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Edited excerpt from Homi Bhabha: A life by Bakhtiar Dadabhoy (Rupa Publications, 2023) has been reprinted in Parsiana with permission from the author and the publishers.

The child who would become famous as Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born into privilege, culture and entitlement on October 30, 1909 in a bungalow named Kenilworth on 53 Pedder Road in South Bombay. Kenilworth belonged to Bhabha’s maternal aunts, Bachibai and Hirabai, and later to his other aunt, Cooverbai Panday. In a common naming custom among Hindus, the first sound of the newborn’s name is astrologically determined, since it is supposed to bring the child luck. Many Parsis follow this custom but it is not known whether Jehangir and Meherbai Bhabha, the child’s highly westernized parents, believed in this. The child was called Hormusji after his paternal grandfather, a name that was shortened to Homi by all those who knew him, and it was as Homi Bhabha that he courted national and international fame. Almost five years later, on August 21, 1914, another son, Jamshed, was born, who made a substantial contribution to art and culture in Bombay.

The Bhabha family was very well off but by no means extraordinarily wealthy. However, they had a long tradition of learning and service in the field of education. Hormusji’s association with Mysore began in 1876 when he was appointed vice principal of Central College in Bangalore. (More than six decades later, his grandson Homi would be a guest lecturer in physics at the same college.) Eight years later, Hormusji became the headmaster of Maharaja’s College in Mysore. In 1890, he was appointed secretary in the Education Department, and then from 1895 to 1909, he served as the first Indian inspector general of education in the state of Mysore. 

During his years in the department Hormusji helped implement the Maharaja’s vision for educational reform. In recognition of his services, he was given the title Munir-ul-Taleem in 1909 by the Mysore government. Hormusji was also a leader in his own community, being president of the Iranian Association and chairman of the standing committee of the Zoroastrian Conference. He was also a member of the Syndicate of Bombay University, along with being on the boards and committees of various other charitable and educational institutions. 

Mysore was one of the few progressive princely states in India at the time and Hormusji contributed substantially to its development. He was a forward-thinking individual who eschewed religious orthodoxy. He deposed in support of Bella in the famous Saklat vs Bella case which ended in 1925. Bella was a girl from Rangoon, Burma, born of the union of a Parsi mother and a non-Parsi father, and the issues to be decided were whether she could be considered a Parsi after her navjote had been performed and whether she could enter the fire temple. After victories in the lower courts, the matter went up to the Privy Council which, citing the judgment in another very famous case, Petit vs Jeejeebhoy (1908), ruled against her. The question of whether the child of a Parsi Zoroastrian mother and a non-Parsi father should be admitted to the Zoroastrian faith remains a vexed one to this day. 

There is no doubt that the advantage of being born a Bhabha gave Homi a leg up in the world, but the fire burned in him and you could always see the glow — he was a product of two molding forces: the external conditions and his hidden germical energies. Intellectually, life at home was as stimulating as any gifted child could wish for. He was encouraged from an early age to cultivate an aristocratic appreciation for the fine arts. This passion for art encompassed all that the young Bhabha did, and his thirst for western music and culture only grew as he aged. When he was in his early 20s he would spend a lot of time at concerts in England, listening to his favorite composers again and again.

Homi had a ear for music from a very early age: his parents only had to play some music to stop him from crying. The family owned a large collection of western classical music records and from childhood Homi was exposed to the works of leading European musicians. His interest in western classical music was nurtured by Cooverbai who resided with the Bhabhas at Kenilworth. Handicapped and unable to move independently, she had an enviable collection of 78 r.p.m. gramophone records that Homi, Jamshed  and his cousin, Dinshaw Panday, listened to with rapt attention. Homi also played the violin and the piano. 

The young men soaked up all the music on offer — Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Joseph Haydn, Giuseppi Verdi, Richard Wagner and Franz Schubert, to name just a few. They would take turns to wind the gramophone and turn over the record. They were familiar with Beethoven’s symphonies since, as Jamshed put it, they were "tiny.” By the time he was eight, young Homi was familiar with the concertos and symphonies of not only Beethoven but also Mozart, Verdi and Wagner. Thus, by the time he was a teenager, a foundation had been laid for his lifelong appreciation of symphonies and operatic music. He frequented concerts in Vienna, Boston and Bombay. Jamshed, for his part, was a lifelong aficionado of Beethoven and even got the Indian postal authorities to issue a stamp in his honor. 

Homi also played with Meccano sets which his father, who had hoped to make him an engineer, bought him. His creative mind was on display there too — he showed a marked preference for trying to make models that were not part of the accompanying booklet. Naturally curious about things, he was ready to try them out as well. One particular experiment would have ended in tragedy had it not been for the timely intervention of Dinshaw. Homi first heard about parachutes around the time of the First World War and decided that there was no harm in attempting a practical demonstration. He and his second cousin, Rustom Vatcha, who was a few months younger, stood on the ledge of the first floor balcony at Kenilworth holding two umbrellas, ready to "parachute” down. Dinshaw noticed the young "paratroopers” in the nick of time and a great tragedy was averted. The tenor of both anecdotes suggests the potential for an overbearing precocity. 

We do not know if Homi experienced the simple childhood pleasures of rambunctiousness and mischief that arise from playing with young companions. Perhaps he did, if we take a clue from this "parachute” experiment. Unlike American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (who Homi befriended later in life) whose intellectual interests and abilities developed well beyond his years but whose social skills remained stunted, Homi does not seem to have created the same sense of separation between himself and other people. Still, there were not many people who could claim to have known his warmth later in his life: friendly, but never familiar, he kept his distance from all but a very few. Perhaps, like the mathematician John von Newmann (also a friend of Homi’s) who was ill at ease with peers from more modest backgrounds, Homi, too, found it difficult to bridge the gap with such people. While there was no hint of decadence or overindulgence in the boys’ upbringing, there was no doubt that it was a luxurious life and a very sheltered one as well. 

Homi bloomed into an artist of great skill and, as a boy, regularly won prizes for his drawings at annual exhibitions organized by the Bombay Art Society. He took painting lessons from the artist Jehangir Lalkaka, and at the age of 17 his self-portrait won a prize at an exhibition of the Bombay Art Society. His sketches were so good that later Air India designed a calendar based on them. Maqbool Fida Husain compared his lines to those of the great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci! In the arts, Homi’s knowledge of classical European painters was such that his understanding could have made him an amateur art critic in his own right. It was not for nothing that scientist and Nobel laureate C. V. Raman introduced Homi as the "modern equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci” to an audience of Indian scientists at Nagpur in 1941. 

Noticeably missing from Homi’s rich artistic repertoire at this stage was any mention of Indian art. Growing up in Bombay in the early 20th century, he certainly must have had access to Indian art and its omission suggests a high level of Anglophilia. Indeed, for young Homi, it is clear that art, music and poetry primarily meant those of the western kind. It was the great classics of the West that inspired him, and figures like Beethoven and dramatist William  Shakespeare were his role models. However, he seems to have been well acquainted with Indian history, writing to his friend Homi Seervai about how history in India should be written.

Homi’s familiarity with western art came from his father’s excellent collection of books on the subject, but he was always quick to point out the impact of seeing the great works of art in the museums and galleries of Europe. While on vacations, he developed an interest in the great sculptures and architecture at places like Ajanta, Ellora and Sanchi. However, his appreciation for Indian art and artists blossomed only after he returned from England. During his stay in Bangalore, he attended concerts of Hindustani and Carnatic music by artistes like A. R. Iyengar and M. S. Subbulakshmi. According to M. G. K. Menon, Homi’s protégé and successor as director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the background already existed for the great feeling of identity that he established with his country. He was deeply conscious of the great cultural heritage and traditions of India, of which he was proud and from which he derived great pleasure; and he began to be conscious of the possibility of economic prosperity and social change based on science and technology, which had been so remarkably demonstrated in the West.

                                 To be continued