In 1896, a small booklet titled the Descriptions with Plans of a Chemical Laboratory: Presidency College, designed by Alexander Pedler, professor of chemistry, and erected by the Bengal Public Works Department, was published by the Bengal Secretariat Press. About thirty-five pages in length, the booklet was composed of a brief introductory note followed by a series of eighteen plates of detailed design and floor plans of both the interior and the exterior structures of the new building.

Pedler outlined the significance of the publication in the following terms:

Appendix A.1 Hindu College Cash Book (1830), The Hindu/ Presidency College Archive

Moral Philosophy, Mental Philosophy, Reformism, Brahmo

On an undisclosed date in the 1880s, the gods came to College Square. There, under the impressive colonnade of the recently completed university building, Varuna informed Brahma, first among the gods, that the recent appointment of Prasanna Kumar Ray (1849–1932) to a professorship in “mental philosophy” (manobijnan śastra) inaugurated a new era in the history of higher education in Bengal. That the gods would descend from Kailaśa to Presidency to celebrate the academic achievements of mortals might appear eccentric, even idiosyncratic, but Durgacarana Ray's puranic novel Debagaṇera marttye āgamana (“The Gods’ Visit on Earth”) was registering a pervasive worldly concern: the enduring interest among the Bengali bhadralok in the “philosophy of mind.”

This chapter investigates how the fortunes of “mental philosophy” rose and fell in College Square. In the early nineteenth century, a set of distinctively Scottish arguments soldering together epistemological realism, neo-Baconian anti-scholasticism, and theories of moral intuition into a single tradition of “common sense” philosophy came to acquire a disciplinary life as an increasingly global subject—“mental philosophy.”Though bemoaned in Britain by “philosophical radicals” as a conservative project unable to make a case for moral change, the common-sense arguments of “mental philosophy” found an unforeseeably radical reception in Calcutta, where Henry Louis Viven Derozio (1809–31) turned to the Scottish idea of self-evident morality to mount an explosively original challenge to extant śastric norms.

As a contribution to a volume devoted to the history of one iconic educational institution, readers might well expect its object of analysis to be fairly clearly defined. Yet, as Michel Foucault reminds us, “concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems.”1 There are two kinds of discontinuities that I want to interrogate. First, the coherence and specificity of disciplinary backgrounds, rather than a general sense of belonging to the Presidency College as a whole. Did disciplinary affiliation, to let us say English literature or history or chemistry, remain confined to the object of analysis alone or did it contribute in some way a student's or teacher's more general social identity? Did it, for instance, in any way shape their political and social choices?

By raising this question, I also want to signal my distance from histories that invoke ahistorical and generalized categories such as “Science” or “Humanities.” Particularly in the case of “Science,” there is now enough scholarship that establishes that whatever might be the political utility of invoking the sign of science, a singular, unified notion of science as a category of historical analysis makes little sense.

P. C. Mahalanobis (1893–1972) taught physics at the Presidency College from 1915 to 1948. During that period he conducted statistical analysis of anthropometric measurements and data on flood, rainfall, crop production, rural indebtedness, the handloom weaving industry, and students’ intelligence. After independence, he emerged as a key figure within the scientific– technocratic apparatus of the developmental state. During that period he played a crucial role in the formulation of the Second Five Year Plan, the construction of the Hirakud dam, and the foundation of the statistical system of India. The physicist-turned-statistician was considered an authority on the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. He was the joint secretary of Visva-Bharati for a decade. This Mahalanobis is known to us. This chapter engages with a lesser-known Mahalanobis who, in the process of coming to terms with the administrative hurdles that he faced in his professional life, strategically assembled an idea of research that bound his academic ambitions with his nationalist aspirations, teaching with innovation, science with society and institutional interests with social concerns. Its larger objective is to examine, through the figure of Mahalanobis, what it meant to do original research in the late colonial context.

In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

State of the Art

The global Second World War caused major humanitarian catastrophes that necessitated relief for soldiers, military and civilian prisoners of war, as well as for other victims of the war, including refugees and displaced persons in Europe and in non-European war zones, particularly in Asia. To assist the ever-increasing needs of these diverse groups became a major task for established humanitarian actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), various national Red Cross Societies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Quakers. They could resort to organisational knowledge and experienced staff, and professionalised more and more their war-related relief work in the course of the ongoing conflict. However, just like during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War, the present global conflagration also saw the emergence of new humanitarian organisations, such as Oxfam and the Catholic Relief Service, that mobilised for special concerns or helped to facilitate potential political alliances. Regardless of whether the humanitarian organisation was an established or a new one, non-state relief agencies entered into close, often co-dependent relationships with states during the war. States understood aid as significant due to moral concerns, but also to safeguard their political, economic and strategic interests, and hence strove to control, guide and coordinate humanitarian activities during and in the aftermath of the war

After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.