Abstract
Prafulla Chandra Ray’s contribution to the birth and development of an ‘Indian school of chemistry’ is well documented. But much of this recognition is situated in the realm of the social history of science. My aim in this essay is to view Ray through the lens of intellectual history and, above all, to shed fresh light on his actual contribution to the chemistry of the nitrites of mercury. Toward this end the focus here will be on five of Ray’s earliest papers on this family of compounds. We will see that the received narrative that Ray discovered mercurous nitrite is problematic. Examining the texts of his early papers it will be seen that Ray’s main contributions to the nitrites of mercury were (i) his apparently serendipitous discovery of a method of synthesizing mercurous nitrite; and (ii) the identification of and solutions to a series of interrelated Kuhnian normal science problems pertaining to this family of compounds. Furthermore (iii) the tools of intellectual history will help discern an underlying ‘plot structure’ informing the tenure of his work; and finally (iv) we will see that the centre-periphery model that attends the social historiography of science in colonial and post-colonial India plays no role in illuminating Ray’s early creative work on the nitrites of mercury.
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Notes
But see also Golinski 1990 who argued that the beginnings of the chemical revolution can be located in the works of Boyle and others in the seventeenth century.
Indeed, Dhruv Raina (1997) ascribes the birth of the social history of Indian science to Ray’s great 2-volume treatise on the history of Hindu chemistry.
One reviewer of this writer’s recent book The Second Age of Computer Science (2018) referred to it as resembling “Kuhn-inspired internalist histories of science and technology from the 1970s.” (C.C.M. Mody, ISIS, Vol. 111, 2, June 2020, pp 439–440.
See also the bibliography of Ray’s scientific papers in his obituary notice in the Journal of the Indian Chemical Society, XXI, 1944, pp. 253–259 — a journal which Ray himself had founded in 1923.
However, as Chakravorty (2014) has so well illuminated, Ray’s ‘normal science’ had consequences: not only did it initiate a flourishing ‘school of Indian chemistry’ (see Majumdar, 2010)—especially in the realm of nitrites of mercury and other metals (see also Mellor, 1922, pp 758–759)—but it also stimulated other chemists in more recent times to refer to Ray’s original papers in their own investigations. In this sense Ray was not only H-original (that is, original with respect to his past history) but was also what I have termed C-original (‘consequentially original’): his work had consequences or implications for the future history of the field (Dasgupta, 2018).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Dhruv Raina and Arnab Rai Choudhuri for their remarks on an earlier version of this essay. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their critical, acute but constructive comments that helped considerably in shaping the final version of this essay.
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Dasgupta, S. An intellectual history of P.C. Ray’s papers on the nitrites of mercury. Indian J Hist. Sci. 58, 20–28 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43539-023-00078-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43539-023-00078-0