In 1911, he joined the newly established Dayal Singh College, Lahore (which was later moved to New Delhi, India[8] after independence) where he became an active member of the Saraswati Stage Society and earned a good reputation as an actor.
Bhatnagar passed the Intermediate Examination of the Punjab University in 1913 in first class and joined the Forman Christian College, where he obtained a BSc in physics in 1916, and an MSc in chemistry in 1919.
[6][9] Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar was awarded a scholarship by the Dayal Singh College Trust to study abroad, and he left for America via England.
In August 1921, he returned to India and immediately joined the newly established Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as a professor of chemistry, where he remained for three years.
Justice N. H. Bhagwati, the then Vice-Chancellor of BHU said: "Many of you perhaps do not know that besides being an eminent scientist, Professor Bhatnagar was a Hindi poet of repute and that during his stay in Banaras, he composed the ‘Kulgeet’ of the University.
His research interests included emulsions, colloids, and industrial chemistry, but his fundamental contributions were in the field of magneto-chemistry, the use of magnetism for the study of chemical reactions.
[3][9] Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar's first industrial problem was developing the process for converting bagasse (peelings of sugarcane) into food-cake for cattle.
He added an Indian gum, which had the remarkable property of lowering the viscosity of the mud suspension and of increasing at the same time its stability against the flocculating action of electrolytes.
Meghnad Saha wrote to Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar in 1934 saying, "You have hereby raised the status of the university teachers in the estimation of public, not to speak of the benefit conferred on your Alma Mater".
Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar wrote jointly with K. N. Mathur Physical Principles and Applications of Magnetochemistry which is considered a standard work on the subject.
Under the persuasive pressure of Arcot Ramaswamy Mudaliar, the Board of Scientific and Industrial Research (BSIR) was formed on 1 April 1940 for a period of two years.
Mudaliar also won the demand for an establishment of Industrial Research Fund, and that it should have an annual grant of Rs 1 million for a period of five years, at the Central Assembly in Delhi at its session on 14 November 1941.
[9] Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar played a significant part along with Homi Jehangir Bhabha, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Vikram Sarabhai and others in the building of India's post-independence science and technology infrastructure and policies.
While at CSIR, he mentored a number young scientists of the time who were working at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) in Kolkata, including Syamadas Chatterjee, Santilal Banerjee (MSc Gold Medalist- Dacca University and a DSc from the US, who later moved to the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi at Bhatnagar's request), and Asutosh Mookherjee.
"It may be pointed out that this was the first-ever systematic assessment of the scientific manpower needs of the country in all aspects which served as an important policy document for the government to plan the post-independent S&T infrastructure."
[11][note 1] For his contributions to pure and applied chemistry, Bhatnagar was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1936 New Year Honours List.