D. N. Wadia

Darashaw Nosherwan Wadia was an Indian geologist, born in 1883 in Surat and died in 1969 in New Delhi, widely regarded as the father of geology in independent India. Working from Jammu and later the Geological Survey of India, which he joined in 1921 as its first Indian employee holding a degree from an Indian university, he carried out the pioneering mapping of the Nanga Parbat, Kashmir and Punjab Himalaya that identified the great northwestern syntaxis, the sharp arcuate bend of the entire Himalayan mountain belt. His textbook Geology of India, first published in 1919 and revised in 1939, remained the standard reference on Indian geology for decades, and he later headed the Atomic Minerals Division of India's Atomic Mineral Commission.