Abstract
THE death occurred on July 25, after a short illness, of Dr. Panchanan Mitra, head of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Calcutta. Panchanan Mitra, born in Calcutta on May 25, 1891, was a member of a family already distinguished in the study of Indian history and culture. His grandfather, Raja Rajendra Lal Mitra, was the first Indian president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. After a distinguished career at the University of Calcutta and four years as a lecturer in English, Panchanan Mitra in 1919 was awarded the Premchand Raichand Scholarship of his university for a thesis afterwards (1923) published under the title “Prehistoric India”; and in the same year was appointed to the staff of the Department of Anthropology, of which he became head on the retirement of Diwan Bahadur Dr. Anantha Krishna lyer in 1932. In 1929, at the instance of Dr. Craighill Handy, he was appointed to a fellowship of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and travelled extensively in Polynesia, collecting evidence bearing upon the problem of the influence of Indian cultural traits on Polynesia. His results are now on the point of publication. A period spent at Yale University working with Dr. Clark Wissler on distributional studies resulted in “A History of American Anthropology” (Calcutta, 1931), for which he was awarded a Ph.D. In 1931 also he visited Spain and southern France as a member of the American School of Archaeology in France. Two years later he presided over the Anthropological Section of the Indian Science Congress.
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Dr. Panchanan Mitra. Nature 138, 750 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138750a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138750a0