His childhood experiences, and in particular the acts of Mahatma Gandhi, influenced his pacifist tendencies: Todd Tucker says that as a child Scholberg "personally witnessed how nonviolent tactics could bring about concrete political change.
In a naive gesture, reflecting the commonplace antipathy towards British governance in India and despite his pacifism, he was among a group of schoolboys who executed the Nazi salute on being told by their headmaster of the beginnings of World War II; Germany was opposed to Britain and that was sufficient justification in their minds.
[6] After finishing at Woodstock in 1939, Scholberg left his parents in India, sailing on the SS President Taft to enroll at the University of Illinois, close to where his sister lived.
As an objector, Scholberg was ordered to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS), through which he became one of the test subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment from 1944.
This was his first experience of the University of Minnesota, having previously had CPS postings in a conservation camp at Lagro, Indiana, and a mental institution in Maryland.
[8] When he underwent a psychological assessment for acceptance on the Experiment, based on the then new Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory method, it was determined that he had psychotic tendencies, including depression, hypochondria and hysteria.
[9] Scholberg enrolled in graduate-level courses to learn French while he was involved in the year-long experiment, having soon exhausted the possibilities of the beginners' classes that were offered by a fellow test subject, the Princeton University graduate Sam Legg.
His bibliography, which included brief histories of how their compilation evolved and attempts to identify the myriad of authors and editors, is arranged by province or its administrative equivalent and, according to a review by N. Gerald Barrier, "surmounts substantial organisational problems" and is a "painstaking study".
Barrier was critical of some aspects of the work, citing as examples the omission of a substantially revised gazetteer for Amritsar and also the lack of information relating to pagination or publication, other than date.
This represented eight years' of work, identified sources in over 80 locations, in numerous languages, and included unpublished doctoral theses and material dating as far back as the 16th century.
John Villiers noted in a review that Scholberg had already demonstrated "ample evidence of his abilities as a bibliographer" and that this bibliography included various papers written by experts on aspects of Indo-Portuguese historiography.
These comprised various languages, including one in Assamese, six in Bengali, three in Gujarati, four in Hindi, three in Kannada, four in Malayalam, six in Marathi, five in Oriya, one in Punjabi, six in Sanskrit, two in Tamil, four in Telugu, and two in Urdu.