journal
of science education
Professor T R Seshadri – An Acharya
par Excellence.
Thiruvenkata Rajendra Seshadri was born on the 3rd of February 1900, in the small town of Kulitalai on the banks of the river Kaveri near Tiruchirapalli in the then presidency of Madras. He was the third of five brothers and his father was a school teacher. Seshadri had his early education in the temple towns of Srirangam and Tiruchirapalli. He gave credit to his dedicated teachers for instilling in him eternal values such as a sense of duty, obligation to society, love of humanity and thirst for knowledge. He then joined Presidency College, Madras, to do his chemistry honours course. During this time he stayed at Sri Ramakrishna Mission’s students home. The spiritual values he learned from the Swamijis there remained with him all through his life. At Presidency College, he was taught by B B Dey and P Narayana Iyer, whom he revered and remembered for the rest of his life. After securing the Master’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Madras, he worked with Dey on the synthesis of quinolino-a-pyrones, which earned for him two prizes from the University of Madras. In 1927, the Government of Madras selected him for an overseas scholarship that enabled him to do research under Robert Robinson on new antimalarial drugs and the synthesis of anthocyanins, and obtain a doctorate degree of the University of Manchester. Later, Sir Robert, recalling those years, paid rich tribute to the experimental skills of Seshadri shown in evolving viable synthetic routes to anthocyanins. He spent the summer of 1929 in the laboratories of the Austrian Nobel laureate, Fritz Pregl at Graz, to learn organic microanalysis. He also did part-time work on agricultural analysis under Cameron who was the agricultural analyst for the county of Fife. Sesha-dri completed his research training in Europe with a study of the alkaloid retrorsine under the guidance of G Barger at the University of Glasgow.
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