This autobiography, resurrected by Ruchi Ram Sahni’s great-grand daughter, makes for fascinating reading. Ruchi Ram Sahni is well known at the Panjab University in Chandigarh as one of the revered academics. In addition to his contribution to the subject of Chemistry and to the well-being of Panjab University, are remembered the contributions of his sons Birbal and Mulk Raj and more so his grandson, Ashok.
Ruchi Ram Sahni stops his life-story in the present volume, penned in the 1940s, just when his academic life ended and he began to take an active part in the politics of the Congress through the Nonooperation Movement of 1920-22.
The last 26 years of his life, the ones that saw the turmoil of the Partition of India, the documents to do with what he called the ‘History of My Own Times’, remain unpublished. What is left is a story of his life as a scholar, and of a person committed to the spread of knowledge, of someone who used his academic standing to persuade others to move towards rationalism, humanism, and evolve a scientific temper. One of the side effects of this was his involvement in the Brahmo Samaj, a conversion of which his mother did not approve. So much so that she refused to live with him in his house in Lahore or to eat with him.