32 6 august 2018s a young geology student in Durgapur,
West Bengal, in the 1980s, Rajat Mazumdar
now recalls with affection how taken up
he was with the debate around an ancient
rock sample that had been discovered in
odisha. “The scientists who had made the dis-
covery [from Presidency College in Kolkata]
believed that they had found a sample that
was part of an ancient crust and at least around
3.8 billion years old. Everyone back then was
talking about it,” he says. But after the findings
were published, several scientists were sceptical
of the claim. and subsequent investigations re-
vealed that the sample was old, but not that old.
“There had been some sort of a miscalculation
and it was found that it was actually about 3.3
billion years old. But it became a sentimental
thing for me,” he says. “I told myself I must find
the oldest rock in India.”
Much later, in 2010, Mazumdar, a profes-
sor now, was in the very area, Champua,
where the rock sample had been discovered
in the 1980s. He was accompanied by a student,
Trisrota Chaudhuri. using clues gleaned from
journals and research papers, Mazumdar and
Chaudhuri were trying to find rocks as old as
the ones found in the 80s. “We had descrip-
tions and some landmarks, but this was all
from the pre-gPs age. so it was in a language
like ‘from this PWD bungalow, walk such and
such kilometres south or north from it’,” Ma-
zumdar recalls.
Mazumdar was then part of an international
unEsCo project tasked with finding rocks be-THE ROCK BOTTOM
OF ORIGINS
life
The ancestral story as written in a stone found in Odisha
By Lhendup G BhuTia
A
Illustration bySaurabh Singh