The Birdman of India

I was reading an article “Ruffled Feathers” by John Seabrook in the New Yorker (May 29, 2006) in which the author described how a distinguished ornithologist, Pamela Rasmussen, uncovered the frauds and forgeries perpetrated by a very renowned amateur ornithologist and collector, Richard Meinertzhagen. He stole rare birds from Britain’s Natural History museum, changed their tags and claimed them as his own collections. Attention was drawn to his frauds first by Alan Knox, an Irish ornithologist, who had published an article in Ibis arguing “that several of Meinertzhagen’s Red Poll skins had been relabeled with incorrect data.”

Meinertzhagen was a colonel in the British army and had served with T.E. Lawrence during the First World War. He was a phony and a fraud; yet at the same time he did some really good genuine work in ornithology. Unfortunately, it has become very difficult to determine which of his work is genuine and which else is phony. Although he was not a Jew, he was a Zionist. He helped create the State of Israel and a square in Jerusalem is named after him.

In the article, Seabrook mentioned the work of S. Dillon Ripley (Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. from 1964-84. Rasmussen was Ripley’s assistant). Seabrook wrote, “when he (Ripley) was a young man, he made several expeditions to India, in the grand style, meeting dignitaries while collecting birds. As a professional ornithologist, he wrote a ten volume tome on the birds of India, with the renowned Indian ornithologist Salim Ali.”

I had never heard of Salim Ali before in my life because I was not interested in the birds and bird-watching. Seabrook’s article intrigued my curiosity and I set out finding who the distinguished Indian ornithologist, Salim Ali, was. Based on the information that I could come by, I introduce the Birdman of India to the readers in the following.

Salim (Moizuddin Abdul) Ali was born on November 12, 1896. Thus he was a contemporary of Ramanujan. Ramanujan was interested only in mathematics while mathematics was the bane of Salim Ali. Algebra and logarithms disgusted him. Like Ramanujan, Salim Ali was also deficient in his formal education. Both of them rose to the acme of their respective professional fields from ordinary backgrounds, largely by virtue of their natural love for knowledge.

Salim Ali belonged to a middle class Muslim family; his father died when he was quite young. His maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tayabji, brought him up in Khetwadi, Bombay (Mumbai). He did a short stint in Burma helping his brother in wolfram mining. This did not interest him. On his return from Burma in 1917, he resumed his education and managed to earn a B.Sc. in Zoology which however did not land him a job as ornithologist in the Zoological Survey of India. He managed to get only a guide lecturer’s position at the “newly opened natural history section in the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai.” Later he went to Germany on study leave where he received training under Professor Erwin Stresseman (author of “Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present).

He was interested in birds right from his childhood. When he was only a 12-year kid, he shot a sparrow and took it to the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) for identification. He was introduced to W.S. Millard, the honorary secretary of BNHS, who was amused to see his interest in birds. After looking at numerous specimens of stuffed birds, he found a yellow throated sparrow like the one Ali had brought with him. Ali was very excited when the bird was finally identified. This inborn interest propelled him into the study of birds (ornithology) in which he was destined to make important contributions in due time.

One of his most remarkable works was collaborated with S. Dillon Ripley as already mentioned above, for writing the “Handbook of Birds of India and Pakistan” in ten volumes. Hugh Whistler, a prominent ornithologist (the Whistler Prize of Sussex University, awarded to the best essay on natural history or archaeology is named after him) also guided him in his surveys. He also introduced him to Meinertzhagen and they cooperated in an expedition to Afghanistan. Meinertzhagen made some candid and interesting entries about Salim Ali in his diaries which he later showed to Ali. Ali used some of this material in his autobiography “The Fall of a Sparrow.”

The entry dated April 14, 1937, (Ghorbund Valley, Afghanistan), reads, “Pitching camp was a long and tedious business as Salim is quite useless at anything of that sort and none of the servants knew anything about tents or camping. Salim is so accustomed to be waited on by an army of servants that he is impotent when he has to do something himself, and yet he advocates that his class is capable of governing India. They must first learn to govern themselves.”

The entry dated April 30, 1937, reads, “I am disappointed in Salim, He is quite useless at anything but collecting. He cannot skin a bird, nor cook, nor do anything connected with camp life, packing up or chopping wood. He writes interminable notes about something – perhaps me…Even collecting, he never does on his own initiative. Like all Indians he is incredibly incompetent at anything he does; if there is a wrong way of doing things he will do it, and he is quite incapable of thinking ahead.”

The entry for May 20, 1937 reads, “Salim is the personification of the educated Indian and interests me a great deal. He is excellent at his own theoretical subjects, but has no practical ability, and at everyday little problems, is hopelessly inefficient, yet he is quite sure he is right in every case. His views are astounding. He is prepared to turn the British out of India tomorrow and govern the country himself. I have repeatedly told him that the British Government have no intention of handing over millions of uneducated Indians to the mercy of such men as Salim: that no Englishman would tolerate men being governed by rats.”

January 9, 1952, Sikkim. “I find Salim very touchy about India and Indians. He resents any trace of criticism and is extremely bitter about South Africans’ treatment of the Indian question. My experience of Indians both in Kenya, and S. Africa is that they introduced disease, dishonesty and sedition.”

He wrote several books and technical reports on birds. In time, he earned name and fame in his field. According to wikipedia, “Although recognition came late, he received numerous awards including the J. Paul Getty International Award, the Golden Ark of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the golden medal of the British Ornithologists’ Union (a rarity for a non-Britisher), the Padma Shri and the Padma Vibhushan from the Indian Government, three honorary doctorates, and numerous other awards. He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1985. Dr. Ali’s influence helped save the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and the Silent Valley National Park. In 1990, the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History was established at Kalayampalayam, Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, aided by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.”

Bird-watching or ornithology is not an idle pastime or undertaking as many may like to believe. I used to believe like that before reading about Darwin’s finches. He used his observations and data on finches in the Galapagos for formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection. Many scientists are interested in Darwin’s finches even now and they are revealing much about the evolutionary process.

Salim Ali died at the age of 91, in 1987, after a long battle with prostate cancer.

An interesting anecdote is told about him, which shows his natural and instinctive interest in the birds. A journalist interviewed him late in his life. He was hard of hearing and at every question that the reviewer asked, he would say “Pardon” and make the reviewer repeat the question. But when he heard the chirping of a bird in the nearby trees, he suddenly exclaimed, “Did you hear that? That was a barbet.”

He was rightly called the Birdman of India.