Given the lesser post because he was Indian, he started Indian chemistry himself, with ₹700 and a rented house.
In 1888 a young Bengali came home from Edinburgh with a doctorate in chemistry and a prize for further research. Europeans with lesser degrees were walking into the senior Indian Educational Service. Prafulla Chandra Ray was kept out of it. The next year he took a temporary post as assistant professor at Presidency College, Calcutta, in the lower provincial service.
He did not leave. He taught for the next forty-seven years, and the students in his rooms included Meghnad Saha and Satyendra Nath Bose. In his own house he mixed medicines and chemicals that India had been buying from Europe, and that kitchen chemistry grew into Bengal Chemicals, which is still running more than a century later. Then, at sixty, he gave his whole salary away.
From the Kapotaksha to the laboratory
The lifeline
1861
Born 2 August in Raruli-Katipara, Jessore district, Bengal
1882
Sails for Edinburgh on a Gilchrist scholarship; D.Sc. in 1887
1889
Joins Presidency College, Calcutta, as a temporary assistant professor
1892
Starts Bengal Chemical Works with ₹700 at 91 Upper Circular Road
1916
Becomes the first Palit Professor at the new University College of Science
1944
Dies in Calcutta on 16 June, aged 82
By the numbers
The measure of him
₹700
Capital he started his chemical works with in 1892
47
Years he taught chemistry in Calcutta, from 1889 until he retired in 1936
60
His age in 1921, when he gave his entire salary to Calcutta University
1st
Chemical Landmark Plaque the Royal Society of Chemistry awarded outside Europe
What he made and changed
The work
1886
"India Before and After the Mutiny", a student essay for an Edinburgh prize that criticised British rule and called India "a country of famished peasants." It won a joint second place.
1892
Bengal Chemical Works, made in his own rented house. It became a limited company in 1901 as Bengal Chemical & Pharmaceutical Works and is now Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals.
1896
Mercurous nitrite, Hg2(NO2)2, prepared as a stable compound and reported in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. It started his long series of papers on the nitrites.
1902 · 1909
A History of Hindu Chemistry, in two volumes. He read Sanskrit texts to recover India's metallurgy, alchemy and medicine from ancient times to the 16th century.
1922
Flood relief in North Bengal. When the floods left huge numbers of people homeless, he organised the Bengal Relief Committee and raised money and supplies across the province.
1932 · 1935
Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, his two-volume autobiography, which argues that India needed science, industry and self-reliance.
Honoured at home, unknown abroad
Recognition
In his lifetime
Kept out of the senior Indian Educational Service despite an Edinburgh D.Sc.
Began his company in a rented house in Calcutta
Knighted in 1919; President of the Indian Science Congress in 1920
Known to his students simply as "Acharya", the teacher
Today
India Post issued a stamp for his birth centenary in 1961
Royal Society of Chemistry landmark plaque, unveiled at Presidency College in 2012
The company he began in 1892 still makes chemicals and medicines
Outside South Asia, his name is still barely known
A village in the delta
Raruli-Katipara
He grew up in a landowning family in Raruli, a village on the Kapotaksha river in the Bengal delta. His father, Harish Chandra, kept a library at home, and the boy read through it. Raruli is now in Khulna district, Bangladesh. In 1861, the year Ray was born, Rabindranath Tagore was also born in Bengal.
Khulna
The district, now in Bangladesh, where his birthplace lies
1861
The year both he and Tagore were born in Bengal
1888
The year he came home to Bengal from Edinburgh
"Science can afford to wait, but Swaraj cannot."
— Prafulla Chandra Ray, in the years of the freedom movement
