Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia FRS was a pioneering geologist in India and among the first Indian scientists to work in the Geological Survey of India. He is remembered for his work on the stratigraphy of the Himalayas.
Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia FRS was a pioneering geologist in India and among the first Indian scientists to work in the Geological Survey of India. He is remembered for his work on the stratigraphy of the Himalayas. He helped establish geological studies and investigations in India, specifically at the Institute of Himalayan Geology, which was renamed in 1976 after him as the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology. His textbook on the Geology of India, first published in 1919, continues to be in use.
Wadia was born at Surat in Gujarat. The Wadia family belonged to the Parsi family who had traditionally been shipbuilders. Young Wadia received his early schooling in a private school at Surat and later at Sir J. J. English School before the family moved to Baroda in 1894 where he went to Baroda High School. At 16 years, he moved to Baroda College, where he was influenced by Adarji M. Masani the professor of natural history and Aravind Ghosh. He obtained a BSc degree in 1903 in botany and zoology and another BSc degree in 1905 in botany and geology. The study in geology was helped by the geological collections that were made under Maharaja SayajiRao Gaekwad. In 1905 he graduated with a M.A. in biology and geology and began to teach undergraduates. Education in geology in India at that time was restricted to the Universities of Calcutta and Madras where officers of the Geological Survey of India sometimes acted as part-time lecturers. At the age of 23, Wadia obtained the post of a Professor of Geology at the Prince of Wales College at Jammu and continued to work there for the next fourteen years.
The location also allowed him to make geological studies in the adjoining region. He spent vacations in the Himalayan region, collecting rocks and fossils. In 1919 he published a textbook of Geology for students, the first new work after the Manual of geology in India which had been revised in 1893. This continues to be a major text in Indian geology. In 1925 he discovered tusks and fragments of the extinct elephant-like animal already described as Stegodon ganesa.
In 1920, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) expanded from 20 to 32 scientific officers. In 1921, a post was offered to Wadia, then aged 37. He was not the first Indian to join the Survey, but was the first who did not have a degree from a European university. His early work was on the geology of the Himalayas and it involved careful field work and mapping. He collected numerous Middle and Upper Cambrian trilobites which were studied by F R C Reed in 1934. He also found When he visited the Survey headquarters at Calcutta, he lectured at the Presidency College, then under the University of Calcutta. After Pilgrim’s retirement in 1928, Wadia became the Paleontologist at the GSI and continued in that post until 1935. After retiring from the GSI in 1938, Wadia took up an offer from the Government of Ceylon for the post of Mineralogist. He worked on many aspects of the geology of Sri Lanka.
Wadia returned to India in 1945. In 1947, he became an advisor to the government led by Jawaharlal Nehru. At a meeting he suggested that India should move away from a “lukewarm, hesitating and even patronising” attitude to science and bring about co-operation among Indian scientists to help in tapping “the basic sources of wealth and well-being, yet imperfectly tapped in land, man-power, its rivers, forests, minerals and electric power”. In 1948, Homi Jehangir Bhabha who was associated with the creation of the Indian Atomic Energy Act invited Wadia in 1949 to help survey for raw materials for use in reactors.atomic energy. This led to the extraction of thorium and uranium ores in Kerala, Bihar and Rajasthan.
Wadia worked on Himalayan stratigraphy, dating various sections and understanding the age and origin of the ranges. He studied the fossils of the Siwaliks, examining the collections at the British Museum along with A T Hopwood and W E Swinton around 1926–27. The Trigonometrical Survey of India had found discrepancies in measurements based on triangulation and those made using astronomy observations. Wadia took an interest in soil science. In 1954, he suggested that the Pleistocene Ice Age of the northern hemisphere was a time of great rainfall (the Pluvial Age) in the semi-tropical and tropical latitudes. One of his early contributions was to explain the knee-bend or syntaxis in the mountain ranges around Nanga Parbat.
In 1951, a 2 Anna Indian postage stamp to commemorate the centenary of the Geological Survey of India illustrated Stegodon ganesa was released. In 1984 an Indian postal stamp with a portrait of Wadia was issued.