Nirmal Kumar Bose

Born: 22 January 1901

Died: 15 October 1972

He was a leading Indian anthropologist, who played a formative role in “building an Indian Tradition in Anthropology”.
A humanist scholar with a broad range of interests, he was also a leading sociologist, urbanist, Gandhian, and educationist.
Also active in the Indian freedom struggle with Mahatma Gandhi, he was imprisoned in 1931 during the Salt Satyagraha.
He 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 1957–58, 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.
He had also written an explanatory book on the Sun Temple of Konarak in Orissa, in Bengali, titled Konaraker Bibaran.
This title was out of print for a long time till recently, when New Age Publishers Private Limited of Kolkata published a new edition, annotated by Prasenjit Dasgupta and Soumen Paul.
The edited book was also reviewed.
In this review other English works of Bose were cited along with his debate with Stella Kramrisch on the issue of Konark architecture.