New Delhi: Jayant Vishnu Narlikar had the answers to how the universe came to be, literally. He helped develop the Steady State Theory that provided an alternative to the Big Bang Theory. The community of scientists, former students and fans are mourning the death of an astrophysicist and part-time science fiction author who reshaped our relationship with the sky.
Narlikar passed away at his Pune residence Tuesday at the age of 86. He wasn’t just a globally famous astrophysicist confined to labs and institutes. Across India and especially in Maharashtra, he is known for bringing science to the masses at a time when education was inaccessible and language was a barrier.
He wrote around 10 fiction and non-fiction books in Marathi around space science, cosmology and astrophysics. What’s more, they were so written that children could find them accessible. His influence extends to the country’s science education as well—he served as the Chairman for the advisory committee for science and mathematics textbooks for NCERT in 2005.
“There’s an entire generation of Indian and especially Marathi scientists that were raised by Dr. Narlikar’s work,” Aniket Sule, an associate professor at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, told ThePrint.
.@IndiaDST bids farewell to Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of India’s most brilliant astrophysicists & a beloved science communicator.
From co-developing the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity to founding @IUCAAstro, Prof. Narlikar was a giant who shaped Indian cosmology. pic.twitter.com/xyNWXfmarK
— DSTIndia (@IndiaDST) May 20, 2025
Born on 19 July, 1938, Narlikar grew up in Benaras (Varanasi) where his father was a professor at the Banaras Hindu University. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was the vice chancellor of the university at that time.
Narlikar completed his BSc from the BHU and went on to study mathematics at Cambridge University. It was in Cambridge that Narlikar first interacted with renowned astrophysicist Fred Hoyles. The two later collaborated.
At the time, Hoyles was already working on the Steady State Theory which proposed that the universe never had a beginning or an end rather it has always existed, in a steady state.
“I am credited with the Steady State Theory but I didn’t actually propose it, Fred Hoyles did,” Narlikar is quoted as saying in an interview in 2015. “I basically put a lot of mathematics into it in the later stages and developed the Quasi-Steady State Cosmology Theory”.
India mourns the loss of Dr. Jayant Narlikar (1938–2025), a visionary astrophysicist and science communicator who inspired my generation with his popular works such as ‘The lighter side of gravity’ and ‘Seven wonders of the cosmos’
His pioneering contributions in cosmology… pic.twitter.com/Hnq1NfEbLk— Dr. S Somanath (@SomanathSpeak) May 20, 2025
The commonly accepted Big Bang Theory proposes that there was a big bang which led to the origin of the universe, and since then it has been expanding. The Quasi-Steady State Cosmology Theory, which Hoyles and Narlikar worked on in 1993, went against this to say that while the universe is expanding, it did not have a hot, ‘banging’ origin and had always maintained a constant level of density.
“Later on, the Big Bang Theory became more commonly accepted because of the cosmic microwave background radiation observations,” said Sule. “But Narlikar’s work was so important at a time when no one knew what the true origin of the universe was. It posited scientific enquiry and took forward the cause of cosmological research. It led people to question how our universe actually came around?”
‘Inspired a generation of scientists’
In a 2022 video celebrating his 84th birthday, Narlikar’s Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) colleagues, current stalwarts of Indian astrophysics like Somak Roychaudhary, Ajit Kembhavi, and Kandaswamy Subramanian, credit him with their introduction to astrophysics. They recalled their encounters with his work, be it his short science fiction in Illustrated Weekly or a news article in Deccan Herald about his scientific work at the Cambridge.
“If it wasn’t for him, I would have never gotten into the field of science, much less astrophysics,” Roychaudhary said, a sentiment shared by the other physicists.
According to Dr. Sule, Narlikar’s contribution is invaluable not just in the scientific research he did but also in the communities and institutions that he built.
After coming back to India from the Cambridge in 1972, Narlikar first worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, alongside setting up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics. It was the first government-facilitated institute dedicated solely to astrophysics in India. Narlikar both envisioned and set it up.
“Narlikar’s most famous book is Akashashi Jadale Nate in Marathi – which loosely translates to developing a relationship with the sky. I think it also best describes Narlikar’s contribution to India,” said Sule. “He helped all of us get closer to the sky.”
Director of Raman Research Institute Dr. Tarun Souradeep, who was Narlikar’s student at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), said, “I was fortunate to be part of the founding batch of IUCAA with Dr. Narlikar as one of my supervisors.”
“Even though he was such a big figure in cosmology, he always gave his students full freedom in the research they wanted to pursue. It was his foresight that made IUCAA the place that it is.”
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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