Modern figure
Ruchi Ram Sahni
ਰੁਚੀ ਰਾਮ ਸਾਹਨੀرُچی رام ساہنی
Chemist of Government College Lahore who brought modern science to the Punjab and lectured on it in Punjabi in the villages.
Ruchi Ram Sahni was born in Dera Ismail Khan and taught chemistry at Government College Lahore for more than thirty years. He built a workshop that made scientific instruments in Lahore, and gave hundreds of public lectures, many of them in Punjabi, to bring science to people who had never seen an experiment.
In 1914, already in his fifties, he went to Manchester to work with Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr on the new physics of the atom. He was also a campaigner in the Gurdwara reform movement of the 1920s. His son was the botanist Birbal Sahni.