Chapter 26 the Making of an Indian School of Chemistry, Calcutta, 1889–1924 Madhumita Mazumdar h istorical accounts of an Indian School of Chemistry begin almost invariably with an observation made in the 23 March 1916 issue of Nature on the contributions of acharya prafulla Chandra ray (1861–1944) in creating a tradition of original chemical research in India. 1 Following this initial acknowledgement of an identifiable school of chemical research in India, subsequent accounts of the development of chemical education in Bengal have invoked a similar set of parameters to celebrate the emergence of Indian chemical science in colonial India. 2 Implicit in these accounts is the argument that the emergence of a distinctively ‘Indian’ School of Chemistry could be discerned not merely by the volume of work produced by the Indian scientists during this period but in their conscious turn towards contemporary problems of ‘pure’ research. 3 It is argued that the first indications of an Indian School of Chemistry in colonial India were evident from the Annual Report on the Progress of Chemistry (1904–56) published by the Chemical Society of London, which mentioned that 120 chemists from India with five or more than five papers could be marked out. publications in different journals of the UK, France, Germany and the United States corroborated the standards of this intellectual attainment. 4 the driving argument in this analysis is that the school of Indian chemistry that took shape within the precincts of the University College of Science in Calcutta was the upshot of a certain reorientation in the research interests of Indian chemists. From an earlier inclination towards ‘need-based’ research encouraged by the colonial government, Indian students who took their first degrees under the guidance of acharya prafulla Chandra ray, and later made their way into european laboratories for post-graduate studies, entered areas perceived as ‘pure research’. this entry into the domains of pure research enabled Indian chemists to participate in the metropolitan communities of science and carve out a distinct professional identity for themselves.