Correspondence Early Doctorates Conferred by Indian Universities K Razi Naqvi* * Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. Email: razi.naqvi@ntnu.no This refers to the paper “Doctorate Degrees from India: 1877 (first award) to 1920” by BK Sen published in IJHS 50.3 (2015): 533–534. The purpose of this note is to make two comments, first to correct a factual error and second to add some remarks, both cautionary and elaborative, as regards the meaning evoked (in the mind of a contemporary reader) by the term doctorate. 1. INTRODUCTION In an informative article which lists the doctorates awarded by Indian Universities during the period 1877–1920, Sen (2015) stated: “India produced its first doctorate in the year 1904 when University of Allahabad (f. 1887) awarded D.Sc. to Annoda Prasad Sircar, about half a century after the establishment of the three premier Indian universities. … Till 1920, 13 doctorates were produced from India, one from Allahabad and the remaining 12 from the University of Calcutta.” It will be convenient to quote one more excerpt (in the same format as that used by Sen): Chemistry 1. Sircar, Annoda Prasad. By papers. D.Sc. Allahabad Univ. 1904. The first doctorate from India. Two comments appear to be in order: (1) Unfortunately, Sen has overlooked the fact that a doctorate in mathematics was awarded by Allahabad in 1898 to Ganesh Prasad (Allahabad Univeristy Calendar, 1902, p. 710), and another in 1901 to Zia-ud-din Ahmad (p. 729). (2) Many modern readers—particularly those accustomed to thinking of a doctorate as the recognition of independent research conducted by the awardee, and to reading European “theses” many of which consist of little more than a collection of published papers or submitted manuscripts under review— might be misled into thinking that every ‘doctorate’ was earned on the basis of a substantial body of original research work, or that the phrase “By papers” means “by submitting papers published in research journals”. 2. SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT To support the claims concerning Ganesh Prasad (hereafter GP) and Zia-ud-din Ahmad (hereafter ZUA), it will be sufficient to refer the reader to the University of Allahabad Calendar for the academic year 1902–1903, since it covers previous years as well. The award of a D.Sc. to GP (1898) is mentioned on p. 710; to ZUA (1901), on p. 729. Both names may be found on p. 307, which provides a list of scholars who were granted funds for travelling to England in the pursuit of higher studies; I add here for the sake of completeness, that ZUA’s name is spelt (p. 307) as Zia-Uddin Ahmad, and that the same name is written, much more often than not, as Ziauddin. Such is the difficulty of transcribing (into English) a compound word (in Arabic, Persian or Urdu) that even a university whose name begins with the definite article in Arabic could not cope with the problem of transcribing a name in which two nouns sandwich the two-lettered article al! Indian Journal of History of Science, 54.1 (2019) 108-109 DOI: 10.16943/ijhs/2019/v54i1/49602