Background
Nirmal Kumar Bose was born on January 22, 1901 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
anthropologist sociologist urbanist humanist scholar
Nirmal Kumar Bose was born on January 22, 1901 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
Nirmal Kumar Bose attended the Puri Zilla School, the Scottish Church College, and later the Presidency College, which was then affiliated with the University of Calcutta. He dropped out of the Master of Science program in geology as a gesture of solidarity with the Non Cooperation Movement. Later he would earn an Master of Science degree in anthropology from the University of Calcutta.
His anthropological work was founded on extensive field work and had a pragmatic prescriptive basis. His initial work was among the Juang of Orissa, as part of his master's work at Calcutta University (1924–1925). In 1929, Nirmal Kumar Bose brought out Cultural Anthropology, presenting a developing world view of anthropology and culture. 1932 saw the publication of Canons of Orissan architecture, announcing his interest in art and architecture. His sociological interests were reflected in Some aspects of caste in Bengal (1958), and his urbanist interests in Calcutta 1964: a social survey (1968) and Anthropology and some Indian problems (1972).
Among his major works is the study Peasant Life in India (1961), based on a wide study with data collected from 311 out of 322 districts of India. Here Nirmal Kumar Bose comments on the considerable interpenetration in the material culture of rural India, "on the whole independent of language as well as of physical types". Other important works include The Structure of Indian Society (1949).
Nirmal Kumar Bose was also the editor, from 1951 until his death, of the journal Man in India. He was the director of the Anthropological Survey of India from 1959 to 1964. In 1957-1958, he visited the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. In 1965, he undertook a survey of the Hill districts of Assam and in the following year, the tribal regions of Arunachal Pradesh (then NEFA).
Over a long career during much of which he was also involved in political struggle and government offices, he "found time to write more than 700 articles and almost thirty books", writing in both Bengali and English, for the general public and a scholarly audience. In 1972 he was elected President of The Asiatic Society.
