India’s Renaissance woman: Meet Chandrima Shaha, a biologist, cricketer, photographer

She has headed the National Institute of Immunology, and also played for Bengal, been a radio commentator and more. Check out a legacy shaped by passion.

Think of her as the Renaissance woman.

Shaha resets a camera lens, during her years as a photographer, in the 1970s. (Courtesy Chandrima Shaha: A Lifelong Journey of Scientific Inquiry)

Biologist Chandrima Shaha, 72, has headed the National Institute of Immunology (NII) and was the first woman president of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA; appointed in 2020).

She has also been a professional cricketer, a radio commentator, and an award-winning photographer. She has been a relentless champion of gender equality in the male-dominated pure sciences.

The spirit in which she has lived her life is one of “nothing is impossible”, says Suprakash C Roy, co-author of a new biography that documents the life of this unusual polymath.

Shaha is proof, Roy adds, of the extent to which passion can shape a legacy, “whether it’s in science or cricket or anything else”.

Roy, a physicist and former editor-in-chief of the journal Science and Culture, worked on the biography for years, with co-author Rajinder Singh, a science historian at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and professor emeritus at Chandigarh’s Punjab University. This is their tenth such collaboration; most of their previous ones have also been the untold stories of Indian scientists.

Lately, they’ve been focusing on the women. These have included Bibha Chowdhuri (1913-1991), called the forgotten heroine of Indian science, for her early work on cosmic rays. And Purnima Sinha (1927-2015), a singer, painter, writer, and a physicist.

Today’s young people need to know the rich history of research in India, Roy says. And it could help them to know about the challenges they will likely face.

Back to Shaha, she was born in a forward-looking, cosmopolitan Calcutta, in 1952, in a household that encouraged her to explore interests ranging from carpentry and photography to cricket and classical literature. Her father Shambu Shaha was an accomplished photographer, best known for his images of Rabindranath Tagore, shot during the last decade of that Nobel Prize-winning polymath’s life.

Her mother Karuna Shaha was a feminist, painter, singer and freedom fighter. The legendary theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was a family friend, and was among the artists and scholars who frequently visited the Shaha home. He had a profound impact on her as a young girl, Roy says.

As Shaha’s passion for science grew, her father bought her a telescope and encouraged her to study the stars and planets. For a while, she dreamed of being an astronomer.

Tiny tales

Then her father picked up a microscope, at a local auction.

“A drop from a puddle of water, examined under the microscope, opened an amazing world not visible to the naked eye,” Singh and Roy write in the biography. “Moving creatures of various shapes and sizes… intrigued Chandrima.”

She began to disappear into the neighbour’s garden for entire afternoons, to collect and study a range of reluctant insects under her new lens. It was no surprise to anyone when she picked zoology at Calcutta University. She eventually earned a PhD in the field, at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.

Around this time, in 1975, she won a Best Woman Photographer prize, handed out by Kolkata’s Camera Photo Monthly magazine. (The winning entry was a photograph of a woman golfer.)

“Because of the Naxalite activity in the state, our classes were often interrupted, so I took up photography very avidly,” Shaha tells Wknd. “At one point I wanted to do it professionally, but then my interest in science overrode that. My father had always impressed on me that science as a process of inquiry is very entertaining. It allows you to view life up-close.”

Playing ball

Her brief stint as a photographer did, however, lead Shaha into a brief career as a professional cricketer.

Coming across an advertisement by the newly formed Women’s Cricket Association, she rushed to the grounds with her camera, to photograph the goings-on.

When she arrived, selections were still underway. She registered on a whim, and ended up being selected. She represented Bengal in the National Women’s Cricket Championships in 1973 and ’74, and played on the East Zone team in the Rani Jhansi Trophy in ’74 too.

“This was the first ever women’s team in Bengal, and there was a great camaraderie among the players,” Shaha says. “It was the first time I really worked with a team, and that taught me a lot. Those lessons helped me later, because science too is essentially a team game.”

Shaha went on to become the first Bengali-language woman cricket commentator on All India Radio. As Singh puts it, there really didn’t seem to be anything she couldn’t do.

But she did stick to science. In 1980, she moved to Kansas, to join the laboratory of reproductive biologist Gilbert S Greenwald. Here, Shaha researched various aspects of ovarian cellular function.

She moved on to the biomedical laboratory at the research organisation Population Council in New York. That’s where she met GP Talwar, founder-director of the National Institute of Immunology. Talwar was recruiting scientists for his newly created institute in India, and invited Shaha to head her own laboratory there.

Shaha ran that laboratory for 28 years, before being appointed director of the institute in 2012. Initially she worked on developing a contraceptive vaccine, before shifting focus to studying host-parasite interactions. She made a significant contribution in advancing the understanding of cell death in unicellular infectious parasites and their hosts.

“Her work was particularly impactful in identifying molecular targets that could be exploited to eliminate these pathogens,” says Singh.

All the while, she was fighting rampant gender discrimination.

When she returned to India in 1984 to join NII, for instance, she was assigned a room at a hostel, while her male counterparts were assigned flats in the staff quarters. The male scientists would soon be married and would need the space, she was told.

“She wrote a strongly worded letter to Talwar saying she wouldn’t be discriminated against in this manner,” Roy says. “She convinced him to abandon this idea and give her a flat, which he eventually did.”

“There was a lot of subtle discrimination then. If I’d taken serious note of it, it would have left me very disturbed,” says Shaha, now JC Bose Chair and distinguished professor at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)’s Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.

Instead, drawing from her parents’ example, she fought the battles she could fight, she adds, and simply ignored the rest.