Salim Ali

Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali was born on November 12, 1896, in Bombay (now Mumbai), the youngest of nine children in a Sulaimani Bohra family. His father Moizuddin died when Salim was an infant, and his mother Zeenat-un-nissa died before he turned three. The orphaned children were raised by their maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and his wife Hamida in Khetwadi, a crowded quarter of the city ^[1].

A boyhood incident set the course of his life. Around the age of ten, Salim shot a sparrow with his toy air gun and noticed an odd yellow patch on its throat. Curious, he took the bird to his uncle, who sent him to W. S. Millard, honorary secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society. Millard identified it as a yellow-throated sparrow, showed the boy the Society's collection of stuffed birds, and lent him books on Indian birdlife. Ali later described this meeting as the moment that fixed his interest in ornithology ^[1][2].

His formal schooling was unremarkable. He attended St. Xavier's College in Bombay but struggled with the mathematics required for a degree, and in 1913 he passed only the matriculation examination of Bombay University. A few years later he was sent to Tavoy in Burma to help run the family's wolfram mining and timber interests, where the surrounding forests gave him far more education in natural history than in commerce ^[1][3].

After returning from Burma in 1917, Ali resumed his studies, taking courses in commercial law and accountancy while attending zoology classes. He sought a post at the Zoological Survey of India but was passed over for lack of a university degree, a rejection that stung him for years. In 1926 he accepted a modest position as guide lecturer at the newly opened natural history section of the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay ^[1][2].

Determined to train properly, Ali took leave in 1929 and travelled to Germany to study under Erwin Stresemann, one of the foremost ornithologists of the era, at the Zoological Museum of Berlin University. The year in Berlin exposed him to modern systematic methods and to the study of living birds in the field rather than skins in cabinets. When he returned to India in 1930 his museum post had been abolished, leaving him without steady employment ^[2][3].

Unemployment proved productive. Ali and his wife Tehmina settled at Kihim, a coastal village near Bombay, where he spent months watching the breeding behaviour of the baya weaver bird. His 1930 paper on the weaver's nesting habits attracted wide notice and established his reputation as a careful field observer. Soon afterwards he began the regional bird surveys, starting with the princely state of Hyderabad in 1931 and 1932, that would occupy much of the next two decades ^[1][3].

Among the most cited Salim Ali achievements are his systematic bird surveys of the Indian subcontinent. Working on shoestring budgets sponsored by princely states and the Bombay Natural History Society, he surveyed Hyderabad, Cochin, Travancore, Gujarat, central India, Afghanistan's border regions, Kutch, Kailash and Mansarovar, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the eastern Himalayas. These expeditions produced the first reliable distribution records for hundreds of species and rediscovered birds such as Finn's baya. In 1948 he took part in locating breeding grounds relevant to the mystery of the mountain quail and other little-known Himalayan species ^[2][4].

His writing carried ornithology to ordinary readers. The Book of Indian Birds, first published by the Bombay Natural History Society in 1941, paired concise species accounts with colour plates and went through many editions, becoming the standard field companion for Indian birdwatchers. Between 1968 and 1974 Ali and the American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley published the ten-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, a comprehensive reference covering roughly 1,200 species and still the foundation of subcontinental ornithology ^[3][4].

Ali's influence extended into conservation policy. He persuaded governments to protect the Keoladeo wetlands at Bharatpur, which became a national park and later a World Heritage Site, and his intervention with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi helped halt the hydroelectric project that would have flooded the Silent Valley rainforest in Kerala. He guided the Bombay Natural History Society for decades and secured government funding that kept the institution alive after independence ^[4][5].

Honours followed. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 1976. The same year he won the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize, then worth 100,000 dollars, most of which he turned over to the Bombay Natural History Society. The British Ornithologists' Union awarded him its Union Medal in 1967, the first time it went to a non-British citizen, and Aligarh Muslim University, Delhi University, and Andhra University conferred honorary doctorates ^[2][5].

In December 1918 Ali married Tehmina Begum, a distant relative who had spent part of her youth in England. The marriage was close and childless, and Tehmina became an uncomplaining partner in fieldwork, joining him in camps far from any comfort. Her sudden death in 1939, following minor surgery, was the deepest blow of his life. He never remarried and afterwards lived with his sister Kamoo and brother-in-law in Bombay ^[1][3].

Friends and colleagues remembered a wiry, disciplined man who rose before dawn, kept meticulous notes, and had little patience for sloppy observation. He rode motorcycles with enthusiasm well into old age, once touring Europe on one, and listed the machines he had owned with the same care he gave to bird records. His autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow, published in 1985, took its title from the childhood sparrow episode and displayed a dry, self-mocking humour that surprised readers expecting a solemn scientist ^[1][3].

Ali held pragmatic views on wildlife study that sometimes drew criticism. Trained in an era when specimen collection was standard, he defended the scientific shooting of birds for museum study even as he campaigned against habitat destruction, arguing that accurate knowledge was the basis of protection ^[3][4].

Independence brought Ali new standing. He represented India at international ornithological congresses, served as president of the sixtieth anniversary meetings of professional bodies, and advised the government on wildlife matters. In 1985 he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, a recognition that made the self-taught ornithologist, once rejected for lacking a degree, a member of the national legislature ^[2][5].

He kept working long past the usual age of retirement. In his eighties he was still leading the Bombay Natural History Society, revising the Handbook with Ripley, and lobbying ministers on conservation questions. Field trips continued almost to the end; associates recalled him identifying birds by call when his eyesight had weakened. He used prize money and his influence to fund studies of endangered species, including the great Indian bustard ^[4][5].

Salim Ali died of prostate cancer in Bombay on July 27, 1987, at the age of ninety. Tributes came from scientists, politicians, and the amateur birdwatchers his books had created. The Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, established at Coimbatore in 1990 by the Government of India, was named in his memory ^[2][5].

Any Salim Ali biography must reckon with how completely he reshaped his field. Before him, Indian ornithology was largely the work of British officers and museum men; after him it was an Indian science with its own institutions, journals, and trained observers. The regional surveys he conducted remain baseline data against which modern population changes are measured, and the Handbook he wrote with Ripley is still consulted by researchers across South Asia ^[3][4].

His name is attached to landscapes and species alike. Bird sanctuaries in Goa and elsewhere carry his name, as does the Coimbatore research centre, and a subspecies of rock bunting and the Himalayan swiftlet Aerodramus salimalii commemorate him taxonomically. Among widely repeated Salim Ali facts is his nickname, the Birdman of India, which entered common usage during his lifetime and appears on the postage stamps India issued in his honour in 1996, his birth centenary year ^[2][5].

Perhaps his most durable achievement is cultural. The Book of Indian Birds put affordable field identification in the hands of students, teachers, and civil servants, turning birdwatching into a popular pursuit across the subcontinent. The generations of Indian ecologists and conservationists who began with that small green book are, in a real sense, his students ^[4][5].