Dipankar Sengupta #SundayClub

In July 1938, a 26 year old chemist sat for a job interview in Simla and told Sir S.S. Bhatnagar, sitting on the selection committee, that some of Bhatnagar's own statements were factually incorrect. Bhatnagar gave him the job. And took a fatherly interest in him for the rest of his life. The young man was Santi Ranjan Palit. You have not heard of him. Polymer chemists everywhere still use his work. On her mother's word, he refused to take his degree from the hands of the British Chancellor at convocation. Tea, to her mother, was a British planter's crop. So Palit never drank tea in his life. Stanford wanted to give him a doctorate. He declined. He already held a DSc from Calcutta. Instead, in 1946, he went to Brooklyn to train under Herman Mark, the father of polymer science. He came home months before Independence. M.N. Saha made him Prof. and Head of Physical Chemistry at IACS, Calcutta, in 1947. There he worked out something quietly elegant: certain dyes stick to specific chemical end-groups on polymer chains, so colour itself becomes a measuring instrument. His dye-partition method for finding polymer end-groups came out in 1960-62 and was picked up in international journals. Herman Mark's verdict: "the leading polymer scientist in India and in fact the most prominent representative of this discipline in the Far East, a recognized member of the small group of leading polymer scientists in the entire world." More than 350 research papers. More than 80 PhD students. And, in a student's recollection, he turned half his Calcutta mansion into a free hostel for needy students, meals included. The father of polymer research in India. No Wikipedia page. His only biography is a single academy memoir. Sources: INSA Biographical Memoirs - Santi Ranjan Palit (Fellow, 1953); S.R. Palit, Die Makromolekulare Chemie 38 (1960); J. Polymer Science 50 (1961); Pure & Applied Chemistry 4 (1962); student recollection, SPSI. Photo 1: Palit's signed portrait, from the first page of the INSA memoir. Photo 2: His 1939 shellac paper from the Lac Research Institute, the exact job Bhatnagar gave him after that Simla interview. S.R. Palit & G.N. Bhattacharya (1939), via Zenodo. Photo 3: A 1975 paper from the University of Missouri titled "The Palit Relationship Applied to Polystyrene" - American researchers testing and confirming an equation named after him, while he was still working in Calcutta. This is the visual proof of "polymer chemists everywhere still use his work. Photo 4: The memoir page with the mother/tea vow, the Bhatnagar interview, and the declined Stanford doctorate, highlighted.