Harking Back: The fate of the house that Ruchi Ram Sahni built

Once that line of hate was drawn across the subcontinent in August 1947, it seems praising our finest depends more on belief and faith than ability. Our ‘horse blinkers’ have become our biggest drawback.

Recently I was approached by a scholar researching details about her famous ancestor, the great Lahore scientist Prof Dr Ruchi Ram Sahni, a GC professor, scientist, freedom fighter, innovator and the man primarily responsible for introducing science learning in Punjab. The last description surely is his greatest and lasting achievement. No matter how stubbornly you wear your blinkers, his contribution just cannot be ignored. If ever there was a Lahori worth honouring, it was Ruchi Ram Sahni.

The reason the scholar was referred to me was not that I do know a wee bit about Lahore and its past, but primarily because I had lived on Rattigan Road, the place where this great man built his house, lived there all his life and left in 1947. He died within months of reluctantly leaving, his broken heart very much in his beloved Lahore.

His great grand-daughter Dr Neera Burra is a researcher on social development issues and an advisor to the United Nations. She had heard so many stories about the great man and Lahore that she wrote a book about him, a book that carried his autobiography. But then there were many gaps in her precise knowledge of the man and the place where he lived. In this piece let me touch, sparingly, on his life, and then dwell on how we were able to finally decipher just what happened to his grand and famous house in Lahore.

Ruchi Ram Sahni was born in Dera Ismail Khan in 1863 to a family of rich ship-owning merchants. A storm in River Chenab destroyed his father’s entire fleet and its cargo. Overnight this rich family became paupers. After initial home schooling he left and walked all the way to Adhiwal in Jhang, 100 miles away. It was a gruelling three days trek. He found Jhang and his school boring, and ran away to join Government High School, Bhati Gate, Lahore. There he came under the influence of his teachers Pandit Narain Agnihotri and Pandit Navin Chandra Rai, who was to go on to form the Brahmo Samaj in Lahore.

As this movement believed in a rationalist approach to problems of faith, he soon started speaking about issues like widow remarriage, caste discrimination, child marriage, and the dowry system. Most people classified him as secular. The result was that his own mother refused to live with him or even share a meal in his Lahore house. After his Matric examinations he joined Government College and was known for his debating skills. He could talk for hours on the economics of John Stuart Mill, and with the same ease on Bentham’s ‘Theory of Legislation’. His life was his books, his teachers and the debates in Lahore’s tea houses.

After graduating from GC Lahore he joined the Met Office in Simla and in 1887, aged 24, he joined GC Lahore as an assistant professor of science. From his limited salary he donated science books to the college library. But then life took a drastic turn when a teacher 26 years junior to him was appointed head of chemistry department. The reason seems to be a tiff with his ‘white’ principal. He decided to leave the country and go to Germany, where he joined the research centre at Karlsruhe. The First World War forced him to move to England where he worked with Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr. His outstanding contributions include his methodology in measuring“the variability in the atomic weight of Lead and Bismuth”. Soon his scientific contributions were being reproduced in science journals all over the world.

Once back in Lahore he started propagating the need to manufacture scientific equipment in the subcontinent, which the colonial rulers disliked. He started being invited all over the country to demonstrate scientific experiments. The daily newspaper ‘The Tribune’ started reproducing his lectures. He started delivering his lectures in Punjabi. The result was that villagers from afar invited him to instill scientific knowledge among them.

His newspaper articles mainly concentrated on various social issues, including one in favour of removing the statue of Lord Lawrence from The Mall. In 1909 he was conferred the title of Rai Sahib, a title he returned on the advice of Maulana Shaukat Ali during the Khilafat Movement. His portrait was removed from the college hall. This triggered a student movement and the Punjab government ordered its restoration. His newspaper articles after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to his house being searched several times. The twists and turns in the life of Sahni are many, each a story in their own right.

But what about his house at 22 Rattigan Road just next to the famous Bradlaugh Hall. The record tells us that Ruchi Ram Sahni had a hand in the selection of this site, for he had started building his own in a huge plot next to it. As Dr Neera Burra started trying to locate exactly where the house was, all she had as a guide were a few old pictures, and a copy of a 1909 land revenue record in words, but without any map. She asked the former GC University VC, Dr Khalid Aftab, for assistance, who suggested my name.

Being in Cambridge this was a tough job, but my younger brother Karim was put to the task. He has spent his life in Rattigan Road flying kites, running along the walls of Bradlaugh Hall and getting into trouble all the time. When our family moved out he refused to leave. There is not a single house or lane or person he does not know in the area, and they all respect him as ‘Agha Sahib’.

For Karim this was no problem. Very logically he started with the District Court’s ‘patwar-khana’. Naturally, he knows everyone. Very soon he had a complete picture. He emailed me the details which I sent to Neera. So here is what happened to the house of Ruchi Ram Sahni. If you face Bradlaugh Hall his house was to the left and the front wall and main gate extended right up to the lane to the extreme left. In the lane are five houses on the right along the lane and between them and the wall of Bradlaugh Hall was the house of Ruchi Ram Sahni.

Today to the front in the lawn is an official tubewell. The two houses to the right when the lane starts were also part of the old house. Behind them was a house where lived Syed Maratab Ali, who moved out after 1947 to Davis Road.

On the 13th of August, 1947, it seems Ruchi Ram Sahni had decided not to migrate. On hearing this a mob approached the house and murdered his son, the grandfather of Dr Neera Burra. The family moved to Delhi, but not Ruchi Ram Sahni. Very soon he was harassed to the extent that he decided to move in early 1948 to Delhi, where he died in a few months.

The main house was taken over by the ETPB, who leased it to the Lahore Electric Supply Company. Later they sold the main middle portion to two Kashmiri policemen from Amritsar. The front right portion had a printing shop set up in his lifetime by a son. At the left front side two houses were built by the Abbasi family. Their signboard is still there.

So come 1947 the Hindu and Sikh residences of Rattigan Road emptied. The powerful took over and virtually forced the Evacuee Trust to allot them plots against those left behind. In those days fraudulent ownership papers could be had for a few rupees, mostly from those working in the District Court.

So this is what happened to the house of the man who introduced science education to Punjab, and who enriched the Freedom Movement with his thoughts on a secular subcontinent. Between the long walk from D.I. Khan near lower Waziristan for 110 miles through sand and dust over three days and the final migration from Lahore to Delhi, was a life well lived and will never be forgotten.