Mohammad Abdur Rahman Khan: The 'Meteor Man' who incorporated astronomy into everyday living

The night sky has been one of the oldest sources of wonder. Through the ages men and women have looked up to the stars and been filled with curiosity and awe. This peculiar awe inspired by the diamond-studded vault has also inspired a number of distinct disciplines and practices. From hobbies like stargazing to highly systematised knowledges like astronomy and astrology and several cosmological myths in every major world religion have all been inspired by the awe one feels for the “heavens”. When we write the history of our all-too-human interest in the night skies, however, we usually parse these various practices and knowledges into neat silos.

Stargazing is seen to be an activity proper to children and hobbyists. Religious cosmologies are mostly left to theologians or historians of religion. Astronomy becomes the province of the savant. Even if some traffic between these distinct groups and their practices may be allowed in earlier eras, the distinctions seem to have become watertight by the 20th century. And that might be why no one today remembers Mohammad Abdur Rahman Khan.

A passion for meteors

In the last decade of British rule in India Khan published a whopping ten papers and reports in Nature, the preeminent scientific journal of the...