The message of Mars came to India 150 years ago

By Mr DIGVIJAY SINGH


a stone fell sharply from the sky at 9 am on 25 August 1865 in the Sherghati area of ​​Bihar and went into the ground. All this happened in front of the eyes of a farmer named Hanuman Singh. Call it coincidence or, luckily, when the smoke fell after the stone fell, the winds were blowing on their faces. Where did this stone come from? This question was troubling him.


In the end, he considered it a game of God and somehow got rid of this question. Meanwhile, nearby people also gathered and this stone puzzle had become in their mind as well. No one had the answer to the question whether this stone fell from the sky, but where did it come from? It was not as if a thunderstorm had brought him here because the weather was perfectly clear. Hanuman Singh succeeded in pulling the stone out of the ground. They handed it over to the authorities.

This is the event before independence. That is, when the British government was considering India as its private property. For the British, India was a treasure trove of unique things. In such a situation, it does not take time for the echoes of the stones falling from space to reach Britain and the competition starts to collect them to form part of the collection of the Natural History Museum of London.


Britain used to have only one rival in the matter of collecting, investigating and presenting the Meteorites as a unique treasure of the country. Museum of Natural History of Vienna, capital of Austria. London was always ready to collect Meteorite from every possible jagger to take on her. Special officers would be appointed for this. Their only task would be that whenever a stone falls from the sky, it should be transported to London, protecting it from the local people. However, the Meteorite of Sherghati survived to become the pride of the British.


To understand how this was possible, one has to walk about 80 years behind the Sherghati incident. On 15 January 1784, Sir William Jones, a British philologist, started the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Later, it became The Asiatic Society of Bengal, which took the initiative to collect and research meteorites in India.

The Society began to compete with London and Vienna by opening India's first public library in 1808 and the first public museum in 1814. Then in 1851, Irish geologist Thomas Oldham created the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and thus India became a major center of meteorite study. During this time Britain left no stone unturned to assert its right to the stones falling from space in India. Many rules and laws were made. Neville Story-Maskelin, who commanded the British Museum after the Revolution of 1857, devised the entire process of transporting each stone to London and forming part of the collection there, and issued it as ordered.


The Museum of London would return only a small portion of the meteorite from India as an 'offering'. It was with this 'gifting' technique of Maskelin that GSI gave London a befitting reply. India's collection was made to compete London and Vienna by buying 223 meteorites from a mineral dealer in England. The Indian Museum was inaugurated in Calcutta in 1866 and all the Meteorites deposited with the Asiatic Society and the GSI found a place there.


Sherghati Meteorite became a part of this new collection. This was the first time that Meteorite was cut, read and the other two big museums were 'gifted' in Kolkata instead of London. To the British, this was India's reply in their own language. These stones came from Mars, it was found out in the late twentieth century. Today, the world mainly knows three types of stones that fell on Mars from the earth. The first of these are Shergotite, which corresponds to the composition of Sherghati Meteorite that has fallen in India. They have the highest number of stones from Mars. The remaining two varieties are Chassignite and Nakhlite.


A fourth category consists of those stones from mars which are different from the rest. The most important of these is 'Allen Hills 84001' which probably fell in Antarctica about 13 thousand years ago. The carbonate present in it indicated the presence of water on the mars, which increased the interest of humans in mars than ever before.


There have been several MAR missions before Perseverance and many are in Papline. Not only space agencies like ISRO, NASA, ESA, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos also remain the focus on Mars. If the human colony on the Red Planet was truly ready, then the Sherghati Meteorite would be a big part of the history of that civilization.