Raman was born at Trichinopoly (now Tiruchirappalli) in India and educated at the University of Madras. However, although he revealed considerable talent, he was unable to pursue his education overseas because of ill health. Instead, he chose to enter the civil service where he worked as an auditor for ten years while continuing with his own private research. In 1917 he took up an appointment as professor of physics at the University of Calcutta. In 1933 he moved to Bangalore where he first headed the physics department at the Indian Institute of Science and later, in 1948, became founding director of the Raman Institute.

In 1928 he discovered a spectral effect for which, in 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, thus becoming not only the first Indian but the first Asian to be so honored. The Raman effect (as it is now known) occurs when visible radiation is scattered by the molecules in the medium. Not only will the original frequency of the incident light be found but in addition specific new-frequency lines will be detected as a result of the interaction of photons with the molecules. From these new lines in the spectrum (Raman lines) information can be deduced about the molecular structure. The effect is similar to that found by Arthur Compton for x-rays and had in fact been predicted by Werner Heisenberg some years earlier.