Shiv Ram Kashyap

Shiv Ram Kashyap was born on 6 November 1882 in Jhelum District, Punjab, in a family that had members in the army. He studied at the University of Punjab in Lahore, receiving a medical diploma from Agra in 1904. He worked briefly in the medical service of the United Provinces during which time he privately appeared and qualified for the B.Sc. In 1909 he obtained a M.Sc. in botany. Obtaining the Arnold and Maclagan Gold medals, he went to Cambridge University in 1910 and passed the Natural Science Tripos in 1912. He then joined the Government College at Lahore as a professor of biology founding the botany department in 1919. He was a founding member of the Indian Botanical Society in 1920 and edited its journal. Kashyap was a specialist on the bryophytes, especially from the Himalayan region. He is famous for three contributions - Liverworts of the Western Himalayas, Flora of Tibet and the sexual generation of Equisetum. Kashyap studied the liverworts of the western Himalayas and the Punjab region, where he described four new genera and thirty new species of liverworts. He published a book on Lahore District Flora jointly with A C Joshi in 1936. He travelled widely across the Himalayan region and being a friend of the family, was an unofficial mentor for Birbal Sahni. He was a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1934. A moss genus Kashyapia (family Calymperaceae) was named in his honour by Ram Saran Chopra but this is considered an illegitimate name and a possible synonym of Syrrhopodon. He died suddenly at Lahore, on 26 November 1934, due to heart failure. Even an hour before his death, he was attending to his work with his characteristic thoroughness. An entire block in Panjab University is named after him. His daughter Kamini Kaushal became a famous actress.