Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali (November 12, 1896 – July 27, 1987) was an Indian ornithologist and naturalist. Known as the "birdman of India", Salim Ali was among the first Indians to conduct systematic bird surveys across India and his bird books helped develop ornithology. He became the key figure behind the Bombay Natural History Society after 1947 and used his personal influence to garner government support for the organization, create the Bharatpur bird sanctuary (Keoladeo National Park) and prevent the destruction of what is now the Silent Valley National Park. He was awarded India's second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.
Early life
Salim Ali was born into a Sulaimani Bohra Muslim family of
Bombay, the ninth and youngest child. His father Moizuddin died when he was one
year old and his mother Zeenat-un-nissa died when he was three. The children
were brought up by his maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and childless aunt,
Hamida Begum, in a middle-class household in Khetwadi, Mumbai. Another uncle
was Abbas Tyabji, well known Indian freedom fighter. Salim was introduced to
the serious study of birds by W. S. Millard, secretary of the Bombay Natural
History Society (BNHS), who identified an unusually coloured sparrow that young
Salim had shot for sport with his toy airgun. Millard identified it as a
Yellow-throated Sparrow, and showed Salim around the Society's collection of
stuffed birds. Millard lent Salim a few books including Eha's Common birds of
Bombay, encouraged Salim to make a collection of birds and offered to train him
in skinning and preservation. Millard also introduced young Salim to (later
Sir) Norman Boyd Kinnear, the first paid curator at the BNHS, who later
provided help from the British Museum.In his autobiography, The Fall of a
Sparrow Ali notes the Yellow-throated Sparrow event as the turning point of his
life that led him into ornithology, an unusual career choice, especially for an
Indian in those days. His early interest was in books on hunting in India and
he became interested in sport-shooting, encouraged by the hunting interests of
his foster-father Amiruddin. Shooting contests were often held in the
neighbourhood in which he grew and among his playmates was Iskandar Mirza, a
distant cousin who was a particularly good marksman and who went on in later
life to become the first President of Pakistan.
Salim went to primary school at Zanana Bible Medical Mission
Girls High School at Girgaum along with two of his sisters and later to St.
Xavier's College in Bombay. Around the age of 13 he suffered from chronic
headaches, making him drop out of class frequently. He was sent to Sind to stay
with an uncle who had suggested that the dry air might help and on returning
back after such breaks in studies, he barely managed to pass the matriculation
exam of the Bombay University in 1913.
Burma and Germany
Yellow-throated Sparrow
Salim Ali's early education was at St. Xavier's College,
Mumbai. Following a difficult first year in college, he dropped out and went to
Tavoy, Burma (Tenasserim) to look after the family's Wolfram (Tungsten) mining
(tungsten was used in armour plating and was valuable during the war) and
timber interests there. The forests surrounding this area provided an
opportunity for Ali to hone his naturalist (and hunting) skills. He also made
acquaintance with J C Hopwood and Berthold Ribbentrop who were with the Forest
Service in Burma. On his return to India in 1917 after seven years, he decided
to continue formal studies. He was to study commercial law and accountancy at
Davar's College of Commerce. His true interest was however noticed by Father
Ethelbert Blatter at St. Xavier's College and was persuaded to study zoology.
After attending morning classes at Davar's College, he began to attend zoology
classes at St. Xavier's College and was able to complete the course in zoology.During
this break in Bombay he was married to a distant relative, Tehmina in December
1918.
Ali was fascinated by motorcycles from an early age and
starting with a 3.5 HP NSU in Tavoy, he owned a Sunbeam, Harley-Davidsons
(three models), a Douglas, a Scott, a New Hudson and a Zenith among others at
various times. On invitation to the 1950 Ornithological Congress at Uppsala in
Sweden he shipped his Sunbeam aboard the SS Stratheden from Bombay and biked
around Europe, injuring himself in a minor mishap in France apart from having
several falls on cobbled roads in Germany. When he arrived on a fully loaded
bike, just in time for the first session at Uppsala, word went around that he
had ridden all the way from India! He regretted not having owned a BMW.
Ali failed to get an ornithologist's position which was open
at the Zoological Survey of India due to the lack of a formal university degree
and the post went instead to M. L. Roonwal. He was hired as guide lecturer in
1926 at the newly opened natural history section in the Prince of Wales Museum
in Mumbai for the salary of Rs 350 a month.He however tired of the job after
two years and took a study leave in 1928 to Germany, where he was to work under
Professor Erwin Stresemann at the Zoological Museum of Berlin University. Part
of the work involved examining the specimens collected by J. K. Stanford in
Burma. Stanford being a BNHS member had communicated with Claud Ticehurst and
had suggested that he could work on his own with assistance from the BNHS.
Ticehurst did not appreciate the idea of an Indian being involved in the work
and resented even more, the involvement of Stresemann, a German. Ticehurst
wrote letters to the BNHS suggesting that the idea of collaborating with
Stresemann was an insult to Stanford. This was however not heeded by Reginald
Spence and Prater who encouraged Ali to conduct the studies at Berlin with the
assistance of Stresemann. In Berlin, Ali made acquaintance with many of the
major German ornithologists of the time including Bernhard Rensch, Oskar
Heinroth and Ernst Mayr apart from meeting other Indians in Berlin including
the revolutionary Chempakaraman Pillai. Ali also gained experience in bird
ringing at the Heligoland observatory.
Ornithology
With Mary and Dillon Ripley on a collection trip (1976)
On his return to India in 1930, he discovered that the guide
lecturer position had been eliminated due to lack of funds. Unable to find a
suitable job, Salim Ali and Tehmina moved to Kihim, a coastal village near
Mumbai. Here he had the opportunity to study at close hand, the breeding of the
Baya Weaver and discovered their mating system of sequential polygamy. Later
commentators have suggested that this study was in the tradition of the Mughal
naturalists that Salim Ali admired. A few months were then spent in Kotagiri
where he had been invited by K M Anantan, a retired army doctor who had served
in Mesopotamia during World War I. He also came in contact with Mrs Kinloch,
who lived at Longwood Shola, and her son-in-law R C Morris, who lived in the
Biligirirangan Hills. He then discovered an opportunity to conduct systematic
bird surveys of the princely states that included Hyderabad, Cochin,
Travancore, Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal with the sponsorship of the rulers of
those states. He was aided and supported in these surveys by Hugh Whistler who
had surveyed many parts of India and had kept very careful notes.
Interestingly, Whistler had initially been irritated by the unknown Indian.
Whistler had in a note on The study of Indian birds mentioned that the long
tail feathers of the Greater Racket-tailed Drongo lacked webbing on the inner
vane. Salim Ali wrote that such inaccuracies had been carried on from early
literature and pointed out that it was incorrect on account of a twist in the
rachis. Whistler was initially resentful of an unknown Indian finding fault and
wrote "snooty" letters to the editors of the journal S H Prater and
Sir Reginald Spence. Subsequently Whistler re-examined his specimens and not
only admitted his error but became a close friend.
Whistler also introduced Salim to Richard Meinertzhagen and
the two made an expedition into Afghanistan. Although Meinertzhagen had very
critical views of him they became good friends. Salim Ali found nothing amiss
in Meinertzhagen's bird works but later studies have shown many of his studies
to be fraudulent. Meinertzhagen made his diary entries from their days in the
field available and Salim Ali reproduces them in his autobiography:
30.4.1937 '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...
20.5.1937 '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... 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:...
He was accompanied and supported on his early ornithological
surveys by his wife, Tehmina, and was shattered when she died in 1939 following
a minor surgery. After Tehmina's death in 1939, Salim Ali stayed with his
sister Kamoo and brother-in-law. In the course of his later travels, Ali
rediscovered the Kumaon Terai population of the Finn's Baya but was
unsuccessful in his expedition to find the Mountain Quail (Ophrysia
superciliosa), the status of which continues to remain unknown.
Label for a specimen collected by Salim Ali during his
Mysore State survey
Ali was not very interested in the details of bird
systematics and taxonomy and was more interested in studying birds in the
field.Ernst Mayr wrote to Ripley complaining that Ali failed to collect
sufficient specimens : "as far as collecting is concerned I don't think he
ever understood the necessity for collecting series. Maybe you can convince him
of that."Ali himself wrote to Ripley complaining about bird taxonomy:
My head reels at
all these nomenclatural metaphysics! I feel strongly like retiring from
ornithology, if this is the stuff, and spending the rest of my days in the
peace of the wilderness with birds, and away from the dust and frenzy of
taxonomical warfare. I somehow feel complete detachment from all this, and am
thoroughly unmoved by what name one ornithologist chooses to dub a bird that is
familiar to me, and care even less in regard to one that is unfamiliar -----
The more I see of these subspecific tangles and inanities, the more I can
understand the people who silently raise their eyebrows and put a finger to
their temples when they contemplate the modern ornithologist in action.
—Ali to Ripley, 5
January 1956
Ali later wrote that his interest was in the "living
bird in its natural environment."
Salim Ali's associations with Sidney Dillon Ripley led to
many bureaucratic problems. Ripley's past as an OSS agent led to allegations
that the CIA had a hand in the bird-ringing operations in India.
Salim Ali took some interest in bird photography along with
his friend Loke Wan Tho. Loke had been introduced to Ali by JTM Gibson, a BNHS
member and Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Indian Navy, who had taught
English to Loke at a school in Switzerland. A wealthy Singapore businessman
with a keen interest in birds. Loke helped Ali and the BNHS with financial
support.Ali was also interested in the historical aspects of ornithology in
India. In a series of articles, among his first publications, he examined the
contributions to natural-history of the Mughal emperors. In the 1971 Sunder Lal
Hora memorial lecture and the 1978 Azad Memorial Lecture he spoke of the
history and importance of bird study in India.
Other contributions
Salim Ali was very influential in ensuring the survival of
the BNHS and managed to save the then 100-year old institution by writing to
the then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru for financial help. Salim also influenced
other members of his family. A cousin, Humayun Abdulali became an ornithologist
while his niece Laeeq took an interest in birds and was married to Zafar
Futehally, a distant cousin of Ali, who went on to become the honorary
Secretary of the BNHS and played a major role in the development of bird study
through the networking of birdwatchers in India. Ali also guided several M.Sc.
and Ph. D. students, the first of whom was Vijaykumar Ambedkar, who further
studied the breeding and ecology of the Baya Weaver, producing a thesis that
was favourably reviewed by David Lack.
Ali was able to provide support for the development of
ornithology in India by identifying important areas where funding could be
obtained. He helped in the establishment of an economic ornithology unit within
the Indian Council for Agricultural Research. He was also able to obtain
funding for migration studies through a project to study the Kyasanur forest
disease, an arthropod-borne virus that appeared to have similarities to a
Siberian tick-borne disease. This project partly funded by the PL 480 grants of
the USA however ran into political difficulties. In the late 1980s, he also
guided a BNHS project that aimed to reduce bird hits at Indian airfields. He
also attempted some early citizen science projects through the birdwatchers of
India who were connected by the Newsletter for Birdwatchers.
Dr. Ali had considerable influence in conservation related
issues in post-independence India especially through Prime Ministers Jawaharlal
Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi was herself a keen birdwatcher,
influenced by Ali's bird books (a copy of the Book of Indian Birds was gifted
to her in 1942 by her father Nehru who was in Dehra Dun jail while she herself was
imprisoned in Naini jail) and by the Gandhian birdwatcher Horace Alexander. Ali
influenced the designation of the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and in decisions
that saved the Silent Valley National Park. One of Ali's later interventions at
Bharatpur involved the exclusion of cattle and graziers into the sanctuary and
this was to prove costly and resulted in ecological changes that led to a
decline in the numbers of many species of waterbirds. Some historians have
noted that the approach to conservation used by Salim Ali and the BNHS followed
an undemocratic process.
Dr. Ali was a frequent visitor to The Doon School where he
was an engaging and persuasive advocate of ornithology to successive
generations of pupils. As a consequence, he was considered to be part of the
Dosco fraternity and became one of the very few people to be made an honorary
member of The Doon School Old Boys Society.
Personal views
Salim Ali held many views that were contrary to the
mainstream ideas of his time. A question that he was asked frequently was about
the collection of bird specimens particularly in later life when he became
known for his conservation related activism. Although once a fan of shikar
(hunting) literature, Ali held strong views on hunting but upheld the
collection of bird specimens for scientific study. He held the view that the
practice of wildlife conservation needed to be practical and not grounded in
philosophies like ahimsa. He suggested that this fundamental religious
sentiment had hindered the growth of bird study in India.
it is true that I despise purposeless
killing, and regard it as an act of vandalism, deserving the severest
condemnation. But my love for birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is
essentially aesthetic and scientific, and in some cases may even be pragmatic.
For a scientific approach to bird study, it is often necessary to sacrifice a
few, ... (and) I have no doubt that but for the methodical collecting of
specimens in my earlier years - several thousands, alas - it would have been
impossible to advance our taxonomical knowledge of Indian birds ... nor indeed
of their geographic distribution, ecology, and bionomics.
— Ali (1985):195
Brought up in a Muslim household, he had in his younger life
been taught to recite the Koran without understanding any Arabic. In his adult
life he despised what he saw as the meaningless and hypocritical practices of
prayer and was put off by the "ostentatiously sanctimonious elders".
In the early 1960s the national bird of India was under
consideration and Salim Ali was intent that it should be the endangered Great
Indian Bustard, however this proposal was overruled in favour of the Indian
Peafowl.
Honours and memorials
Although recognition came late, he received several honorary
doctorates and numerous awards. The earliest was the "Joy Gobinda Law Gold
Medal" in 1953, awarded by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and was based on
an appraisal of his work by Sunder Lal Hora (and in 1970 received the Sunder
Lal Hora memorial Medal of the Indian National Science Academy). He received
honorary doctorates from the Aligarh Muslim University (1958), Delhi University
(1973) and Andhra University (1978). In 1967 he became the first non-British
citizen to receive the Gold Medal of the British Ornithologists' Union. In the
same year, he received the J Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation prize consisting
of a sum of $ 100,000, which he used to form the corpus of the Salim Ali Nature
Conservation Fund. In 1969 he received the John C. Phillips memorial medal of
the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The
USSR Academy of Medical Science gave him the Pavlovsky Centenary Memorial Medal
in 1973 and in the same year he was made Commander of the Netherlands Order of
the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The Indian government
decorated him with a Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.He
was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1985.
Dr. Salim Ali died in 1987, at the age of 91 after a
prolonged battle with prostate cancer in Mumbai. In 1990, the Sálim Ali Centre
for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) was established at Coimbatore by
the Government of India. Pondicherry University established the Salim Ali
School of Ecology and Environmental Sciences. The government of Goa set up the
Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary and the Thattakad bird sanctuary near Vembanad in
Kerala also goes by his name. The location of the BNHS in Bombay was renamed to
"Dr Salim Ali Chowk". In 1972, Kitti Thonglongya discovered a
misidentified specimen in the collection of the BNHS and described a new
species that he called Latidens salimalii, considered one of the world's rarest
bats, and the only species in the genus Latidens. The subspecies of the Rock
Bush Quail (Perdicula argoondah salimalii) and the eastern population of Finn's
Weaver (Ploceus megarhynchus salimalii) were named after him by Whistler and
Abdulali respectively. A subspecies of the Black-rumped Flameback Woodpecker
(Dinopium benghalense tehminae) was named after his wife, Tehmina by Whistler
and Kinnear.
The International
Jury for the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize of the World Wildlife
Fund has selected for 1975
Salim A. Ali
Creator of an
environment for conservation in India, your work over fifty years in
acquainting Indians with the natural riches of the subcontinent has been
instrumental in the promotion of protection, the setting up of parks and
reserves, and indeed the awakening of conscience in all circles from the
government to the simplest village Panchayat. Since the writing of your book,
the Book of Indian Birds which in its way was the seminal natural history
volume for everyone in India, your name has been the single one known
throughout the length and breadth of your own country, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
as the father of conservation and the fount of knowledge on birds. Your message
has gone high and low across the land and we are sure that weaver birds weave your
initials in their nests, and swifts perform parabolas in the sky in your honor.
For your lifelong
dedication to the preservation of bird life in the Indian subcontinent and your
identification with the Bombay Natural History Society as a force for education,
the World Wildlife Fund takes delight in presenting you with the second J. Paul
Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize. February 19, 1976.
Writings
The 10 volume "Handbook" (second edition)
Salim Ali wrote numerous journal articles, chiefly in the
Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. He also wrote a number of
popular and academic books, many of which remain in print. Ali credited
Tehmina, who had studied in England, for helping improve his English prose.
Some of his literary pieces were used in a collection of English writing. A
popular article that he wrote in 1930 Stopping by the woods on a Sunday morning
was reprinted in The Indian Express on his birthday in 1984.His most popular
work was The Book of Indian Birds, written in the style of Whistler's Popular
Handbook of Birds, first published in 1941 and subsequently translated into
several languages and numerous editions. The first ten editions alone sold more
than forty-six thousand copies. The first edition was reviewed by Ernst Mayr in
1943, who commending it while noting that the illustrations were not to the
standard of American bird-books.His magnum opus was however the 10 volume
Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan written with Dillon Ripley and
often referred to as "the handbook". This work started in 1964 and
ended in 1974 and a second edition was completed by others, notably J S Serrao
of the BNHS, Bruce Beehler, Michel Desfayes and Pamela Rasmussen, after his
death.A single volume "compact edition" of the "Handbook"
was also produced and a supplementary illustrative work A Pictorial Guide to
the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent with illustrations by John Henry Dick and
coauthored with Dillon Ripley was published in 1983, these plates were also
used in the second edition of the "Handbook".
Some of the books written by Salim Ali
He also produced a number of regional field guides,
including "The Birds of Kerala" (the first edition in 1953 was titled
"The Birds of Travancore and Cochin"), "The Birds of
Sikkim", "The Birds of Kutch" (later "The Birds of
Gujarat"), "Indian Hill Birds" and the "Birds of the
Eastern Himalayas". Several low-cost book were produced by the National
Book Trust including "Common Birds" (1967) written with his niece
Laeeq Futehally which was reprinted in several editions with translations into
Hindi and other languages. In 1985 he wrote his autobiography, The Fall of a
Sparrow. Ali also wrote about his own vision for the Bombay Natural History
Society, noting the importance of conservation related activities.In the 1986
issue of the Journal of the BNHS he noted the role that it had played, the
changing interests from hunting to conservation captured in 64 volumes that
were preserved in microfiche copies, and the zenith that it had reached under
the exceptional editorship of S H Prater.
A two-volume compilation of his shorter letters and writings
was published in 2007, edited by Tara Gandhi, one of his last students.
