which further confirmed the quantum nature of light. With his student Nagendra Nath he explained the acousto-optic effect, the scattering of light by sound waves, in what became the celebrated Raman-Nath theory. Modulators and switching systems based on this effect have enabled optical communication components built on lasers.

  He studied the diffraction of light by ultrasonic and hypersonic sound waves. He also studied the effects of X-rays on infrared vibrations in crystals, published between 1935 and 1942. From 1944 to 1968 he worked on the structure and properties of diamond. In the early 1950s he turned to iridescent substances, including labradorite, pearly feldspar, agate, quartz, opal and pearl. His last interests, in the 1960s, were the colours of flowers and the physiology of human vision.

  In 1943 Raman and his former student Panchapakesa Krishnamurti started Travancore Chemical and Manufacturing Co. Ltd. It was one of the first organic and inorganic chemical manufacturers in India, and it was renamed TCM Limited in 1996. In 1947 the new government of independent India appointed Raman its first National Professor. He retired from the Indian Institute of Science in 1948 and set up the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, where he worked to his last days.

  Raman rarely talked about religion. He called himself an agnostic and objected to being labelled an atheist. His father, a follower of Herbert Spencer, Charles Bradlaugh and Robert G. Ingersoll, largely shaped this outlook, and Raman was also influenced by the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. He resented Hindu traditional rituals but kept them up in family circles. His signature attire was a traditional pagri, an Indian turban with a tuft underneath, and a upanayana, a Hindu sacred thread. Turbans were not customary in South Indian culture. He explained his habit: "Oh, if I did not wear one, my head will swell." He added: "You all praise me so much and I need a turban to contain my ego." He even credited the turban for the recognition he received on his first visit to England, from J. J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford.

  In a public speech Raman declared: "There is no Heaven, no Swarga, no Hell, no rebirth, no reincarnation and no immortality." He went on: "Therefore, he should live his life properly." In a friendly meeting with Mahatma Gandhi and the German zoologist Gilbert Rahm, the talk turned to God. Raman said: "If there is a God we must look for him in the Universe. If he is not there, he is not worth looking for."

  At the end of October 1970 Raman had a cardiac arrest and collapsed in his laboratory. In the hospital, doctors declared that he would not survive another four hours. He survived a few days and asked to stay in the gardens of his institute, surrounded by his followers and fans. Two days before he died, he told a former student not to let the journals of the Academy die. He called them "the sensitive indicators of the quality of science being done in the country." That evening he met the institute's Board of Management in his bedroom to discuss its future. He told his wife: "I believe only in the Spirit of Man." He asked for "Just a clean and simple cremation for me, no mumbo-jumbo please." He died of natural causes early on the 21st of November 1970, aged 82. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said: "His mind was like the diamond, which he studied and explained."

  Honours had arrived from many directions over the years. While still in the Finance Service, he received the Curzon Research Award in 1912 and the Woodburn Research Medal in 1913. The Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze in Rome gave him the Matteucci Medal in 1928. In 1930 Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, knighted him at a special ceremony at the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, after his inclusion in the 1929 Birthday Honours had been delayed. He presided over the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia awarded him the Franklin Medal in 1941. In 1954 he received the Bharat Ratna, alongside C. Rajagopalachari and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and in 1957 the Lenin Peace Prize. He joined the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1961. His memberships also included the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Optical Society of America and the Catgut Acoustical Society of America.

  India celebrates National Science Day on the 28th of February every year, to commemorate the discovery of the Raman effect in 1928. Postal stamps featuring Raman were issued in 1971 and 2009. Roads in New Delhi and Chennai carry his name, as does the Bangalore area of CV Raman Nagar. A building at the Indian Institute of Science is called the Raman Building, and the Raman Science Centre stands in Nagpur. A lunar crater bears his name. C. V. Raman Global University was established in 1997, and Dr. C.V. Raman University in Chhattisgarh in 2006. On the 7th of November 2013, a Google Doodle honoured the 125th anniversary of his birthday.

  Nandan Kudhyadi directed a biopic, C. V. Raman: The Scientist and His Legacy, released in 1989, which won the National Film Award for Best Biographical Film. Ananya Banerjee directed a documentary, Beyond Rainbows: The Quest & Achievement of Dr. C.V. Raman, which aired on Doordarshan in 2004. The streaming series Rocket Boys features T.M. Karthik as Raman. In 1998 the American Chemical Society and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science named his discovery an International Historic Chemical Landmark, at the association in Jadavpur, Calcutta. The plaque on that spot notes that the method became even more valuable with modern computers and lasers. It says its uses range from the non-destructive identification of minerals to the early detection of life-threatening diseases.

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