"By grounding these stories where they unfold, I hope audiences better appreciate both the universality of scientific truth and the human circumstances from which it emerged."- Nilanjan P. Choudhury (Author)

Team Kitaab is in conversation with author Nilanjan P. Choudhury where he spoke about his latest book, Encounters with Infinity: Three Plays on Scientific History (Speaking Tiger, 2026).

Nilanjan P. Choudhury is a novelist, theatre-maker and science communicator. His most recent novel is Song of the Golden Sparrow: A Novel History of Free India, a brilliant satire on modern India, published to critical acclaim. His earlier novel Shillong Times is a coming-of-age story set against the ethnic conflict in Shillong in the 1980s. It has been widely recognized as an important new voice in the literature of the Northeast, and was nominated for the Sahitya Akademi Award (2023).

His debut novel, a mythological thriller entitled Bali and the Ocean of Milk, was a best-seller. His subsequent writings include The Case of the Secretive Sister, a contemporary detective caper set in Bangalore. His plays on science history which include The Square Root of a Sonnet, The Trial of Abdus Salam and Invisible Particles, have been staged to wide acclaim across India, Europe and the USA. Nilanjan grew up in Shillong and studied at IIM, Ahmedabad and IIT Kanpur. He now lives in Bangalore with his family. He can be reached at http://www.nilanjan.net.

About the Book:

Encounters with Infinity is a collection of plays, based on the lives of three pioneering physicists from the Indian sub-continent and other associated historical figures. Set against the backdrop of the epoch-making events of the 20th century—the two great world wars, the Indian freedom struggle and above all, the birth of the strange new sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics, the plays bring alive the stories of these remarkable men and women who forever changed our fundamental understanding of the infinitely vast, infinitely mysterious universe, in which we live.

The Square Root of a Sonnet explores the history and science of black holes, through the lens of the intriguing and complex relationship between two giants of modern astrophysics—the brilliant Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his guru, Sir Arthur Eddington.

The Trial of Abdus Salam is a courtroom drama that examines the fascinating life of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in Physics (1979), for his contributions to the unification of the fundamental forces of nature, who today lies buried in a desecrated grave, isolated and rejected by his own country.

Invisible Particles reimagines the erased history of India’s first woman physicist, Bibha Chowdhuri, and her struggles against the deeply entrenched patriarchy, social prejudices, and colonial injustices of her times, as she joins the global hunt for an elusive, elementary particle—the meson.

Team Kitaab: You frame scientific lives as drama. What does theatre allow you to express about science that biography or history cannot?

Nilanjan P. Choudhury (NPC): Theatre allows me to move beyond documenting events and explore the emotional, psychological and moral worlds in which the struggles of scientists and their discoveries take place. Unlike a biography, a play can juxtapose memory, imagination, humour and symbolism to reveal the external and internal conflicts that often drive creativity whether it is in science, the arts or any other realm of human endeavour. It also allows audiences to experience scientific ideas collectively, as living conversations rather than dry facts and technical details only.

My aim is to show that science is not just about equations and laboratory experiments, but about the very human search for meaning.

Team Kitaab: Your plays sit at the intersection of relativity, quantum mechanics, and political upheaval. Do you see scientific discovery as shaped by its historical moment or rising above it?

NPC: Scientific ideas may be universal, but the people who discover them are deeply shaped by their historical circumstances. War, colonialism, religious persecution and discrimination influenced not only the lives and works of the protagonists of my plays such as S. Chandrasekhar, Abdus Salam, Marietta Blau and Bibha Chowdhuri, but also the opportunities available to them. At the same time, the truths they uncovered transcend those circumstances and belong to all humanity. That tension between the universality of science and the specific social and historical circumstances in which the science gets done, is central to my work.

Team Kitaab: Why did you choose the format of plays, rather than essays or narrative nonfiction, to tell these scientific histories?

NPC: Theatre combines ideas with emotion in a uniquely immediate way. It allows scientific concepts to be explained through dialogue, stage demonstrations, visuals, humour and conflict while simultaneously exploring the personal journeys of the scientists themselves. I also enjoy the freedom that theatre offers through non-linear narratives, surreal imagery, imagined conversations and psychological explorations that illuminate historical and scientific truths without compromising factual accuracy. That combination would be much harder to achieve in conventional nonfiction.

Team Kitaab: These physicists worked in an era of war and decolonisation. How did global conflict shape the production of universal scientific knowledge?

NPC: The twentieth century showed that science never develops in isolation from politics. War displaced scientists, colonial structures limited opportunities, and prejudice shaped whose work was recognised and whose contributions were forgotten. Yet science also created international communities that transcended national boundaries, as institutions like ICTP, Trieste demonstrated. My plays explore both these realities—the vulnerability of science to politics and its remarkable capacity to unite people across cultures.

Team Kitaab: Science often claims universality, but your work is rooted in specific geographies and lives. Is there a tension between the universal and the situated in your writing?

NPC: I don’t see this as a contradiction but as a necessary balance. Universal scientific laws are discovered by people living in very specific historical, cultural and political contexts. By grounding these stories where they unfold – whether in Calcutta, Chicago, Lahore, Cambridge or Trieste, I hope audiences better appreciate both the universality of scientific truth and the human circumstances from which it emerged. The local, in many ways, becomes the gateway to the universal.

Team Kitaab: Your title invokes infinity. Do you treat infinity here as a scientific concept, a philosophical idea, or a dramatic metaphor?

NPC: I think it is all three. As the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran beautifully observes, what is extraordinary about the idea an infinitely vast universe is not simply in its mathematical or physical grandeur and mystery, but that a puny three-pound human brain can contemplate the mind-blowing idea of infinity—and even contemplate itself doing so.

My plays celebrate that uniquely human impulse to ask questions, whether through science, philosophy or art. In that sense, Encounters with Infinity is less about reaching definitive answers than about our endless search for knowledge, meaning and wonder. At its best, scientific discovery, like theatre, continually opens new questions rather than offering final answers and these plays are ultimately about curiosity, wonder and pushing the limits of human understanding.

Team Kitaab: How do you dramatise abstract ideas like quantum mechanics without reducing their complexity or turning them into allegory?

NPC: I try not to dumb down the science to the point where it loses all its subtlety, power and inherent complexity. Instead, I build dramatic situations in which complex scientific ideas emerge naturally through stage experiments and demonstrations, metaphors and conversations between characters – for example, in ways that are similar to Galileo’s Dialogues.

The audience encounters these concepts much as the scientists themselves once did – as beginners. They are introduced to the basics of what is known and unknown and as the play progresses, they are nudged to gain a deeper understanding through curiosity, debate and uncertainty. However, since factual accuracy is extremely important to me, the science is always grounded in careful research rather than metaphor alone.

Team Kitaab: What drew you to the lesser-told personal histories like the relationships, doubts, and rivalries behind landmark scientific breakthroughs?

NPC: I have always been fascinated by the gap between scientific achievement and public memory. Many extraordinary scientists, particularly women and those from the Global South, have been overlooked despite making fundamental contributions. Their stories reveal ambition, achievements, failure, friendship and resilience in ways that conventional histories often overlook.

Bringing those forgotten lives back into public conversation is one of the motivations behind my writing.
Nilanjan P. Choudhury – Author, Encounters with Infinity: Three Plays on Science History (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

Team Kitaab: Do you think the figure of the scientist is still culturally understood as a human being with contradictions, or has it become too mythologised?

NPC: I think scientists are often presented either as flawless geniuses or as distant experts, and both stereotypes flatten their humanity. The scientists I write about were deeply contradictory people—with doubts, rivalries, convictions, quirks and personal struggles. Those contradictions do not diminish their achievements; they make those achievements more remarkable. Theatre allows us to recover that complexity.

Team Kitaab: If science is one way of understanding the infinite, what do you think theatre contributes to that pursuit?

NPC: Science helps us understand the universe, but theatre helps us understand ourselves as we pursue that understanding. It explores the hopes, fears, contradictions and moral choices that accompany every great act of discovery, reminding us, as the philosopher Blaise Pascal suggested, that reason alone does not encompass the whole of human experience.

What unites science and theatre is curiosity—the desire “to know,” which, as the playwright Tom Stoppard writes, is what makes us matter. I hope my plays show that the pursuit of knowledge is not only an intellectual journey, but also a profoundly human one.