BackJanaki Ammal, the pioneering female botanist who ‘sweetened a nation’
When India became independent, then PM Nehru invited her to return to the countryAmmal was India’s first female botanist even before the country woke up to independence
PremiumOn 31 July, Smithsonian, published by the Smithsonian Institution of the US, hailed Janaki Ammal as a forgotten but pioneering female botanist from India, who “sweetened a nation and saved a valley".
Just a month earlier, Viru and Girija Viraraghavan, plant breeders in Tamil Nadu’s Kodaikanal, had named a laboriously crafted hybrid rose of yellow colour after Ammal. Yet, beyond the limited circles of academic publications and articles, her story remains largely untold in her home state, Kerala, or for that matter, anywhere else in the country.
In May, a book tracing her journey hit the stores, the first such effort in her mother tongue Malayalam, authored by Nirmala James.
Ammal was probably India’s first female botanist, even before the country woke up to Independence. She was born in Kerala in 1897 and, aided by a scholarship, went on to pursue her doctoral studies in her 20s at the University of Michigan. There, she became the first Indian woman to receive a doctorate degree in botany in the US, according to her niece Geeta Doctor quoted in a write-up in The Wire website in 2016.
According to science historian Vinita Damodaran’s citation in her research article History of Science, under the title Gender, Race, and Science in Twentieth-Century India in the 1930s, Ammal worked at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore amid caste and gender prejudices.
She was born into Thiyya caste, low in the social hierarchy. At the institute, she created a high-yielding variety of sugar best suited for India, which was till then importing sugar from Indonesia.
Soon, Ammal left for London, joined the John Innes Horticultural Institute at its invitation as an assistant cytologist, and later joined as a cytologist at the prestigious Royal Horticulture Society, next to Kew Gardens, which has the world’s largest collection of living plants.
Along with fellow biologist C.D. Darlington, Ammal wrote The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, a bible for botanists around the globe even now. To honour her work, a cross-breed variety of Magnolia blossom she created, was named after her at the Royal Horticulture Society— the Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal.
When India became independent, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally invited her to return to the country to reorganize the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) and survey India’s flora. In the later years, she would become a voice to preserve the indigenous plants against the development juggernaut, and lent her solid scholarship track to give credence to environmental movements such as the one to protect Western Ghats’ precious Silent Valley region against construction of a hydropower dam that would flood the place. She was conferred Padma Shri in 1977.
Piecing together the life of Ammal, who had made major contributions to society was a tough task as very little archival evidence exists, author James said.
“She comes from what is locally known as White Thiyya community. Her grandmother was married to a colonial British officer. Her relatives seem to be bothered with this ancestor lineage, they don’t want to admit it or associate with it anymore. So they did not talk to me," James said. “Further, the younger generation doesn’t know much about her importance as a historical figure, many of her letters and photos were either disposed of or set on fire," she added.
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