[1] A humanist scholar with a broad range of interests, he was also a leading sociologist, urbanist, Gandhian, and educationist.
But Bose went on to argue that such a social structure was being dislocated from the middle of 19th century onwards as India became involved more and more in a world economic system, in larger political conflicts, etc.
[5] Here he comments on the considerable interpenetration in the material culture of rural India, "on the whole independent of language as well as of physical types".
In 1965, he undertook a survey of the Hill districts of Assam and in the following year, the tribal regions of Arunachal Pradesh (then NEFA).
In this review other English works of Bose were cited along with his debate with Stella Kramrisch on the issue of Konark architecture.
The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts has organised the N. K. Bose memorial lectures once every two years since 1993.
Anthropologist Surajit Chandra Sinha has written a field biography: The Anthropology of Nirmal Kumar Bose (1970).