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Science and politics rarely sustain each other for long. A scientist who wanders into political conviction is expected, sooner or later, to make a choice – either the conviction stays decorative, a personal opinion held softly alongside the real work of the laboratory, or it takes over entirely and the science is the first casualty, reduced to slogans, or worse, bent to fit whatever the party of the day needs it to prove. The 20th century saw no shortage of cautionary examples in both directions: scientists who kept their politics so private that their work said nothing about the world they lived in, and scientists who let politics dictate their science until the science stopped being trustworthy at all. What almost never happens is a scientist who lets the two disciplines actually argue with each other for an entire working life, each one correcting the other’s excesses, neither one permitted to simply win.

M.P. Parameswaran died in Thrissur at 91 after spending close to 60 years being exactly that rare and mostly unrewarded thing. He trained as a nuclear engineer inside a state institution built on the premise that scientific progress and centralised planning were more or less the same project, and he carried that training into a Marxist party built on a closely related premise, and then spent the second half of his life refusing to let either institution’s assumptions go unexamined.

He questioned his own party’s model of development with the same instruments he had been trained to question a reactor’s safety margins, and he questioned the scientific establishment’s faith in bigger projects with the same moral seriousness he brought to questions of class and equality. It is this refusal to let either science or politics simply defer to the other that makes the shape of his life worth tracing carefully, because almost nothing about it follows the expected pattern, and the places where the pattern breaks are exactly the places worth lingering over.

He began, after all, inside the most confident institution Indian science had to offer. Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) took him in 1956, straight out of an engineering degree from Kerala, at a moment when the country was placing its long-term stake on centralised power generation and heavy industrial capacity, and a doctorate from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1965 should have set the remaining........

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