Nirmal Kumar Bose
Indian anthropologist (1901–1972)
Nirmal Kumar Bose (22 January 1901 – 15 October 1972) was an Indian anthropologist, who
played a formative role in "building an Indian Tradition in Anthropology". A humanist scholar with a 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.
Early life
He 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 MSc program in geology as a gesture of solidarity with the Non-Cooperation Movement. Later he would earn an MSc degree in anthropology from the University of Calcutta.
Career in anthropology
Bose was originally from Kolkata. His anthropological work was founded on extensive field work and had a pragmatic prescriptive basis, and was considered radical against the background of earlier descriptive work by British anthropologists. He wanted Indian intellectuals to work on Indian anthropology. According to Andre Beteille, Bose showed that the idea that one gets of Indian society by looking at classical texts and the idea that one gets of Indian society by conducting anthropological fieldwork in fact confirm each other; they confirm a picture of a particular kind of social structure.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3342123. VIAF identifies the subject as 46775551. The Library of Congress control number is n50043812. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1972 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nirmal Kumar Bose” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.