THE Centre for Archaeological Studies & Training, Eastern India (CASTEI) is privileged for permission to publish some articles, this volume in English, and the others in Bengali, by a pioneer of Cultural Anthropology and Human Geography in India, Nirmal Kumar Bose (1901-1972).
Bose's published books, and articles collected into books during his lifetime, are numerous. A chronological listing and preliminary attempt to content analyse some of them, based on rough and ready categorisation, was made in the year of his death by his disciple, Professor Surajit Sinha'. Nearly twenty years ago, Sinha, then the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, published an excellent, concisely factual yet characteristically analytical, intellectual biography of his mentor in the Anthropological Survey of India², on whose facts this essay is based.
These two very useful monographs will interest researchers on the social background of Bose's academic discourse. They will also appeal to lay people who would like to know the epic saga of a patriotic social activist, who moved with equal grace among the most neglected and needy in Eastern India's forested hill fastnesses and sandy beaches, as well as in the corridors of knowledge and power.
The articles published in this volume each came out in certain ephemeral journals from the second to the sixteenth decade of the twentieth century. They are chips from a draughtsman's workshop rather than finished products, often preliminary field reports of research, for a broader project meant to be later written up. Yet each can be read for its intrinsic value, since its end-use is often out of print or stored in inaccessible libraries. This is the case with the second and third articles Nirmal Kumar Bose collaborated, in 1939-42, with his colleague in the Department of Anthropology (where he was then lecturing on pre-historic archaeology) Dharani Kumar Sen; they were on excavation at Kuliana in Mayurbhanj, from where a Harvard Scholar, Eugene Worman had guided them to new palaeo sites around Baripada, the capital of the Native State. The book on this, Excavations in Mayurbhanj was published in 1940.
The articles should whet the interest of young archaeologists about the way a geologist (he had a First Class First in the B.Sc. Honours in Geology, from Presidency College, Calcutta in 1919 as well as having been captain of the cricket eleven(1) and had studied in the M.Sc. Geology classes in the University, before rushing into the Non-Cooperation Movement against imperialism under the influence of Dinabandhu C.F. Andrews' social service preaching and Deshabandhu C.R. Das' call for national education) analysed pre-historic artefacts with scientific logic. The fourth article relates more to historic archaeology. It demonstrates the way in which provenance of material objects can be used to infer their dating, before or after known terminal chronological points. This article, first printed in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 1929 has a hint lurking in its inherent logic that seems to contest Rakhaldas Banerjee, then the Bengali archaeologist par excellence, that 'Pathurey Pramaan' [the evidence of (material) stone] was proof of whatever the scholar, who used it, wanted to prove.
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