The Geological Survey of India, 1846 to 1947

Abstract

NOW that the Empire of India has ceased to exist as a British possession and the control of the services in Hindustan and Pakistan has passed from Whitehall, the records of many British-organised services will be reviewed and then perhaps forgotten. I had attempted to tell the story of the Geological Survey of India ten years ago in my presidential address to the Mining and Geological Institute of India (Trans. Min. and Geol. Inst. India, 31; 1936). It was evident to me then that the beginnings of the Geological Survey of India were not correctly known, l and certainly not as represented in the record by Sir Clements R. Markham (“Memoirs of Indian Surveys”, p. 216; 1878), nor as given by Sir Thomas Holland in his “Indian Geological Terminology” (Mem. Geol. Surv. India, 51, Part 1; 1926). I began a search for information in India, first among the files of the Geological Survey of India, then in the Record Office in the Secretariat of the Government of Bengal, and finally, on my return to Britain last summer, in the record room at the India Office, Whitehall. The correspondence relating to the engagement of David Hiram Williams and, eventually, after his death, to that of Thomas Oldham and his re-engagement after five years service, show that Oldham was recruited as “successor to Williams”, and that, even at the time of his re-engagement by the Honourable Court of Directors of the East India Company, Oldham was addressed as “Geological Surveyor”. These facts are quite plain in the dispatches to India and Bengal from London, and may be seen in the Commonwealth Relations Office, King Charles Street, London, S.W.I, through the Superintendent of Records.