Ramanathan was born in Kalpathi,
Palakkad to Ramakrishna Sastrigal, an astrologer, printer and
Sanskrit scholar. After completing secondary school, he entered the
Government Victoria College,
Palakkad in 1909. In 1911, he received a government scholarship to attend the
Presidency College, Madras, where he studied for a B.A. (Hons.) degree in physics. He received his honours degree in 1914, and an M.A. two years later in 1916. After taking his M.A., the principal of the Maharaja's College of Science in
Thiruvananthapuram in
Travancore (now the
University College Thiruvananthapuram), who was one of his examiners, offered him the post of a demonstrator in physics. At the college, Ramanathan enjoyed the freedom to conduct his own investigations and to hone his laboratory skills. He travelled across the kingdom and developed the first rainfall map of Travancore; in conjunction with this study, he published his first research paper: "On Thunderstorms over Trivandrum." In late 1921, Ramanathan moved to
Calcutta to collaborate with
C. V. Raman, who had accepted him as a doctoral student, on studies of
X-ray diffraction in liquids. For this work, in June 1922 he received the first-ever D.Sc. degree awarded by the
University of Madras. He joined
Rangoon University as assistant professor of physics in late 1922. During the university holidays, he continued to carry out post-doctoral research under Raman's guidance, and in 1923 observed an unusual "fluorescence" in a beam of light when it was diffracted in water - which Raman eventually concluded was an
effect caused by the substance, associated with a change in frequency equal to the molecular vibrational frequency. ==India Meteorological Department==