Abstract It is said that during a voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921, the Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888–1970) looked at the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea and questioned where the sea's blue colour came from and why it should be different from the sky's blue. Raman started a series of experiments to address these questions, and he found the blue colour of the sea was not merely due to simple reflection of the sky in water, as most people imagined, but was additionally affected by molecular scattering of light. This led to the discovery of a new inelastic scattering process that is the optical analogue of the “Compton effect”; it is nowadays known as the “Raman effect”. It describes a change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam interacts with molecular vibrations. The possibility for such interaction between matter and light had already been predicted theoretically by Smekal (1923) . The first verification was obtained by Raman and Krishnan (1928) in light scattering experiments on liquids. Only two years later, Sir C.V. Raman (who was knighted in 1929) was the Nobel laureate in physics, honoured for his work on the scattering of light and the discovery of the effect named after him. In his Nobel lecture, given on 11 th December 1930, Sir C.V. Raman said “The frequency differences determined from the spectra, the width and character of the lines appearing in them, and the intensity and state of polarization of the scattered radiations enable us to obtain an insight into the ultimate structure of the scattering substance. […] It follows that the new field of spectroscopy has practically unrestricted scope in the study of problems related to the structure of matter” In 1948, he founded the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, with funds from private sources.