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Recollections of mineral collecting and dealing in India
Mineralogical Record, Mar/Apr 2003 by Kothavala, Rustam Z
Prior to 1972, fine collectable specimens from India were virtually unknown in the West. Today they comprise a prominent share of the international mineral market. Yet the hobby of mineral collecting still remains almost nonexistent in India itself. This first-person account by a native son, who began as a field-collecting hobbyist and later became a mineral dealer, recalls the flavor of amateur mineral collecting in India from the 1940's and 1950's, then illuminates the development of a feisty, fiercely competitive mineral specimen market in India during the decades that followed.
INTRODUCTION
Several bullock-cartfuls of fresh river gravel delivered and spread on my uncle's driveway in Poona provided my entry to a lifetime with minerals.
In 1945 I was spending the Christmas holidays with my cousins in Poona. World War II had ended some months earlier, triumphantly for Britain, whose Raj in India would come to a close in less than two years, much to the surprise of the politically naive adults of my Indian family. But such topics barely impinged on the mind of an eleven-year-old boy whose eye darted curiously from one chunk to another in the gravel, until it was caught and held by a bright yellow stone with the most incredible pattern of sharp parallel bands of various intensities surrounding a sparkling center.
"Quartz crystals," declared my know-it-all uncle, "with agate surrounding them. That's nothing," he continued dismissively, "In Cambay, agates come in all colors of the rainbow. And they are cut and polished into astonishing jewels for rings and necklaces. Once, I saw . But I was no longer listening. I was already excitedly off hunting for more "jewels" in the driveway gravel... my first mineral collecting trip. When I had finished I had an array of gaudily colored stones to accompany my initial yellow treasure... red, green, translucent milky blue ... with all sorts of inexplicable marks and shapes within them. Why did they have such a variety of colors? And what produced the strange indentations and exquisitely fine patterns? And what were some of the other stones I had picked up that didn't look at all like the agates? No one seemed to know the answers.
After I returned to my hometown of Bangalore, in South India, I hopped on my bicycle for a trip to the museum. In a corner section of the upper floor I found a couple of display cases labeled "Rocks and Minerals of India." Though the collection would most aptly be called shabby in light of what I know today, they were fantastic beyond belief to my then untutored eyes. Something glassy black: "Samarskite," labeled "radioactive," no less. Another piece, sparkling bright emerald green: "Fuchsite quartzite." A chunk looking polished and as transparent as glass: "Muscovite mica:' Hey! Mica! That's the stuff in the window of Mother's kerosene kitchen stove! Here was my introduction to mineralogy and geology. I was off and running. And when I stumbled across an article with full color photographs of wulfenite and other American specimens in the Smithsonian Institution, authored by the associate curator of the U.S. National Museum (Switzer, G. S., Nov. 1951, "Rockhounds" Uncover Earth's Mineral Beauty, National Geographic Magazine, v. C [100], no. 5, p. 631-660), my enthusiasm for minerals was set on fire.
But my questions about the agates remained unanswered until, in New Delhi, my father took me along to meet an old friend of his, Professor Darashah N. Wadia, whose home was filled with curious and beautiful pieces of natural materials the venerable gentleman had collected during field trips across the length and breadth of India. With convincing authority "Darashah Uncle" (for that is the way Indian boys are expected to respectfully address an elder man) instantly answered each and every mineral-related question I could think to lay on him. My very first specimen, the bright yellow one from the driveway gravel in Poona, Prof. Wadia said, was a pretty piece of "fortification agate." I was still too callow to grasp how significant a figure he was when Father informed me that he, Dr. D. N. Wadia, was the first Indian ever to be appointed Director General of the Geological Survey of India, and that he was the author of Geology of India, a seminal book on the subject.
BANGALORE
Thereafter, whenever Dr. Wadia's work brought him to Bangalore he would invite me to join him and his G.S.I. colleagues on any field trips they undertook. That was how I learned about an occurrence of monazite. As we zoomed along a dirt track in a jeep, Dr. Wadia pointed off to one side at a waste pile of white clayey material, saying, "You should take a look at that during the monsoons. If you persist, you'll find interesting crystals of monazite ... that's a rare-earth/thorium phosphate." After that, during the late 1940's and early 1950's, I made it a practice to visit this occurrence on my red Jawa motorcycle after periods of heavy rain. It turned out to be a thoroughly kaolinized pegmatite pit, surrounded by fields, on the outskirts of Bangalore, near a barely discernible hamlet called Yediyur. The rains would expose crystals of red to brown fragments and crystals of monazite up to 5 cm across, as well as less well-crystallized black columbite, which could be spotted and picked up on the surface. Over 2 or 3 years, my school buddy, Vijay Kumar, who joined me for the fun of taking outings rather than for the mineralogy, and I managed to collect a dozen or so pretty decent specimens, plus myriad broken crystal pieces.
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