Draft:Pramada Ranjan Ray

Pramada Ranjan Ray was born on 18 June 1874 (per the official Survey of India service record; family sources give 1875 — see § Birth and death dates) into the Ray family of the village of Masua (Bengali: মশুয়া, also romanised as Moshua), in the Katiadi sub-district of Kishoreganj (then part of the larger Mymensingh District of undivided Bengal), in what is now Bangladesh.^[10][7] The village name is preserved in the title of the family history compiled by his grandnephew Hitendrakishore Raychowdhury: Upendrakishore O Moshua Ray Poribaarer Golposholpo (lit. Stories of Upendrakishore and the Ray Family of Moshua).^[11] His father was Kalinath Ray, known as Munshi Shyamsundar, a scholar in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, consulted by both Hindu pandits and Muslim maulvis for his learning; his mother was Joytara Devi.^[7][12] Kamadaranjan Ray (1863–1915), the second eldest of the brothers, was adopted as a child by a zamindar family in Mymensingh and became known as Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, the celebrated children's writer, publisher, and printing pioneer. His brothers included Saradaranjan Ray (1858–1925), the eldest, a scholar in mathematics and Sanskrit, Principal of Metropolitan (Vidyasagar) College, and a celebrated cricketer known as the W. G. Grace of India; Muktidaranjan Ray (1867–1934), professor at the same college and also a cricketer; and Kuladaranjan Ray (1873–1950), a children's author, celebrated photo-portrait artist whose enlarged portraits hung in virtually every respectable Bengali household of the time, and also a cricketer. Pramadaranjan too was a keen cricketer.^[12]

Pramada Ranjan Ray, like his adopted brother Upendrakishore, converted to Brahmoism, while some of his siblings remained Hindu.^[13] In 1905 he married Surama Devi, who had been taken into Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury's household as a child of three after her mother's sudden death and her birth-father Ramkumar Bhattacharya (later the sannyasi Ramananda Bharati) had placed his daughters in the care of friends before departing as a sannyasi.^[12][14] Having grown up in Upendrakishore's household, Surama Devi addressed Pramadaranjan as chhoto kaka (youngest paternal uncle); to the next generation — Upendrakishore's children including Sukumar Ray — he was chhoto dadu (youngest paternal grandfather's brother).^[15]

The Ray brothers and their families lived in remarkable closeness. From 1914, the extended family gathered around Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury's large new house at 100 Garpar Road, north Calcutta, which he had designed himself. The household operated as a classic joint family, with married sons, brothers, and their children living under the same roof and opening their doors to relatives in times of need — when Kuladaranjan Ray lost his wife, he and his children moved in with Upendrakishore; when the family faced crisis after the collapse of U. Ray and Sons and the sale of the Garpar house in the mid-1920s, members scattered across Calcutta but continued to take each other in.^[7] The future filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who grew up partly in this milieu, later recalled the Garpar house in his childhood memoir Jakhan Chhoto Chhilam as a place crammed with relatives and alive with the activity of the printing press on the ground floor.^[16] His grandniece Nalini Das, daughter of Upendrakishore's daughter Punyalata Chakraborty and later Principal of Bethune College, Calcutta, recalled that Pramadaranjan's children were regular visitors to family gatherings.^[17] Almost the entire Ray family — Upendrakishore's children Sukumar, Subinoy, and Sukhalata, and his brothers Kuladaranjan and Pramadaranjan — contributed to the children's magazine Sandesh, leading the poet Buddhadeva Bose to remark that the Rays seemed to hold a monopoly in Bengali children's writing.^[7]

Pramadaranjan and Surama had eight children — confirmed by Satyajit Ray in Jakhan Chhoto Chhilam, who recalls that about four of the eight were living with their father in Bhowanipur after his retirement^[16] — of whom the second daughter Leela Majumdar (1908–2007) became one of the most celebrated Bengali children's writers of the twentieth century.^[12] When in 1933 Leela married Dr. Sudhir Kumar Majumdar (1897–1984), a Hindu dentist and graduate of Harvard Dental School, Pramada Ranjan, firm in his Brahmo convictions, disowned her. She retained cordial relations with her mother and siblings.^[13] Leela herself noted the irony that when her father had married Surama in a Brahmo ceremony, the eldest brother Saradaranjan Ray — a Hindu who might have been expected to object — did not oppose the match, though he was far from pleased by it.^[9]

The family was based in Shillong during Pramadaranjan's northeastern posting years, living there for one major stretch of approximately 1911 to 1919. Before settling in Shillong proper, the family spent time in Cherrapunjee, where Pramadaranjan was engaged on Survey work in the surrounding jungle terrain, with elephants, horses and donkeys accompanying his team on field duty; it was in Cherrapunjee that Leela and her siblings had their first elephant ride, on an elephant belonging to the Survey Department itself.^[9][18]

The family then shifted to Shillong, living briefly in a small house on a hilly slope in the locality of Laban, surrounded by eucalyptus trees, before moving to a house called 'High Woods' where they lived for eight years from 1911 to 1919.^[9][18] 'High Woods' was rented from a Khasi landlord named Jeebon Roy, and later from his son Chandranath Roy after Jeebon Roy's death in 1903; the rent was forty-five rupees a month. In 1916, when Leela's youngest brother was born, Chandranath Roy built additional rooms including a study with bookshelves rather than ask the family to vacate.^[9][18] Laban was the locality where much of Shillong's Bengali community was concentrated — government clerks and professionals who had come from Calcutta and Sylhet in search of employment — and within it, a substantial community of Brahmo families had established themselves, the Rays among them.^[18]

As Brahmos, the family participated actively in Shillong's Brahmo community life. Sunday schools were held in Laban where stories were narrated, songs sung and poems recited; Maghotsav — the annual celebration commemorating the founding of the Brahmo Samaj on 25 January — was observed each year with competitions, feast and upasana under the shade of trees at Chandmari, to which Hindu Bengali neighbours also contributed and attended.^[9][18] Several prominent Brahmos visited Shillong during these years, including Rabindranath Tagore, who came for the first time in October 1919 and whose recital of Puraton Britto at a house called Brookside in Kenches Trace left the young Leela spellbound — though her father Pramadaranjan, characteristically, found Tagore's flowing hair an object of impatience rather than veneration, a reaction that sat in some irony alongside the family's deep participation in the broader Brahmo cultural world to which Tagore also belonged.^[9][18] Two Brahmo figures who made a lasting impression on young Leela during these years were her neighbour Sarada Manjari Dutta, a schoolteacher of around sixty who took care of the children when their mother fell ill and was known for going from house to house caring for sick women, and Nilmoni Chakraborty, a Brahmo missionary living in Cherrapunjee who worked for the upliftment of poor Khasi villagers, established primary schools, and practised as an untrained homeopathic doctor.^[9][18]

The Shillong years shaped Leela Majumdar's sensibility in ways she returned to throughout her writing life. When Pramadaranjan was transferred to the Map Publication headquarters in Calcutta in 1919, Leela — then in the sixth standard and having spent her entire conscious childhood in the hill station — left with a sense of loss that, she later wrote, never entirely left her. When she returned to Shillong after twenty-five years she found little that she had known; after twenty-eight years the preserved forest was gone entirely. The sounds, fragrances and images of those years remained with her regardless.^[9][18]

Ray left Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur without completing his degree — the West Bengal Board of Primary Education's official Class 4 Bengali textbook Patabahar states explicitly that he left his studies incomplete (পাঠ অসম্পূর্ণ রেখেই) — but ranked first in the Survey of India entrance examination,^[19] joining the department on 21 November 1898 as Probationary Sub-Assistant Superintendent 3rd grade, attached to the Trigonometrical Branch Office in Dehradun for training.^[20] In the preface to his book, he recalls spending approximately twenty to twenty-two years on field surveys in remote and dangerous terrain.^[21]

His field career ran from 1899 to approximately 1920. On 5 October 1899 he was posted to Upper Burma as Sub-Assistant Superintendent, attached to No. 11 Party, Topographical Survey, and was promoted to 3rd grade on 21 November 1899 and 2nd grade on 11 June 1901.^[20] After privilege leave from 26 June 1901, he returned to Upper Burma in 1904 as Sub-Assistant Superintendent 1st grade, attached to Nos. 11 and 21 Parties.^[20] From 1 October 1904 he served on the North-West Frontier, attached to No. 11 Party, where his surveys included the Bannu and Torchi valleys.^[20][21] After privilege leave from 24 May 1905, he returned to the Shan States, No. 11 Party, from 1 October 1905, and was promoted to Extra Assistant Superintendent 6th grade on 27 February 1906.^[20] From 19 May 1906 he was transferred to Burma, No. 20 Party, Topographical Forest Survey, and by July 1908 was posted to Party No. 20 in Assam under Burma Surveys supervision.^[20] His Burma postings covered the Shan States (1899–1902 and 1905–1906), Kengtung (1902–1904), and the Chin Hills (1906–1907), travelling on foot through dense jungle, often with no roads or settlements within twenty to twenty-five miles.^[21] From 1907 onwards he worked across northeastern India, including East Bengal, Assam, Tripura, the Lushai Hills (1908–1909), the Khasi Hills, Jaintia Hills, Kamrup, and Dimapur.^[21] The family was based in Shillong during his northeastern postings, and in 1919 he was transferred to Calcutta.^[14]

Following the transfer to Calcutta, Ray moved from field survey work into the administrative and cartographic production branch of the department. By 1920 he held the post of Head Draftsman of No. 1 Drawing Office at the Survey's Calcutta Map Publication headquarters — the department's senior-most drawing office, responsible for engraving and publishing the India and Adjacent Countries Series, the Carte Internationale du Monde at 1:1,000,000 scale, the Southern Asia Series, and standard one-inch topographical sheets — with a salary of Rs. 500 plus a city allowance of Rs. 100.^[10] On 15 April 1927, following the departure of E.B. West, he took charge as Officer in Charge of No. 1 Drawing Office — the central map production establishment in Calcutta, directly under the Director of Map Publication — a position he held until his retirement.^[22] Under his tenure the office was reorganised into two divisions: a Head-Quarters Division under his own supervision, handling geographical map engraving and all non-routine work, and a General Division under the Head Draftsman for routine topographical sheet production and re-issues.^[22] The same survey year's Map Publication Report distinguishes him clearly as "Pramadaranjan Ray, R.S." in charge of No. 1 Drawing Office, Calcutta — separate from a "Rama Prasad Ray" concurrently posted at No. 2 Drawing Office, Dehra Dun — confirming that these were two different officers.^[22] In the Survey's Disposition List of Administrative Officers corrected to 1st January 1931, he is listed among the Class I Superintendents as "in charge No. 1 Drawing Office, Calcutta."^[23] Within the Survey's hierarchy in this period, Class I Superintendents — of whom there were approximately thirty across the entire department — sat directly below the Directors (who commanded the five regional Survey Circles and the Geodetic and Map Publication branches), who in turn reported to the Surveyor General of India.^[22][23]

By the 1912–13 survey season, already holding the title of Rai Sahib, Ray commanded the largest of three survey camps in the No. 12 Party (Assam), with a strength of nine surveyors — more than either of his two co-commanders — responsible for mapping the Kamrup and Darrang districts; within the same party, a separate camp was assigned to the Kamrup-Darrang-Bhutan boundary area, the most topographically challenging portion of an otherwise flat survey region.^[24] By the 1914–15 season his team had grown to ten surveyors and two trainees, mapping nearly three standard topographical sheets — each covering approximately 192 square miles at the 1-inch-to-the-mile scale — a considerable portion of which was carried out at the more detailed 2-inch-to-the-mile scale required for the densely wooded reserved forest areas where heavy vegetation made every measurement harder; after the field season closed he was additionally assigned to supervise the preparation of the finished fair maps — the clean, publication-ready versions drawn from the season's raw field data — covering three further sheets.^[25]

In June 1913 the title of Rai Sahib was conferred on him by the British Indian government, at which point he held the rank of Extra Assistant Superintendent.^[3] In 1924–25 he was promoted temporarily to the Class I Service, the senior-most grade of civilian officers in the department.^[26] On 13 June 1929, at a durbar held at Murree, he was elevated to Rai Bahadur by the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Northern Command.^[4] He retired from the Survey of India on 18 March 1930, recorded in the department's list of casualties for the year ending 31 December 1930 as a Class I Superintendent.^[23]

Pramadaranjan Ray emerges from the accounts of his daughter Leela Majumdar and grandnephew Satyajit Ray as a figure of formidable physical and moral force, whose personal code was as exacting as the terrain he spent two decades surveying. Leela Majumdar records in Pakdandi that his body had been hardened like brick by a lifetime of hockey, cricket and horse-riding, and that he believed children could not become proper human beings without firm discipline — she notes with characteristic dry humour that though he had been raised by his eldest brother Saradaranjan Ray, who shared the same philosophy, Pramadaranjan was "one notch more" (আরেক কাটি বাড়া) than even Saradaranjan.^[9][18] Satyajit Ray independently corroborates this in English in his memoir Childhood Days, recalling that Pramadaranjan "could not stand even the hint of femininity in a man" and that he made the young Satyajit join his sons for regular physical exercise.^[2] He was sharply critical of the milieu of Santiniketan, which he considered effeminate, and objected even to Rabindranath Tagore's flowing hair — a reaction his daughter recorded in both Aar Konokhaney and Pakdandi as entirely characteristic of him, and one that sat in some irony alongside the family's deep participation in the broader Brahmo cultural world to which Tagore also belonged.^[27][9][2]

Running alongside this strictness was an insistence on the dignity of labour that he applied without exception to himself. Leela Majumdar records in Pakdandi that he would tell his children: "Do not unnecessarily let others serve you, not even salaried servants. Why should you not be able to polish your own shoes which even an illiterate person can do?" — and that he continued to polish his own shoes himself even at the senior ranks of the Survey, a practice he never abandoned.^[9][18] He also personally taught his children mathematics.^[9][18] He held his British superiors in no uncritical regard, but they did earn his genuine admiration on strictly professional grounds — for their punctuality, diligence and irreproachable honesty — and he was, Leela records, no sycophant.^[9][18]

His martial temperament found its sharpest expression during the First World War, when he wished urgently to enlist. He kept a heavy service gun at home, well maintained and lubricated, which he routinely carried in the dense jungles of the Khasi Hills on survey duty; when war broke out, his daughter Leela recalled fearing not that he might be killed at the front, but that he would turn the same weapon on Germans that he had hitherto reserved for tigers.^[9][18] His superior British officer dissuaded him from enlisting by pointing out that his survey work in strategically important and difficult terrain was itself an essential contribution to the war effort, and that he was more needed there than at the front — a judgement that, given his two decades of mapping remote frontier territory, was not without foundation.^[9][18]

Yet the same man was irresistible to children as a storyteller. When Pramadaranjan visited the Garpar Road household, children would immediately begin clamouring — "গল্প বল, গল্প বল" (tell a story, tell a story) — for his tales of jungles, wild animals and distant lands. His storytelling was so magnetic that he could deploy the mere promise of a story as leverage: on one occasion, while trying to read Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines on holiday, he was interrupted by a young visitor who demanded a story. To discourage him, Pramadaranjan said he would tell a story only if the boy could swallow the small live fish he was holding in his hand — whereupon the boy immediately did so, the fish still wriggling as it went down. The visitor was Monglu, the short-lived younger son of Kadambini Ganguly — the first Indian woman to graduate in medicine — who was the stepmother of Upendrakishore's wife Bidhumukhi Devi.^[9] Leela Majumdar also records that he was deeply uncomfortable with his honorary titles and actively discouraged anyone from using them, never trading on his official distinctions in any social context — a humility that may partly explain why many of his most memorable anecdotes circulated for years without their origin being acknowledged.^[9]

Ray wrote Baner Khabar (Bengali: বনের খবর, lit. News from the Forest), based on field diaries kept during his survey years and written up after retirement. The accounts were first serialised in the family magazine Sandesh, beginning from the magazine's fourth issue (Shravan 1320, ~August 1913) — within the very first year of the magazine's existence — running across nine instalments through Bengali year 1320 (~August 1913–March 1914),^[28][29] with the original Sandesh illustrations drawn by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury himself, and the very first instalment opening with the account of his servant Suchit's desperate flight from a tiger in the Burmese jungle.^[30] Some additional pieces subsequently appeared in the children's magazine Mukul, a historic childrens magazine that ran 1895 to 1923.^[9]

Nine of these instalments were subsequently reprinted during Pramadaranjan's own lifetime in Bone Jongole (Bengali: বনে জঙ্গলে, lit. In Forests and Jungles), a multi-author anthology of jungle writing edited by Jogindranath Sarkar and published by City Book Society, Calcutta, in 1935, at pages 28–36 (sections 1–3), 66–73 (sections 4–5), and 111–123 (sections 6–9).^[31] The anthology had been approved by the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal, as a prize and library book and as a juvenile reading book for High English, Middle English and Primary Schools — establishing, nearly ninety years before the West Bengal Board of Primary Education's adoption of the same material in Patabahar (2017), that Pramadaranjan's jungle writing had been recognised as fit for school readers across every level of the Bengal educational system. Section 6 of the anthology corresponds precisely to the excerpt now taught in West Bengal's Class 4 classrooms, attesting to the remarkable timelessness of his prose.^[31][19]

After Pramadaranjan's death, his daughter Leela Majumdar provided his original notebooks to Signet Press, Calcutta, who published the collected book in Shravan 1363 BE (July–August 1956) with a cover designed by his grandnephew Satyajit Ray and illustrations by Shyamalkrishna Basu.^[21][9] The cover depicted a tiger's face with intensely glowing eyes against a black background, with the title lettered above in green — one of the most recognised images in Bengali children's publishing, designed the year after Satyajit Ray's cover for Tuntunir Boi (1955).^[30] The book was immediately recognised as outstanding: the inaugural issue of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi — India's national academy of letters — described it in its Bengali review section as "an outstanding book" in which the author "has left a fascinating record of his adventurous experiences."^[32]

The continued relevance of Baner Khabar to Bengali cultural life is reflected in its inclusion in the primary school curriculum of West Bengal: the West Bengal Board of Primary Education's official Class 4 Bengali textbook Patabahar (first published 2017) devotes six pages — pages 40 to 46 of a 176-page volume — to an excerpt from the book, along with a brief biographical note on the author. By comparison, nine pages of the same textbook are devoted to Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury's story 'Nara-hari Das', both including exercises and illustrations.^[19] West Bengal has over 95,000 schools, of which 88 per cent are government or government-aided; primary schools alone number over 50,000.^[33] With a pupil–teacher ratio of approximately 21:1 across primary classes and roughly 50,000 primary schools each with a Class 4 cohort, an estimated one million or more children aged nine to ten encounter Pramadaranjan Ray's writing through this textbook every year — making the excerpt of Baner Khabar, including his gripping accounts of jungle encounters with rhinoceroses and packs of wild elephants in the Lushai Hills (now in Mizoram), one of the most widely read Bengali prose texts in the primary school system of the state.^[33]

The book recounts his experiences over two decades of jungle surveying: encounters with elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, and bison; rescuing people from dangerous situations; and vivid descriptions of the indigenous peoples of the Shan States, the Lushai Hills, and northeastern India.^[21] Ray's survey writing predated by three decades the celebrated jungle accounts of Jim Corbett — who was born in 1875, the same year given for Ray by most family sources, though the official Survey record gives his birth as 1874 — who would achieve international fame with Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944). In Bengal, Baner Khabar had been thrilling readers with tiger encounters, dacoits and forest anecdotes since 1913, when Corbett's fame was still thirty years away. Leela Majumdar records in Pakdandi that her father was so uncomfortable with his honorary titles that he actively discouraged anyone from using them, never trading on his official distinctions in any social context — a humility that may partly explain why many of his most memorable anecdotes circulated with their origin often unacknowledged.^[9]

A peer-reviewed study of Sandesh published in the Proceedings of the Indian History Congress identifies Pramadaranjan explicitly as one of the magazine's notable contributors alongside Sukumar Ray, Sukhalata Roy and Abanindranath Tagore, and devotes a dedicated passage to his writing, noting that he "regaled readers with his own experiences in the forests of Assam and Burma" and that "with humans regularly coming in contact with tigers, elephants, boars, and snakes, and slashing their way through deep forests and navigating uncharted and turbulent rivers, it was really a dangerous undertaking" — situating Baner Khabar as an important precursor to the adventure writing that would become a staple of later Bengali children's magazines, and whose power to captivate readers has not diminished in over a century.^[28] Sukumar Ray, in the biographical chapter of his published Sukumar Samagra Rachanabali (Asia Publishing Company, Calcutta, 1960), explicitly confirmed that Pramadaranjan's travel accounts were serialised in Sandesh as Baner Khabar and later published as a book, and described his second daughter Leela Majumdar's literary achievement as "the continuation of this very talent."^[12] Leela Majumdar herself, in her published biography of Upendrakishore (Leela Majumdar Rachanabali, Vol. 2, Ananda Publishers), recalled that her father's experiences in the forests of Siam and Burma, serialised in Sandesh, "thrilled the readers of Sandesh."^[15] An independent critical appreciation of Baner Khabar published in the ISSN-registered Bengali literary journal Parabaas in 2016 — written by a critic with no family connection to the author — described Ray as one of India's earliest and most fearlessly courageous government surveyors and characterised his prose style as carrying "the scent of dry leaves crunching underfoot in the forest," arriving at the same conclusions about the book's enduring quality that generations of Bengali readers had been arriving at since the work first appeared in Sandesh over a century earlier.^[34]

Together with his brother Kuladaranjan Ray, Ray also translated works by Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle into Bengali for young readers — a contribution documented by the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme in its collection of the Ray family papers^[5] and in the Programme's published survey report on leading business families of early colonial Bengal.^[6]

One of Baner Khabar's most celebrated passages describes Ngapi (ঙাপি), the fermented fish paste of the Shan people of Burma. He describes its preparation: fish cut into pieces, sealed in an earthen pot, buried underground for three to four months until fully decomposed, then dug up and used as the essential condiment in every dish — held by the Shans to be the finest thing in the world. Ray observed the symmetry of mutual culinary incomprehension with characteristic humour: just as he found the smell of Ngapi overpowering, the Shans found the smell of ghee equally nauseating. He illustrates this with several anecdotes: a Buddhist monk who demanded his tent be moved because a cook frying luchis nearby made the smell of ghee unbearable; Shan workers who ate his cook Shashi's khichuri with great relish but flatly refused to believe it could contain ghee, since in their experience the smell of ghee induced vomiting; and a Hindustani food-stall owner in a Burmese town who was reported to the Deputy Commissioner by Burmese neighbours complaining that his ghee-frying made their neighbourhood uninhabitable.^[21] This passage entered Ray family literary memory: his nephew Sukumar Ray echoed it directly in the title poem of his collection Khai Khai — "বার্মার 'ঙাপি'তে বাপ রে কী গন্ধ" (Good lord, the smell of Burma's Ngapi)^[35] — and his daughter Leela Majumdar returned to the same episode in Kheror Khata, recalling how her father's camp had to be pitched upwind of a Burmese village where Ngapi was being prepared, and how the cook Shashi's luchi-frying prompted the village headman to come and complain about the smell of ghee.^[36] The episode has been noted by food historians as an early documented account of cross-cultural culinary incomprehension in colonial-era travel writing.^[37]

A related observation emerges from a scholarly study of Sandesh by Sarvani Gooptu of the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, Kolkata.^[38] Gooptu cites an article titled "Ke ki Khay" (Who Eats What) published in Sandesh vol. 1, issue 3 (Ashadh 1320 BE, June–July 1913), attributed to Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, which describes Burmese fermented fish paste and recounts how Burmese people found the smell of ghee from a Bengali cook frying luchis equally offensive — a theme that closely parallels one of the most frequently cited episodes in Pramadaranjan's Baner Khabar. Upendrakishore's article appeared in the issue immediately preceding Pramadaranjan's first Baner Khabar instalment (issue 4, Shravan 1320 BE, July–August 1913). Pramadaranjan's Survey of India service record documents his postings in the Shan States (1899–1902 and 1905–1906) and Burma (1906–1907), confirming that his direct personal experience of the region substantially predated both publications.^[20] That the luchi-frying episode belongs to Pramadaranjan's own experience, and not to a generalised family knowledge of Burma, is established by Leela Majumdar's explicit attribution of the episode to her father in Kheror Khata, where she identifies the cook as Pramadaranjan's own camp cook Shashi and describes the complaint coming to her father personally from the village headman.^[36] The proximity in time between the two articles, and the close-knit literary environment of the Ray family in which Pramadaranjan's oral accounts from the field would have been shared before their formal publication, suggests that Upendrakishore's piece may have drawn on his younger brother's firsthand experiences, communicated within the family in the months before the magazine's launch. Such informal sharing of material within a collaborative household was entirely characteristic of the Ray family's collective literary practice, and does not imply any deliberate appropriation; it is consistent with Leela Majumdar's observation that her father's anecdotes frequently circulated without attribution, partly owing to his own disinclination to assert priority.^[9] The episode thus illustrates a broader pattern in which Pramadaranjan's experiences fed into the cultural output of the Ray family more widely — a contribution that Baner Khabar and the scholarship around it have only partially recovered.

The birth and death years of Pramadaranjan Ray are recorded differently across primary sources, and no single authoritative resolution has yet been established.

For his birth year, the principal discrepancy is between 1874 and 1875. The official Survey of India List of Officers corrected to 1st July 1920 gives his date of birth as 18 June 1874,^[10] making him the youngest of five brothers born to Kalinath Ray and placing him eleven years junior to Upendrakishore (b. 1863).^[29] Most family-derived sources — including Sukumar Ray's biographical note in the Sukumar Samagra Rachanabali and Chandak Sengoopta's scholarly study The Rays Before Satyajit — give 1875 as his birth year.^[12][7] The West Bengal Board of Primary Education's Class 4 textbook Patabahar (2017) also gives 1874.^[19] It is important to note that both dates may be correct within their respective contexts: the official departmental record of 18 June 1874 would have been established at the time of his appointment in 1898 and carried forward through his service career, while the family's recollection of 1875 may reflect his actual date of birth as known within the household. It was not uncommon in late nineteenth-century Bengal for families to register a child's birth date as a year earlier than the actual date to enable earlier school enrolment — this practice of recording an earlier official birth date alongside a different family-known actual date means that both 1874 and 1875 could be simultaneously authentic in their own domains, one as an administrative fact and the other as a biographical one. The matter remains unresolved pending examination of birth registration or other independent contemporary records.

For his death year, three different dates appear in named published sources. Baridbaran Ghosh, in his biographical essay "লীলা মজুমদার : ফিরে দেখা" (Leela Majumdar: A Retrospective) published as front matter in Aar Konokhaney (Mitra & Ghosh, 1968), states explicitly: "প্রমদারঞ্জন যখন মারা যান ১৯৫১ সালে" — "When Pramadaranjan died in 1951."^[39] The West Bengal Board of Primary Education's Patabahar (2017) gives the year as 1949.^[19] The death year 1947 appears in Sengoopta's study The Rays Before Satyajit and is derived from the Statesman notice for his daughter Leela Majumdar's death in 2007.^[14][7] Of these three, the 1951 date from Baridbaran Ghosh is notable as it comes from a named literary scholar writing in the same volume as Leela Majumdar's own memoir, and is consistent with Satyajit Ray's account in Jakhan Chhoto Chhilam of visiting Pramadaranjan at Bhowanipur during retirement years.^[16] The 1947 date may reflect an error or a conflation with another event in the Statesman source. No death registration or contemporary newspaper notice of Pramadaranjan's death has yet been identified to settle the question definitively.