Birbal Sahni

The Story

Born in 1891, Sahni studied botany at Cambridge and London, where he was trained by the founders of palaeobotany. He returned to Bhārat with a mission: to study the fossil plants of his country and reveal the vegetation of the Indian subcontinent across hundreds of millions of years.

His research covered the whole span of plant history — from the earliest land plants to the ancestors of modern flowering plants — and he is best known for his work on the fossil plant Pentoxylon and the plants of the Gondwana age, when Bhārat lay joined to Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. His work threw light not only on plants but on the very movement of continents.

In 1946 he founded the Institute of Palaeobotany at Lucknow, which he willed to the nation. He died suddenly in 1949, and the institute was renamed in his honour. It remains the foremost centre of fossil-plant research in the world, and his name is the foundation stone of earth-science of Bhārat.