Abstract
Savithri Preetha Nair, Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E. K. Janaki Ammal, A Life 1897–1984, 2023, 611 pp. (Hardback), Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-032-03548-2.
That Chromosome Woman is its own statement on gender and is immediately evident from the title. What is also revealed is that a significant act of gendering, through social disparity, occurred well before the birth of Edavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal (1897–1984). Her mother was one of two offspring of a liaison between a lower caste Thiya woman, Kunhi Kurumbi and an English government official, John Caulfield Hannyngton. He never publicly acknowledged his two daughters, but arranged for the older, Devaki, to marry a Thiya, Edavaleth Kakkat Krishnan, from Tellicherry in what is now north Kerala. The stigma of such mixed heritage was a social blight for their 13 children. It possibly had a bearing on Janaki’s own positions on miscegenation which she was often presented as being opposed to (refer to p. 52).
Paradoxically, such fraught beginnings freed the family from the constraints of upper-caste learning, allowing it to draw liberally from Western education. The result was a delightful facility with the English language (including quips from Shakespeare) for Janaki and her siblings. This was furthered in no small measure by their learned and formidable father, a Sub-judge in Calicut and later Palghat, Deputy Collector of Tellicherry, and later, in the same township, Chairman of its Municipality. When Janaki left Edam, the familial house at the age of 17, to go to college in Madras, it marked the beginning of a bewilderingly peripatetic life, underscoring the term ‘nomad scientist’ in the title of the book. Without delving at length into her many journeys outside India, this review will confine itself to the challenges faced by a remarkable botanist forced as much by circumstance, not least because she was a woman, as her own personality, to respond often unconventionally.
With a BA in Botany from Presidency College, Madras (now Chennai), and a doctorate that was made possible with a Barbour scholarship to the University of Michigan, Janaki’s work at the John Innes Centre and Wisley Gardens in England, as well as in Madras and Coimbatore, made her one of the leading figures globally in the intergeneric crosses between plants. While her doctoral work had employed Nicandra, a species of nightshade in the family Solanaceae, she would focus much of her attention later on monocots, particularly grasses, with especial attention to Saccharum, including sugarcane; in fact, her first publication detailed her work on five different types of the species, wherein she was able to generate a number of polyploids, with 8 being the basic number (p. 156). The fact that she made the prediction that the more primitive forms (i.e., those that resemble most closely the ancestral condition, as opposed to derived forms) had a lower number of chromosomes, was prescient and would be adduced to support theoretical claims that she would make later in opposition to such eminent botanists as Ledyard Stebbins, who, at least for a couple of families, would come to agree with her point of view (pp. 441–442).
As a woman, Janaki was ploughing a lonely furrow. The book is meticulous in documenting just how often she was the single woman in an academic setting dominated by men. The examples are legion. When, in July 1934, the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) came into being in Bangalore, ‘Janaki was the sole woman among the sixty-five founding fellows’ (p. 148). Six months later, that concession was not even made. At the inauguration of the National Institute of Science in India (NISI), (later morphing into the Indian National Science Academy [INSA]), ‘none of the elected fellows … were women; not even Janaki figured on the list’ (p. 154). At the Wisley Garden, she was the first woman to be employed (p. 247), and in 1952, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offered her the post of Director of the Botanical Survey of India, which she accepted (p. 340). In 1954, the Central Botanical Laboratory came into existence, and Janaki was named its Director. At a symposium on the ‘Study of Tropical Vegetation’ in Kandy held in 1956 under various regional sub-bodies of UNESCO, Janaki was again the only female delegate out of 26, participating from disparate places such as Australia, North Borneo, Ceylon, France, Indonesia, Malaya, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sarawak, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Vietnam and India (p. 392). Further, ‘In 1959, the Indian Botanical Society had chosen Janaki as President, the first woman to hold this post; it would take three decades before a woman would be elected President of the Society again (the plant cytogeneticist Archana Sharma, 1932–2008)’ (p. 421). Janaki’s success did not pass unnoticed, and in 1954, the post of Chief Botanist was created, and a male Director was put in charge who, in the Kew system, valued taxonomy considerably more than cytogenetics. As Janaki would write to her intellectual standard of reference, Cyril Darlington, her associate and recipient of Janaki’s possibly most enduring romantic (if unrequited) involvement at the John Innes Centre,
The Government of India has appointed as the Chief Botanist of India— a man with the Kew tradition and I the Director of the Central Botanical Laboratory must now take orders from him. Kew has won a decisive victory—and the news has been jubilantly received there. I am very angry. (p. 365)
Harley Harris Bartlett, Janaki’s doctoral supervisor, would observe sympathetically that Janaki suffered from the simple fact of being a woman in the role of an official superior to men (p. 385). It would take up to 1977, when she was almost 80 years old, for the Government of India to afford Janaki a Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award bestowed by the nation, a lamentably belated recognition for such a pathbreaking scientist who was also a woman. (p 489).
Such examples abound in this engaging and unusual book. The author, an independent researcher of renown, from the same state as her subject, Kerala, has all the benefits that such commonality of cultural nuance affords. Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E. K. Janaki Ammal, A Life 1897–1984 can only be described as a work of deep reverence for Janaki Ammal, without, at least in the main, falling into the trap of hagiography. The book is curiously presented, in some places deeply explanatory of the scientific context (which is laudable), where Janaki, however, does not make an appearance for a few pages in a row, and in others, subject to chronicling events, to the occasional detriment of narrative, sometimes ending abruptly, which gives the whole work a somewhat uneven heft. Adopting a Deleuze–Guattari approach, the author traces the outstanding accomplishments of this nomad botanist, of a ‘minor’ or ‘ambulant’ kind as opposed to top-down statist approaches (p. 538). Eccentric and unpredictable, restless and eager for change, enunciating frequent death wishes yet passing on at the venerable age of 86, the tragedy of this towering figure resides perhaps in her tragic assessment of herself, a failure. Perhaps this might overstate the case, for Janaki had known and acknowledged moments of achievement, but the gnawing questions, embodied in her being ‘disgruntled with her research’ (p. 460), especially after returning to India, remained. Perhaps the Biblical adage of prophets being without honour in their own country was, for extended stretches, true for Janaki, or at least, she got only limited or grudging respect. What this perceptive book has achieved is the possibility for the lasting and deserved celebration of the life of one of India’s most outstanding scientists. If only she could have known it for herself when she was with us.