The night sky has been one of the oldest sources of wonder. Through the ages men and women have looked up to the stars and been filled with curiosity and awe. This peculiar awe inspired by the diamond-studded vault has also inspired a number of distinct disciplines and practices. From hobbies like stargazing to highly systematised knowledges like astronomy and astrology and several cosmological myths in every major world religion have all been inspired by the awe one feels for the “heavens”. When we write the history of our all-too-human interest in the night skies, however, we usually parse these various practices and knowledges into neat silos.
Stargazing is seen to be an activity proper to children and hobbyists. Religious cosmologies are mostly left to theologians or historians of religion. Astronomy becomes the province of the savant. Even if some traffic between these distinct groups and their practices may be allowed in earlier eras, the distinctions seem to have become watertight by the 20th century. And that might be why no one today remembers Mohammad Abdur Rahman Khan.
A passion for meteors
In the last decade of British rule in India Khan published a whopping ten papers and reports in Nature, the preeminent scientific journal of the time. Khan only had a bachelor’s degree to his name and had taught all his life at the Osmania College, away both from the then-new research institutions like the IISc and the old universities like those at Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras. By the end of the 1940s, however, Khan had become well-known to the international scientific community. Besides his regular contributions to Nature and other scientific publications, he had also been elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and appointed a Research Associate at the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico. In 1936 and again in 1948 Khan was invited to present papers at the annual meetings of the Society for Research on Meteorites in the United States.
Khan’s passion was meteors. He had first become interested in them as a schoolboy at the Madrasa-i-aliya in Hyderabad in the late 1880s. Later, the arrival of Halley’s Comet in 1910 reinvigorated his interest in astral phenomena and he set about translating Sir John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy into Urdu. It was also the time when he began to systematically observe the night skies. In 1940, by then nearly 60 years old, he reported to Nature that he had spent a total of 103.25 hours over 152 nights observing the skies that year. As a result, in just that single year, he had observed and mapped the paths of 1390 meteors!
Apart from personal observations, Khan managed to put together a network of other amateur observers who regularly sent him their observances as well. One 1945 publication, for example, contained observations from MM Ali Beg, a school headmaster, MA Latif Khan, a lawyer, and MT Ali, an official in the Finance Department of Hyderabad. What Khan had thus managed to do was link up a number of hobbyists and turn them into data collectors. Here was an early example of what would later sometimes be called “citizen science”, i.e., incorporating lay citizens into the task of scientific knowledge production.
The study of meteors at the time depended not only upon the mapping of aerial pathways and frequencies but also on the study of the actual meteorites. Here again, Khan utilised his social networks to great advantage. In August 1936, for instance, he received from Maulvi Abdul Hag Saheb an aerolite that had fallen a couple of years ago onto a farm near the village of Phulmari in Aurangabad district. At other times, he heard of an old meteor shower in an area and personally went to search for meteorites. Since, unfortunately for Khan, the ground had been flattened in the intervening years, he offered a financial reward to the local villagers to induce them to part with any pieces of the old “shooting star” that anyone might have kept back.
Not satisfied with simply collecting local meteorites, Khan also started buying rarer meteorites from international dealers. He bought several pieces, for instance, from Wards’ Natural Science Establishment – a dealership trading in rare scientific specimens based at Rochester. On another occasion, possibly in the 1920s, he paid the then-princely sum of $24 to a dealer in Denver for some rare meteorites. His collection, in time, became a significant scientific resource. The eminent physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, remembered today as the discovery of the “boson”, once borrowed some meteorites from Khan’s personal collection for x-ray analysis at Bose’s laboratory at Dhaka University. What is also noteworthy is that Khan financed his collection entirely out of his salary as a college teacher. The prices charged by foreign dealers, the financial rewards given to locals etc. all came out of his personal finances.
Yet, Khan had not been a rich man. He came from a scholarly family with roots originally in Ghazni. His ancestors had then served the Nawabs of Arcot before switching to British employment upon the fall of Arcot. The family had been comfortably off as a result of employment in the British military and civil establishments. But Khan’s father had died suddenly when he was still in college, putting the entire family in straightened circumstances. A small scholarship given to him by the government allowed him to tide over the lean period. Always a very good student, he was able to find employment soon after graduation and thus eventually mend his financial circumstances. That neither this experience of precarity nor the relatively modest salary of a college teacher discouraged him from spending lavishly on the collection of meteorites is a testament to the depth of his passion.
Spending hours staring at the night sky or shelling out generous sums for buying meteorites did not exhaust Khan’s passion for the topic. A third area where his enthusiasm manifested itself was in exploring the religious history of meteors. Hailing from a scholarly family and being educated in classical Persian and Arabic, Khan sought to document and analyze the reports of meteorites in religious texts. One of his most interesting studies in this regard comprised attempts to establish the meteoric origins of the holy black stone of Ka’aba in Mecca. Though he was far from being the first one to propose the theory, it was to his credit to bring both scientific knowledge about meteors and classical textual references together to try to establish the case.
A node at which several disparate worlds came together
Khan’s career as a man of mid-20th-century science is a curious blend. At one level he is a hobbyist who managed to keep alive an interest in stargazing that arose as a child. On another level, he is a man brought up in an old Islamic scholarly culture with an abiding antiquarian interest in classical works in Arabic and Persian. At a third level, he is a figure in a global scientific network organised in the form of scientific societies, research institutes, and scholarly journals. Above all, however, he was a node. A node at which several disparate worlds came together. The worlds of hobbyists and scientists, the worlds of antiquarians and astronomers, the worlds of old Hyderabad and modern America, to name only a few.
As a node connecting these heterogeneous worlds, he is reminiscent of an early modern practitioner of natural history. A kind of meta-discipline that predated the birth of modern science, natural history combined the collection of specimens, particularly of exotic and rare objects, with textual studies of classical texts. It was largely displaced by the middle of the 19th century when modern, organised, and increasingly professionalised science took its place. Disciplines gradually became more specialised, collections became institutionalised, and scholarly enquiry became less interested in classical precedents to their topics. The relish with which Khan is said to have displayed his personal collections of meteors to visitors, like SN Bose, after lavish Hyderabadi dinners, or the way he would recite both Sa’adi’s poetry and talk about meteorites at the same event, clearly recalls a world of early modern natural history than modern, scientific astral sciences.
The success of Khan’s career demonstrates the incompleteness of the transitions from natural history to modern science. The former, it would seem, could continue to coexist with modern scientific practices. Moreover, it could even inspire new modes of participatory citizen science, thereby turning dilettantism into a valuable resource for cutting-edge scientific work.
Astronomy was once called the Queen of the Sciences. But the Queen always had more lowly siblings, like stargazing, that remained outside the hallowed halls of science. Remembering Khan and his likes reminds us that on occasion the Queen did in fact meet and learn from her humbler siblings.
Projit Bihari Mukharji is the Head of the Department and a Professor of History at Ashoka University.
