Gender, Nation, Race and Science in twentieth century India: the Life and Letters of E.K. Janaki Ammal

E.K. Janaki Ammal career started as a botanist and cytologist when she worked with Cyril Dean Darlington at the John Innes Horticultural Institute in London from 1940-45. It was here that she studied the origin and evolution of cultivated plants resulting in the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants which she co-authored with Cyril Dean Darlington and which became an important source for cytological work on the economic plants of the world. On her return to India in 1948 she became a leading scientist of the nation who wanted to create a national system of genetic science. She was able to do this as the first director of the Central Botanical Laboratory of the Government of India at Lucknow. She received several accolades becoming Fellow of the Linnean society of London, the Royal Geographical Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Royal Asiatic Society, London and the Indian Academy of Sciences. In fact, Janaki Ammal was one of the founding members of the Academy, and the first woman member. An honorary Legum Doctoris was bestowed on her in 1955 by the University of Michigan where she had received her Phd. C.S. Subramanian a scientific contemporary of hers who was the director of the Centre for Advanced Study at the University of Madras recorded her passion for plants, crop plants, garden plants, plantation crops, medicinal crops, and tribal plants. He saw her as an original thinker doing ‘epochal’ work on intergeneric hybrids such as Saccharum/Zea,Saccharum/Erianthus,Saccharum/Imperata,Saccharum/Sorgham. Her pioneering work was on the cytogenetics of Saccharum officinarum (sugarcane) and interspecific and intergeneric hybrids involving sugarcane and both closely related grass genera and very distantly related ones such as Bambusa (bamboo). Her studies on chromosome numbers and ploidy, as he noted, were directed to ascertaining the role of hybridisation in the evolution of flowering plants, work that she had started with Darlington. As the first salaried female staff member based at the garden of the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley in 1944 she undertook investigations of colchicine and its use in inducing polyploidy. The focus of her work on polyploidy and plant evolution continued after her return to India where she worked on the genera, Solanum, Datura, Mentha, Cymbopogon and Dioscorea, besides a range of medicinal and other plants. The confluence of Chinese and Malayan with Indian floristic elements in north-east India she believed led to natural hybridisation between these and contributed greatly to species diversification. As an officer on special duty entrusted with the task of reorganising the botanical survey of India post-independence she was to become a progressive nationalist scientist.  As Subramanian perceptively recorded ‘though cytology was her forte, her work embraced genetics, evolution, phytogeography and ethnobotany’. [1]

Ammal maintained a prolific correspondence through her series of letters not only to the Cyril Dean Darlington, head of the John Innes Institute in London but to various other botanists located in India and in other countries from 1930-1980. The scientific and sometimes personal correspondence between Darlington and Janaki Ammal is preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and provides a remarkable insight into the nature of a very particular scientific relationship that spanned different continents and crossed gender and racial barriers. In her early career in the 1930s she tread new and innovative paths in a racially exclusive and white male scientific context and her later work as a nationalist scientist in an emerging post-colonial India.

The collection starts with the first letter Ammal’s gentle enquiries to Cyril Darlington on whether she could meet him after her PhD and enroute to India. This was at the suggestion of her supervisor Harry Bartlett. She had spent two stints in Michigan first as a recipient of the Barbour scholarship for oriental women in 1924 and later as a Barbour fellow in 1928. The fund was raised by Levi Lewis Barbour in 1917 to train women from the Eurasia with the intention that after their study at the University they would return to their home countries with the knowledge and skills they obtained to better the improve lives of people back home. A competitive scholarship it depended on an advisory committee that very carefully judged the applications. As Barbour himself noted

‘The idea of the Oriental girls’ scholarships is to bring girls from the Orient, give them an Occidental education and let them take back whatever they find good and assimilate the blessings among the peoples from which they come.’[2]

In 1928, the added dimension of the Barbour Fellowships carried with them a larger stipend and allowed for more freedom in personal research and investigation opening the door for many Asian women to study and engage in research at the University of Michigan. This enabled Ammal to stay in Michigan and she became one of the first women to become a Barbour Fellow in 1928. Among her contemporaries at Michigan were several Chinese, Japanese and other Indian scholars notably Sharkeshwari Aga who went on to head Crosthwaite college for women in Allahabad. Janaki later became the first woman in the US to receive her Doctor of Science in Botany. This is recognised by the university today and her achievement is commemorated on the website of the university graduate school. Life in America was very different from home. Assigned to women’s dormitories with other American students and forced to eat American food some scholars had protested. Poor health was another issue with many students being affected with TB.[3] Her dissertation was on “Chromosome Studies in Nicandra Physaloids’’ and she completed her DSc in 1931. The triploid eggplant she refers to in her letter was the cross she developed while working with HH Bartlett known as "Janaki Brengal" (brengal/brinjal is another name for eggplant).

On her arrival in Britain at the John Innes horticultural Institution which was started in 1910 at Merton in south London under William Bateson. The rediscovery of Mendel’s paper on plant hybridisation in 1900 is seen as the foundation of modern genetics. It was first introduced into Britain by Bateson the gap was to be subsequently filled by GBS Haldane. Here Ammal was in search of CD Darlington who at this time was working on Cytology and with whom she worked at the John Innes for the year returning to India shortly to join the Sugarcane breeding Institute in Coimbatore.

In this first phase of her career she was marginalised both by caste and gender and faced male prejudice from the male Indian scientific establishment for example, from T.S. Venkatraman, head of the Sugarcane Breeding Institute, 1912-42 and in Britain and even from Darlington himself as her correspondence reveals. In one letter in August, 1938 she notes of the visit of the biologist Reginald Ruggles Gates to Coimbatore where she was working in the sugarcane breeding institute;

“It has taken seven long months to undo the harm that Gates did in the course of a simple day spent in Coimbatore. Mr Venkatraman was completely taken in by the “Professor’s keen interest in the work done at Coimbatore” - his fund of information and his gracious manner - hence the doubt expressed not to me but to Venkatraman about the validity of the Saccharum-Zea cross stuck in the expert’s brain and my note to Nature was not sent up to the Director of Agriculture for the necessary permission to publish it outside India - I very nearly decided to leave this station as a result of all this-and life became very complicated-however I refused to be defeated and I am glad to report that Venkatraman is at last convinced that the cross is genuine".”[4]  Her letter to Nature was finally published in 1938. In the second phase of her career she became a leading national scientist challenging the narrow utilitarianism of Indian science. In this latter period one can argue that whilst it is possible to see early nationalist science in India as gradually being dominated by the discourse of scientific industrialism in the 1950s the vision for India’s national future sprang from many sources, including paradoxically those that that sought to regenerate Indian ecological and medical traditions. It is this sense one can see Ammal as pioneering both indigenous and gendered environmental approaches to land-use whilst continuing to be a leading national scientist.

Any account of her life should take as a starting point the view outlined that the personal life of scientific practitioners has a bearing on their work and the importance of individual trajectories and the ways in which individuals become meeting points for influences. By looking at a career such as Ammals that spans different continents helps shed new light on existing historical debates on gender, nation, race and science.

The Ammal-Darlington correspondence addresses some very key issues in the history of science and outline the debates and the challenges at the heart of the transition to a post-colonial India and its scientific independence. They provide rare glimpses into a scientific life and the career and aspirations of a woman scientist at the cutting edge of research into cytogenetics and cytogeography. The letters also reveal her institution building capacities as head of the Botanical Survey of India and her vision for India. For Ammal the heritage of India embraced not only its ancient culture and traditions including of its tribal communities but its natural history heritage, its animals, its plants and its forests. Most of the correspondence is to Darlington but there are other stray letters which are present in the collection. Some of the letters are from other eminent botanists to Ammal and there is also some detailed correspondence relating to the publication of the second edition of the Chromosome Atlas of cultivated plants. Ammal’s own archive of letters does not exist having been destroyed. Her family house was sold and her personal herbarium collection, her collection of letters and her library disappeared with it. A sad footnote to a remarkable career and life which we can only ever partially know.

 [1] CS Subramanium, ‘Edavalath, Kakkat Janaki Ammal’, Resurgence, Vol 12, no 6. 2007

[2] http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/dangerousexperiment/exhibits/show/beyondcampus/levi-barbour-and-the-scholarsh/the-barbour-fellows.

[3] Ibid

[4] Ammal to Darlington, August 8th 1938, Darlington Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford