Reflecting on Chemical Education: Nilratan Dhar andthe Legacy of P C Ray

Abstract

This paper takes a close look at the chemist Nilratan Dhar's memoirs published as Reflections on Chemical Education in 1974 and tries to understand how Dhar's renditions of his life and career bore the imprints of his teacher and mentor Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray. It argues that Dhar drew upon Ray's historicizing impulse to tell us not only a story of his own life but also a larger history of chemical research under colonial conditions on the one hand and the Great Wars on the other.