Birbal Sahniਬੀਰਬਲ ਸਾਹਨੀ

Birbal Sahni (1891 to 1949) was a palaeobotanist from Bhera in Punjab who founded the study of fossil plants as a research discipline in India. Working from the University of Lucknow, he read ancient forests from stone, linked India's fossil flora to debates about drifting continents, and founded the Lucknow institute that now bears his name.

Early life in Bhera and Lahore

Birbal Sahni was born on 14 November 1891 in Bhera, a small town in Shahpur district of Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. Bhera lies in today's Sargodha district, close to the Salt Range and the Khewra salt mines, and the rocks and hills around his birthplace were part of his childhood landscape. His family came from Dera Ismail Khan, and visits to Bhera kept the young boy close to the geology that would later shape his science.

His father, Ruchi Ram Sahni, was a professor of chemistry at Government College, Lahore, a pioneer of science education who had worked with leading physicists of the age, including Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr, and who founded the Punjab Science Institute. Every summer he took his sons on long treks through the Himalayas. At home in Lahore, Birbal learned botany from Shiv Ram Kashyap, remembered as the father of Indian bryology, studied at the Mission and Central Model schools and at Government College, and took his BSc in 1911.

Cambridge and the fossil plants

Sahni followed his brothers to England and graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1914. There he came under the influence of Albert Charles Seward, the leading student of fossil plants of the day, and the partnership shaped his life's work. In 1919 the University of London awarded him a DSc for his research on fossil plants, and in 1920 he and Seward published their Revision of Indian Gondwana Plants, a reworking of the fossil flora of the ancient southern supercontinent.

After a brief spell working in Munich with the plant morphologist Karl Ritter von Goebel, Sahni returned to India. He taught for about a year as professor of botany at Banaras Hindu University and at the University of the Punjab. In 1920 he married Savitri Suri, who shared his work closely for the rest of his life. Cambridge recognised his standing in 1929 with the degree of ScD.

What did Birbal Sahni discover?

Birbal Sahni's discoveries gave names and order to India's fossil plants: he described new fossil species from the Rajmahal Hills, recognised a new group of fossil gymnosperms, the Pentoxylales, and showed how the Glossopteris flora connected the ancient landmasses of the southern hemisphere. Among his best known finds were Williamsonia sewardiana, a petrified fossil plant he described in 1932, and Homoxylon rajmahalense, a petrified wood from the Rajmahal Hills that resembled the wood of a living flowering plant yet came from Jurassic rocks. He was among the first to argue that the conifers Taxus, Torreya and Cephalotaxus deserved their own order, the Taxales.

His fossils also spoke to geology. Sahni described Glossopteris in detail, compared the fossil floras of India and Australia with those of China and Sumatra, and in 1936 wrote on Wegener's theory of continental drift in the light of palaeobotanical evidence. From fossil palms like Nipa in the Deccan beds he argued that parts of central India had once been coastline, and he even tried to estimate how fast the Himalayas were rising from the heights at which fossils were found.

The Lucknow years

In 1921 Sahni became the first professor and head of the new botany department at the University of Lucknow, and he stayed in that chair until his death. Lucknow had no tradition in his subject when he arrived. Within a few years his department had become the first centre in India for botanical and palaeobotanical research, drawing devoted students from across the country, many of whom carried the subject to universities of their own.

Recognition followed. In 1936 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, the first Indian botanist to receive that honour. He served as president of the National Academy of Sciences, India, in 1937 to 1939 and again in 1943 to 1944, and as general president of the Indian Science Congress in 1940. Before his death he had been elected an honorary president of the International Botanical Congress planned for Stockholm in 1950.

Beyond botany: coins, clay and Harappa

Sahni refused to stay inside one subject. Studying wood remains from Harappa, he noticed they came from conifers and argued that the city's people must have traded with mountain regions where conifers grow. In 1936 he examined coins and moulds dating to about 100 BC from Khokra Kot and wrote a noted study of how coins were cast in ancient India, work that later earned him the Nelson Wright Medal for numismatics in 1945. He also played the sitar and the violin, modelled in clay, and played chess and tennis.

The institute and final years

Sahni wanted Indian palaeobotany to outlive him, so he built it a home. He founded the Palaeobotanical Society, which established the Institute of Palaeobotany on 10 September 1946. The institute began inside his own botany department at Lucknow and then moved to its own premises at 53 University Road. On 3 April 1949 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of its new building.

A week later, on 10 April 1949, Sahni died of a heart attack in Lucknow, aged 57. His wife Savitri carried the young institute forward after his death and helped win it international recognition. The institute was later renamed the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany in his honour, and today, as the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, it remains the centre he imagined, built on his own library and collections.

Legacy

Birbal Sahni is remembered as the founder of palaeobotany in India: the scientist who showed that stones could be read as forests, and that India's rocks held evidence for how continents and climates had changed. A Birbal Sahni Gold Medal for botany students keeps his name in front of each new generation, and busts of him stand at institutions including the Geological Survey of India in Kolkata and the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum.

His story also belongs to Punjab. A boy from Bhera, in today's Sargodha district, educated in Lahore and Cambridge, he stands in the line of Punjab born scientists who carried Indian science to world standing, the line that later produced figures such as Abdus Salam of Jhang and Har Gobind Khorana. Bhera may be a small town, but through Sahni it is written into the history of how the world learned to read its oldest plants.