Recognising the signs of an impending cyclone, the 22-year-old scientist demanded half-hourly updates, cross-checked past storm data, and, with no senior officer in sight, issued a public storm warning on his own authority.
When one thinks of India’s scientific hubs today, Bengaluru and Hyderabad take the lead. Only a few recall that undivided Punjab once birthed giants of science — Har Gobind Khorana, Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, and the often-overlooked polymath Ruchi Ram Sahni. A physicist, meteorologist, teacher, reformist, and father of paleobotanist Birbal Sahni, his brilliance was dimmed by the prejudices of his colonial overlords.
Sahni’s great-granddaughter, sociologist Neera Burra, sought to correct this silence in 2018 through A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab, where she chronicled the life of a man who embodied the clash of intellect and discrimination in British India. Beyond science, he was a fierce secularist and vocal opponent of orthodox Hinduism — convictions that earned him social ostracism.
A Native Among Whites
Born in 1863 in Dera Ismail Khan (now in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Sahni belonged to a once-prosperous merchant family that fell on hard times. Determined to educate himself, he often travelled nearly 50 miles on foot as a teenager to study at his chosen institution.
At 22, armed with a BA Honours from Punjab University, Sahni joined the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in Shimla. There, he became the first and only Indian scientist among an otherwise all-European team. Working under British meteorologist Henry Francis Blanford, Sahni quickly rose from filing reports to preparing daily weather bulletins sent across India and Burma.
His reports were scrutinised with suspicion, and when one of his forecasts was accused of being incomplete, The Pioneer viciously declared that “the time had not come for a ‘native’ to be appointed for a scientific post.” The paper even sneered that European nations like Russia would lose respect for India if they discovered someone of “brown skin” was trusted with such responsibility.
The Cyclone That Changed Everything
Yet, Sahni’s moment of triumph came in September 1885, when a sharp decline in atmospheric pressure was reported at Diamond Harbour. Recognising the signs of an impending cyclone, the 22-year-old scientist demanded half-hourly updates, cross-checked past storm data, and, with no senior officer in sight, issued a public storm warning on his own authority.
The cyclone that struck — the infamous False Point Cyclone of 1885 — raged at 250 km/hr, with tidal surges as high as seven metres. Though nearly 5,000 lives were lost, Sahni’s timely warning spared thousands more.
Yet, when his superiors later documented the event in a research paper, his name was erased. The credit for averting one of Bengal’s worst maritime tragedies never reached the man whose foresight had prevented mass devastation. Only through his memoirs did his role finally resurface, decades later.
Despite his brilliance, Sahni’s teaching career too was clouded by discrimination. After three decades at Government College, Lahore, he was superseded by an Englishman and forced to resign. He co-founded the Punjab Science Institute with J. Campbell Oman, pioneering science outreach through public lectures in the local language. Ingeniously, he devised glass-plate slides for demonstrations long before projectors existed.
Sahni mentored a generation of Indian scientists, including Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who would go on to establish CSIR, one of India’s premier research institutions. Moreover, as an active member of the Brahmo Samaj, he opposed caste hierarchies and religious dogma. In his memoir, he said, “…It required no small courage even to make the verbal profession of the ‘brotherhood of man’ and to acknowledge openly that Mohammad, Christ and all other great teachers of humanity were as worthy of homage and reverence as Ram or Krishnan…”
He was insulted for dining with so-called “outcasts,” yet remained steadfast in his fight for equality.
The Legacy
While colonial records erased his name, Sahni’s quick thinking saved countless lives, his teaching shaped future scientific leaders, and his ideals challenged the rigid boundaries of caste and creed. Yet history remembers him chiefly as the father of Birbal Sahni, overshadowing his own pioneering work.
Ruchi Ram Sahni was more than a scientist — he was a visionary who scripted a chapter of Indian science under the weight of colonial prejudice, and a humanist who dreamt of a more inclusive society. His story remains a powerful reminder of how brilliance was silenced simply because it wore a brown skin.