Prafulla Chandra Ray

Prafulla Chandra Ray was born on 2 August 1861 in Raruli-Katipara, a village of the Khulna district in today’s Bangladesh, then part of undivided Bengal. His father, a zamindar who loved learning more than land, built a home library and opened the village’s first school for girls, seating his own wife among its students. Sickly as a boy, he spent two quiet years of his teens in the village, reading his father’s books. In Calcutta he studied at Vidyasagar’s Metropolitan Institution and heard chemistry at Presidency College, where Alexander Pedler’s demonstrations lit a fire in him. He built a little laboratory at home; when a home-made apparatus exploded, he simply rebuilt it: chemistry would be his life, because his country’s future, he believed, would be built on science.

In 1882 he won the Gilchrist scholarship and sailed for Edinburgh; after a BSc in 1885 and a doctorate in 1887, he came home to join Presidency College as assistant professor of chemistry. Colonial rule rarely gave Indians scientific rank, so he built his own school instead. In 1896, in a modest college laboratory, he noticed what nobody had: mercury acting on dilute nitric acid leaves a yellow crystalline solid — mercurous nitrite, $\mathrm{Hg_{2}(NO_{2})_{2}}$ — missed by chemists for centuries. The paper appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and Nature reported it within weeks; it founded a research school of nitrites that British colleagues saluted.

But his grandest laboratory was Bengal itself. Watching India import nearly every medicine it used, in 1892 he began making herbal medicines with seven hundred rupees of capital — a venture that grew into the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works (1901), India’s first pharmaceutical company, still in business today. He mined Sanskrit manuscripts for his History of Hindu Chemistry, and in 1916 became the first Palit Professor at Calcutta University’s new College of Science, where Meghnad Saha and Satyendranath Bose sat in his classes.

Honour kept arriving — a knighthood in 1919, honorary doctorates including Dhaka’s twice — and he kept giving everything away. He never owned a house; on his sixtieth birthday, 1921, he signed over his entire salary to Calcutta University in perpetuity for research, while month after month his pay went to poor students’ fees and to flood and famine relief across Bengal. A lifelong bachelor, he wrote his autobiography for the youth of India and died on 16 June 1944, aged eighty-two. In 2011 the Royal Society of Chemistry raised its first chemical landmark plaque outside Europe in his memory.