Gender, Race and Science in Twentieth-Century India: E. K. Janaki Ammal and the History of Science

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GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY
INDIA: E. K. JANAKI AMMAL AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Vinita Damodaran
University of Sussex
I first came across Janaki Ammal when looking through a massive volume, edited
by W. L. Thomas, Man’s role in changing the face of the earth (Chicago, 1956).
This volume emerged in the context of 1955 and 1956 which were critical water-
shed years in the evolution of post-war environmental history, in particular with the
holding of W. L. Thomas’s landmark meeting at Chicago and the resulting volume
with the same title. It also saw the beginnings of Indian ecological history, the
appearance of Glacken’s first book, The Great Loochoo and the publication of W.
G. Hoskins’s The making of the English landscape, the latter being perhaps the first
major environmental history to be written by an historian.1 The Chicago meeting,
which opened on 16 June 1955, was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research and had been planned for three years, and was encouraged
particularly by Carl Sauer and Lewis Mumford. The Foundation’s interest in calling
the 1955 Symposium was “to keep abreast of all the means at man’s disposal to affect
deliberately or unconsciously the course of his own evolution; in this case what man
has done and is doing to change his physical-biological environment on the earth.”2
The organisers highlighted as the dual inspirers for their project, G. P. Marsh
and the Russian geographer Ivanovich Woeikof. The latter had, like Marsh, made a
series of clarion calls against thoughtless environmental degradation. The Chicago
organisers were cognisant too of the significance of Nathaniel Shaler’s essay entitled
Man and the earth (1905) and quoted other lesser-known authorities as a way of
giving some credence to the undoubted timeliness of the conference.3 It was opened,
appropriately, with papers read by Carl Sauer and Clarence Glacken. For Sauer the
meeting was to be a “Marsh festival”, while Glacken opened his address, on “Chang-
ing ideas of the habitable world”, by referring to Plato’s remarks on the ruination of
Attica by soil erosion.4 The latter essay was a dry-run for the arguments produced
in Traces, the book that would appear more than decade later in 1967. This work
made great play in particular of the works and warnings of John Croumbie Brown,
the Colonial Botanist from the Cape Colony over whose work Glacken repeatedly
enthused, especially later in life.5
The papers presented to the Chicago meeting were largely written by white Anglo-
Saxon men, but there was one very important exception, that given by E. K. Janaki
Ammal, a distinguished woman geneticist and global plant geographer, a Professor
of Botany at Madras and co-author of The chromosome atlas of cultivated plants.6
The latter was already a famous work and one which qualified her uniquely to com-
ment on the evolution of plant distributions, and human impacts upon them. But her
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contribution to the Thomas volume was to essay an environmental history of subsist-
ence agriculture in India. Paying particular attention to the sharp difference between
patriarchal, matriarchal and tribal (indigenous Indian) agronomies, Ammal can be
said to have pioneered both indigenous and gendered environmental approaches to
land-use history. The neglect of her contribution to environmental history and the
history of science is notable as she was to become a well regarded and important
scientist both during the raj and in the post independence period.
SITUATING AMMAL IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY
In recent decades, environmental historians have begun to map the intellectual history
of their discipline while historians of science have come to appreciate the role of
science in the making of nations. Until sixty years ago the history of science and the
history of colonialism were studied separately until the 1970s which saw the emer-
gence of a social history of science leading to a growing interest in the structure and
practice of science more globally.7 Historians such as Roy Macleod, Richard Grove
and Satpal Sangwan, in their early incursions into the science of the Raj started to
unravel the complex matrix of British imperial science in India all of them finding
it necessary to overturn Louis Pyenson and George Basalla’s portrayals of colonial
science as a handmaiden of metropolitan science.8 Much of this work focused on
reinstating the scientific contributions of colonial scientists who were seen mainly
as settler scientists such as William Roxburgh, Nathanial Wallich, Robert Kyd and
others employed in the Calcutta botanic garden in the eighteenth century.9 It is also
important to note that much of what we think of as Western science was produced in
the colonies rather than being exported to them. Colonial expansion was thus crucial
to the development of field sciences such as botany and zoology.
Interest in indigenous responses to western science show how Indians selectively
approached western science during colonial rule with some revivalists attempting
to regenerate India’s scientific traditions whilst others embraced Western reason
and science.10 However, it was not a level playing field for scientists in the western
tradition. As has been argued, a distinction came to be made, between settler scien-
tists and native scientists and the latter were highly discriminated against in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century by the colonial establishment.11 In 1920, P.
C. Ray who pioneered the Indian school of chemistry could count only 18 Indians
out of 213 scientific personnel in eleven colonial scientific enterprises. V. V. Krishna
quotes J. G. Medlicott the head of the Geological survey of India who held the view
in the 1890s that Indians were incapable of any original work in the natural sciences.
In the early twentieth century, J. C. Bose, a creative physicist who later moved into
plant physiology, fought a life long struggle for scientific recognition in the West
and was thwarted throughout. Interestingly, he also seemed to have come up against
the jealously of his own Indian colleagues.12
Much of this historiography focuses on the contribution of native male scientists
in the colonial period and apart from a new and recent collection they remain silent

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 285
on the role of women in the history of Indian science. This new collection is an
important addition to the history of science in India, however while some women
have been rendered visible Janaki Ammal is notably absent from the collection.13
This paper attempts to redress this lacunae in environmental history and the history
of science in India by focusing on the life and scientific contribution of E. K. Janaki
Ammal. By situating her work and career within the context of the 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 sought to regenerate Indian ecological and medical traditions. It is in this sense
that one can see Ammal as pioneering both indigenous and gendered environmental
approaches to land use whilst continuing to be a leading national scientist.
Her career started as a botanist and cytologist when she worked with C. D. Darling-
ton at the John Innes Institute 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 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 generic science. She was able to do this as the first director of the Central
Botanical Laboratory of the Government of India at Lucknow. She was to become
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. C. S. Subramanian, a scientific contemporary
of hers who was the director of the Centre for Advanced Study at the University of
Madras, wrote in a recent article about her passion for plants, crop plants, garden
plants, plantation crops, medicinal crops, and tribal plants.14 He saw her as an original
thinker doing “epochal” work on intergeneric hybrids such as Saccharum/Zea, Sac-
charum/Erianthus, Saccharum/Imperata, Saccharum/Sorgham. Her pioneering work
was on the cytogenetics of Saccharumofficinarum (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.15 The focus of her work on polyploidy and plant evolution con-
tinued 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.16
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

286 · VINITA DAMODARAN
reorganising the botanical survey of India post-independence she was to become a
progressive nationalist scientist.17 As Subramanian recorded “though cytology was her
forte, her work embraced genetics, evolution, phytogeography and ethnobotany”.18
The account of her life that follows takes as a starting point the view outlined in a
study by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram: that the personal life of scientific
practitioners has a bearing on their work.19 It also builds on the notion explored
more recently by Lambert and Lester about the importance of individual trajectories
as these “ran across and athwart state-archived paper trails... [and] the narratives
of the subject’s lives [that] link together markedly different places” introducing a
more “explicit discussion of the complex spatiality of empire, as well as of imperial
subjectivities.”20 As they note, there has developed in recent times a more critical
approach to biographical writings which tends to reflect on the “ways in which indi-
viduals become meeting points for influences no longer static but mobile, effusive
decentred, a process not a thing”.21 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 in the context of empire. The paper also makes the case for
“a less centered biography that seeks to bring the background of a life into view”.22
It is in this sense, that biography continues to remain a powerful way of narrating the
past. By a more considered, reflective approach rather than a standard chronological
biographical narrative I have chosen to sequentially prioritise the different networks/
relationships and career defining moments of Ammals life and see them as dynamic
assemblages of relationships with other people, places and organisms.
NEGOTIATING THE BOUNDARIES OF CASTE AND RACE
The context of empire in late nineteenth-century India whilst creating the repressive
conditions of colonialism did allow for what has been called “equivocal encounters”
opening up intermediate and indeterminate spaces and resulting in forms of sub-
jectivity that complicate the now well-worn binaries of coloniser and colonised.23
Ammal’s individual trajectory was to be shaped by her positioning on the boundaries
of caste and race.
Born on 5 November 1897 to a lower caste family of North Malabar, Ammal had
a chequered ancestry. Her mother was the illegitimate child of John Child Hannyn-
gton of the Madras Civil Service, a member of a well known imperial family who
had resided in India for some generations.24 Her father, who retired as a sub-judge
of the Tellicherry Court, came from an educated family of the Tiyya caste; he was
an employee of Hannyngton and had chosen to marry his illegitimate daughter once
his first wife died. The elder daughter of Hannyngton from his Indian mistress was
married to an Anglo-Indian and became Martha Feukes.25 The younger daughter, who
retained her Indian name Devayani, married E. K. Krishnan in 1878. Hannyngton
clearly led the double life of many British civil servants in India. In the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries it had been a regular practice for East India Company
officials to have Indian wives.26 With increasing missionary activity, the practice
came to be frowned upon, especially after the Mutiny in the Victorian period when

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 287
many English women arrived looking for husbands in what came to be known as
the “fishing fleet”.27 Growing racism in the late nineteenth century meant that such
openly practised unions between white officers and their Indian mistresses was unac-
ceptable though they continued to flourish secretly. Hannyngton’s relationship with
his Indian mistress, Kunchi Kurumbi spanned a twenty-year period. Certainly, he
took an interest in the way in which his daughters were brought up and subsequently
married off. One letter to his son-in-law E. K. Krishnan indicates the starkness of the
terms of his relationship to his Indian family. On 27 March 1883, he wrote:
My dear sir
I am very glad to hear that you have a good chance of promotion. You will require
it if your family goes increasing at this pace. I shall continue to have great inter-
est in your career. I cannot oblige you with a photo of your wife’s sister but I
will send one of myself lately taken in Madras.... I am going home to England
soon to see after my four sons but shall not be away much over a year. It is not
unlikely I will look you up on my way to Bombay.... Tell Kunchi Kurumbi that
it is no use to write to me I won’t correspond.
Yours faithfully
J. C. Hannyngton28
The tenth child of the union of E. K. Krishnan and Hannyngton’s daughter Devayani
E. K. Janaki Ammal, grew up in a large house “Edathil” by the sea in Tellicherry in
what is now the state of Kerala on the west coast of India. Her brother’s diaries record
the westernised lifestyle and the period just before his sister’s birth vividly. There
are frequent references to his father and the Court, snipe hunting and the dullness of
Roman history in school.29 On 5 November 1897 he wrote recording his sister Janaki’s
birth: “mother safely delivered a girl at about 2 a.m. today. Both are all right.”30 There
was little money but the girls were bright and acquired an English education. Caste
deprivation among the Tiyyas was offset by embracing western norms and values,
and many Malabar Tiyyas took advantage of the possibilities of upward mobility
presented by the British education system to move out of the choking confines of
the caste system.31 E. K. Janaki, as she was then known, had her schooling at the
Sacred Heart Girl’s High School in Tellicherry, followed by a B.A. honours in botany
from Queen Mary’s College Madras. Missionary education thus provided a way out
of caste and race restrictions.32 The union between Hannyngton and Kurumbi had
been frowned upon by both sides of the racial divide. “White tiyyas”, as the mixed
races came to be known, were seen as impure by their pure Tiyya brethren and mar-
riage alliances for the children were hard to come by. Many of the children of the
Edathil family were encouraged to marry their first cousins, i.e. the children of E. K.
Krishnan’s sisters belonging to Edavalam house.33 This was permitted, but the fact
that six such marriages were arranged by E. K. Krishnan is indicative of the loss of
status the family suffered by his marrying the illegitimate child of a white man. His
marriage to Devyani was received with scorn in the Tiyya community of Tellicherry.
E. K. Sita records “that there were four or five valla tiyya families in Tellicherry in

288 · VINITA DAMODARAN
those days and they included Mundangadan house, Dr Toyle’s house and Madhavan
overseer’s house. They were all considered to be white. The girls had European colour
and features and could be seen as miles apart from their pucca Hindu sisters. Even
a very eligible white bachelor was refused the hand of a Hindu girl on the basis of
colour”.34 It was in these circumstances that Ammal chose a life of scholarship over
marriage as her sisters had opted for.35 With it came geographical dislocation and
an opportunity to move away from her constraining background in terms of gender,
caste and race. Her life in science had begun. Her marginal status as a woman and as
a lower caste, mixed race Indian was to be transformed in the process. It is possible
to argue that so individual a trajectory was made possible by her positioning on the
boundaries of caste and race and the in between spaces provided by that particular
mixture of imperial sexuality and caste hierarchies that informed her subjectivity.
It was while she was working as a lecturer at the Women’s Christian College, Madras,
that she received a scholarship from Michigan university where she was granted her
DSC in 1931. It is important to note in this context that the leading British and American
universities, with a few exceptions, barred the entry of women until World War II.36 In
India, support for female education was also slow in coming. Social reformers actively
promoted female education, and women’s education began to show an improvement
in Bombay, Poona, Madras and Calcutta by the beginning of the twentieth century.
The University of Calcutta was producing its first women graduates within twenty-
five years of its establishment.37 But this does not deny the fact that the literacy rate
for women in 1913 was less than one percent. The total number of women enrolled in
colleges (that is above grade ten) was less than one thousand.38 Ammal’s rise in these
circumstances to a position of academic eminence is a tribute to her tenacity in the
face of caste, gender and racial discrimination and is a remarkable story.
C. D. DARLINGTON AND THE PATRIARCHY OF SCIENCE IN BRITAIN AND INDIA
The professionalisation of science in the nineteenth and twentieth century had made
it particularly hard for women to fit in, as it was at odds with domestic and familial
life — even in the metropolitan centres of scientific excellence. Many scientific
women had to choose an unconventional family life in these circumstances. Ammal
as a single, unmarried woman was able to challenge established convention and to
practise science in public institutions such as the John Innes Institute, the Royal Hor-
ticultural Society in London and the Botanical Survey of India, normally the preserve
of men.39 This had not always been so. Endersby had argued that the association
between botany and women contributed to its low standing in the male-dominated
councils of scientific societies like the BAAS in the early period and it was only later
that the professionalising of botany led to the marginalisation of women. For most
of the nineteenth century the botanical society of London and the horticultural soci-
ety were the only societies that admitted women. Once professionalised, women in
botany required a male mentor to ensure their rise though this was often constrained
by gender discrimination. Ammal was no exception.
At Michigan, Ammal worked under Harley Harris Bartlett, Professor of Botany,

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 289
who had a broad spectrum of scientific interests from botany to the history of science
and who was to inspire her later forays into ethnobotany.40 It was he who encouraged
her to make contact with her next male mentor. On her way back to India after her
DSC she spent a year at the John Innes Institute where her encounter with Cyril Dean
Darlington signalled the start of a long scientific friendship. Darlington (1903–81)
has been described by his biographer as “belonging to the great school of British
geneticists, evolutionists and biological statisticians produced by a country basking
in the afterglow of the eminent Victorians, Charles Darwin and Francis Galton”. His
first cytological work, Recent advances in cytology in 1932 and his 1939 book, The
evolution of genetic systems would be hailed by some as a fundamental contribution
to evolutionary thought. Later in his life Darlington would turn to the subject of
human history becoming, “one of the most fascinating and controversial exponents
of the socio-biological approach to human culture”.41
The scientific and sometimes personal correspondence between Darlington and
Janaki Ammal is preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and provides a remark-
able insight into the nature of a very particular scientific relationship that spanned
different continents and crossed gender and racial barriers. Her early letters to Dar-
lington reveal an independent thinking, young woman scientist with a deal of self-
respect and self-esteem. When she joined the John Innes institute in 1931 to work with
Darlington, she was joining one of Britain’s most vibrant biological communities.
The Institute had been founded in 1904 by a childless London merchant who had
left over £300,000 to establish a school for the improvement of horticulture. By the
1930s it had become Britain’s premier Institute for genetical research, contributing
fundamental insights into the chromosomal basis of heredity and its role in evolution.
In January 1931, Darlington was beginning to write his anti-Lamarkian masterpiece,
Recent advances in cytology. Darlington had become a major force to reckon with in
the field cytogenetics.42 As head of the Department of Cytology, with fifteen people
studying under him, he had created the largest school of its kind in the world. One of
these researchers was E. K. Janaki Ammal. On 29 May 1931 she wrote an introduc-
tory letter to him noting that she was “anxious to do the cytology of a triploid egg
plant”.43 By the end of the year she was working on Saccharum-Sorghum hybrids
noting eloquently “There is a terrific amount of variation in the F1’s and some of
the dwarfs and pale fellows look as though they are aching to disclose something
cytologically and genetically”.44
Darlington was typical of the scientific mentors of his period in that in extending
his largesse to female employees under him, he often formed intimate relationships
with them, if only briefly.45 Janaki was to prove no exception and in three of her let-
ters written in the 1930s she indicates her emotional involvement with him.46 This
was only to be a brief interlude but the relationship was one that was to dominate her
life. As noted by Abir-Am and Outram, the progressive attitude of some scientific
mentors to women often related to some form of emotional involvement and led to
collaborative scientific work. Women scientists tended to follow this route, rather than
taking on the precarious position in science that would have resulted in the absence

290 · VINITA DAMODARAN
of a male mentor.47 The voluminous correspondence is also indicative of the com-
municative networks at the time that connected individuals and institutions shaping
scientific thinking and personal sensibilities.48 Other letters to Darlington followed,
this time from India where she had returned in 1932, and from the Imperial Sugar
Cane Institute in Coimbatore where she was working in 1934. “I shall try to accom-
plish something in Saccharum cytology so as to get an open sesame to USSR. My
new microscope arrived last week [Lietz binocular]. I have fixed enough material to
keep me engaged for three years.”49 Clearly Russian genetics and cytological studies
were highly rated before the Lysenko affair.50
Despite her active work in the field, Ammal faced several hurdles from the male
scientific establishment in India 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:
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.
The note to Nature was finally published in 1938.51 The same letter indicated her
unhappiness with continuing to work in the Imperial council of Agricultural research
due to the lack of support for her publishing efforts.52 T. S. Venkatraman, with C. A.
Barber, had initiated research in sugar cane breeding and had produced his drought
and disease resistant Coimbatore canes CO 419 raising the prestige of the institute.53
However, Venkatraman as head of the sugarcane institute was not averse to blocking
the work of Janaki Ammal either due to personal jealousy or a patriarchal stance. At
the same time, Darlington was also not above damning Janaki Ammal’s work with
faint praise. When John Russell, Director of the Rothhamsted Experimental station,
wrote to him on 10 May 1937 noting that he had met her in Coimbatore and enquiring:
“could you kindly tell me whether her work seems sound, and whether it is simply
in the nature of a student’s exercise or can be dignified with the title of research?”
Darlington’s reply was indicative of the lack of support, even jealousy, that Ammal
routinely faced within the male scientific establishment:
The question of Janaki Ammal seems to me to be part of a larger problem.
Practitioners of cytology in India are very numerous, but cytological work of
outstanding interest is unknown. The reason for this seems to be that Indians
go in for cytology because they think it is a matter of technique and needs no

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 291
thought otherwise. ...Therefore when I say Janaki Ammal understands her work
better than anyone else I do not mean to pay her a vast compliment. I think she is
doing sound work and will continue to do so for some time just because a great
deal of elementary exploration in this field is necessary and she cannot fail to
be of value to the geneticist working with her.55
He further noted “I think it is a great pity that numbers of Indians come to this
country to take PhD degrees in cytology just because they think it is an easy subject
and, having obtained their PhDs which they never fail to do, return to secure a post
in India. We refuse to take such people here.” Darlington’s attitude here encompassed
both prejudice against Ammal’s gender and her race and was typical of the colonial
attitudes of the time to Indian scientists in general who were seen as lacking the
capacity for creative and innovative research.56
Ammal was critical of the fawning attitude of Indian scientists based at the sugar-
cane institute, especially that of Venkatraman to British scientist’s such as Ruggles
Gates.57 This view was in tandem with her increasing disillusionment with her own
position. She was beginning to see herself as the “Cinderella of the sugarcane sta-
tion”. She had also started new work on Saccharum-Bambusa hybrids noting that they
looked more like sugarcane than bamboo. She found regular meiosis and discovered
that they were fertile.58 This work came out as an article in Nature in 1938.59 At the
annual meeting of the Indian Academy of Sciences — a creation of the Nobel prize
laureate, C. V. Raman — she noted “ it was jolly to get back amongst the few real
scientists of India after the pseudo-scientific atmosphere of Coimbatore — the contrast
between Raman and Venkatraman is very great”. She looked to Darlington to receive
a special invitation to attend the Genetic Congress at Edinburgh so that she could
talk on the Saccharum/Zea hybrid, and continued to complain about the hurdles in
publishing her findings given the resentment of Venkatraman to her work. It is inter-
esting to note in this context that the jealously of male colleagues with regard to her
work was based not only on gender grounds but also on caste grounds. Ammal may
well have come up against the Brahmanism of the male scientific establishment in
India, a feature commented upon by another well-known Indian physicist, J. C. Bose
to Patrick Geddes in earlier decades.60 Bose wrote to Geddes in 1917 “you know that
Brahmanism and priestcraft are not unknown in English science. The evil is far more
accentuated here [in India] where the number of scientific men are few, and where
wire pullers have succeeded in securing positions of authority.”61
The Seventh International Genetical Congress took place from 23 to 30 August
1939 in Edinburgh. The Congress, usually held every five years, was two years late,
the Russians having abandoned their plan to hold the Congress in Moscow in 1937.
The suppression of genetics in Russia had already begun and the Russians withdrew
ten days before the Congress. On Wednesday 23 August, 600 geneticists from 55
countries assembled in Edinburgh and the list included Janaki Ammal. By the end of
Thursday 24 August international events begin to take over — the German delegation
was the first to leave, followed by the Dutch, Hungarian, Scandinavian and Swiss.
The Congress closed prematurely on 29 of August and Ammal was unable to return

292 · VINITA DAMODARAN
to India for the duration of the war.
Stuck in England, Ammal worked for the duration of the war with Darlington at
the John Innes Institute.62 He had become director of the institute in 1939 and in 1945
the collaborative work of Darlington and Ammal was published as the Chromosome
atlas of cultivated plants. This phenomenal study recorded the diploid chromosome
number of some 10,000 species of flowering plants — including economic, decora-
tive and medicinal species. It became an important reference text in economic and
systematic botany, horticulture and plant breeding.63 Ammal left the Institute in 1946
to join the Royal Horticultural Society as the first salaried female staff member,
undertaking investigations of colchicine and its use in inducing polyploidy. Her
expertise in cytology was beginning to be recognised in the metropolitan institutions
of Kew and RHS and she was sometimes called upon to report on newly discovered
plants. For example, in one case an Argentine couple claimed to have developed a
grass with exceptional qualities and this was passed on to Sir Geoffery Evans at Kew
who in his reply stated that the grass was Sorghum halepense as identified by F. W.
Ballard of the Herbarium. When Darlington sent the specimen to Janaki Ammal she
differed from both the Argentinian couple and Ballard, identifying the plant as the
recently described Sorghum almum.64
In 1950, a second edition of the Atlas was proposed but by now Janaki Ammal was
unwilling to be rushed into it by Darlington in what she considered an unworkable
time scale. A row followed, with Darlington noting sourly that Ammal did not wish to
take part in the production of the second edition. Ammal’s response was swift: “You
are right when you say that I do not wish to take part in the production of the second
edition of the Chromosome Atlas. In my opinion there is a whole year’s work to be
done before I can be ready for a new edition and you have asked for my amendments
for next January. Placed as we are geographically and, if I may be allowed to put
it frankly, psychologically, collaboration will be most difficult and rather than see
it break down I believe it is best not to attempt it.” Here was a scientist who under-
stood the value of her work and refused to be rushed into something of sub-optimal
standard by a senior patriarch of the scientific community.65 Darlington was by this
time Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, and he got A. P. Wylie at Manchester
to assist with the second edition of the Atlas, which was published in 1955. Col-
laboration with Wylie was doubtless easier geographically and in their preface they
acknowledged her contribution “Some of the most significant developments have
been due to the work of Dr. Janaki Ammal, first in the Royal Horticultural Society’s
Gardens at Wisley and latterly with the Indian Botanical Survey at Calcutta”. This
incident and other battles with male scientists highlights Ammal’s scientific integrity
and a growing independence from her one-time mentor and the challenges she posed
to the patriarchy of science both in India and Britain.
SCIENCE AND THE NATION AND THE MAKING OF A NATIONALIST SCIENTIST
The 1950s was a very important decade for Indian science when nationalist sci-
entists such as the noted chemist S. S. Bhatnagar and Meghnad Saha, an eminent

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 293
astrophysicist who were part of India’s scientific intelligentsia were debating the future
of Indian science. Autonomy from direct government interference and an emphasis
on pure research were held by Saha as fundamental to the progress of Indian science.
Saha noted “pure science is the seed of applied science and to neglect pure science
would be like spending a large amount on manuring and ploughing the land, and
then to omit sowing of any kind”. However S. S. Bhatnagar disagreed and sought to
reorganise the Council of Industrial and scientific research (CSIR) founded in 1942
within the “framework of a government-administered science”.67 His views won over
India’s first premier, Nehru, and after 1947 though the CSIR continued to interact
with universities, it was applied research that dominated its activities. The plan to
meet post-war needs through the establishment of national laboratories was put into
place. The first five national laboratories that were initiated were the national chemical
laboratory, the national physical laboratory, the national metallurgical laboratory, the
fuel research station and the glass and ceramics research institute. These were fol-
lowed by the setting up of other laboratories including the central botanical laboratory.
This alliance between India’s political leadership and her scientific elite resulted
“in a culture of utilitarianism driven by nationalist goals of self reliance and import
substitution”.68 The embattled Saha predicted the fate of science in the universities
if the path of a government sponsored science policy for India was to be followed:
“The national laboratories which you have erected will not satisfy our needs. You
have erected a temple, but you have not made any provision that there should be
a constant influx of qualified votaries into the temple which will bring life into it.
...you must gird up your loins and find out money so that we can render sufficient
assistance to the universities and revitalise their activities.”69 Ammal was to voice
similar criticism about the fate of Indian science in Indian universities in the 60s.70
By then the damage had been done resulting in the long term neglect of scientific
endeavour in the universities.
In 1948, Janaki Ammal had returned to India. In the plane with her was India’s
first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru. As she noted, the Indian scientific establishment
“was planning great things” and Nehru was encouraging in his efforts to get her to
relocate to India.71 On a visit to the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun in 1950,
she persuaded the director to start research on the cytology and breeding of trees
and to begin work on sal and teak. She was actively involved in the commission
for food production in the early years, but was worried about Lysenko-ish projects
and the emergence of a pseudo-science in newly independent India.72. She was still
undecided as to whether to return to England, nostalgically talking about her little
attic flat in Wisley. This is when her nationalist aspirations seem to have come to the
forefront and once again she chose life and work in India above returning to England.
By the 1950s, Ammal was part of the enterprise of a government administered
science moving on to head the Central botanical laboratory in Lucknow created in
1955. She was also to lead the reorganisation of the botanical survey of India as the
government appointed advisor.73 Gradually however her academic writing showed
a disquiet with the government’s increasingly dominant discourse of scientific

294 · VINITA DAMODARAN
industrialism. Her paper for the Chicago meeting entitled Man’s role in changing
the face of the earth detailed the subsistence economy of India and conceptualised
the importance of ethnobotanical knowledge of India’s tribal communities and its
preservation. This trend in her thinking was to develop into an important critique
of the government’s development policies. Independence had seen many changes
including a further widespread destruction of Indian forests. The destruction of forests
justified in the name of “grow more food” campaigns in the 1950s upset Ammal. “I
went 37 miles from Shillong in search of the only tree of Magnolia griffithii in that
part of Assam and found that it had been burnt down.74
In 1955, after Ammal became the director of the Central Botanical Laboratory in
Lucknow, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Scientific Research accepted her
scheme for the reorganisation of the Botanical Survey of India as officer on special
duty.75 For the purposes of the Survey she planned to divide India into six phytogeo-
graphic units or “Circles” each with its own herbarium and a cytotaxonomic labora-
tory. She planned to have a central herbarium at either Calcutta or Dehradun. Her
plans got into difficulties when the government appointed the Rev. Fr. Hermenegild
Santapau, a Jesuit Spaniard and taxonomist of the old school, as Director of the
B.S.I. Janaki Ammal was devastated and she felt that her two years’ work in India
had been a waste of time:76
I bring you news of a major defeat for botanical science in India. The Govt. 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 ... As a systematic botanist I have nothing against
him [Santapau] but I was hoping the Botanical Survey apt [appointment] its
“reorganisation” could be something different to what it was in 1856 — when
Hooker wrote his Flora of Br. India — Kew has won — Sir Edward [Salisbury]
has won — and we have lost ... I feel sick. When I heard the news I ran away
to the wilds of Malabar to collect wild yams that our aboriginal tribes dig up.
Abir-Am and Outram have noted “the obstacles to women’s experiences of power
within science were only matched by the even greater obstacles of legitimising such
power once it accrued through success or prolonged service. The profound difficulty
faced by women as holders of scientific authority may also explain their minor show-
ing in major scientific debates, theoretical advances, or large scale empirical projects
all of which require potential and actual leadership of many men.” They highlight the
role of gender ideology in access to and pursuit of scientific careers.77 This fact could
account for the curtailment of Ammal’s leadership position at important junctures.
Also important to note is the continuing influence of metropolitan science in the
immediate post-independence context and the fact that a man in the Kew tradition
was chosen over her.
Nonetheless following her memorandum, the Botanical Survey of India was
reorganised into four regional centres at Coimbatore (1955), Pune (1955), Shillong

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 295
(1955) and Dehra Dun (1956) with their head quarters at Calcutta, albeit under a
government-appointed chief botanist. Simultaneously, a Central Botanical Labora-
tory was started in Calcutta, shifted temporarily to Lucknow (1957) and thereafter
established at Allahabad to study potential uses of plants. The scientific wing along
with the herbarium attached to the Indian Botanic Garden was transferred to the
Botanical Survey and named as the Central National Herbarium in 1957 and was
recognised as the national repository. In her memorandum she had pointed out the
decline of systematic botany in India:
The plants collected in India during the last thirty years have been chiefly by
foreign botanists and often sponsored by institutions outside India. They are
now found in various gardens and herbaria in Europe, so that modern research
on the flora of India can be conducted more intensely outside India than within
this country. This is the most lamentable state of affairs. Only a reorganised and
vitalised botanical survey can give fresh impetus to both collection and research.78
She was also keen to improve collaboration between the botanical survey and Indian
universities making provision to include a number of university students during
botanical collection trips. The division of India into directorates or circles was based
on phyto-geographical consideration and the headquarters of each circle was to be
the seat of a regional herbarium fully representative of the flora of that area. Ammal
had hoped that the headquarters of the reorganised botanical survey would also be
the home of the national botanical laboratory and would be transferred to Lucknow
from where all botanical studies in India would be coordinated.79 This did not come
to pass. However, during her tenure as director of the national botanical laboratory,
the herbarium of the forest department of Assam was taken over and attached to the
Shillong herbarium in 1956; the herbarium of Cooke and Talbot, and the Madras
herbarium, were added to the Coimbatore herbarium in 1957. Ammal’s institutional
reorganisation was important in strengthening the Botanical Survey of India and in
giving economic botany a huge fillip. She was clearly an institutional builder, a rather
male characteristic, and was increasingly frustrated when male scientists were given
hierarchical positions of authority over her.
Ammal retired from the Botanical Survey in November 1959 and was asked
by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to help in their new regional
laboratories. She then headed the botany wing of the Regional Research Laboratory
in Jammu, Kashmir becoming a leading figure in Indian science and working on a
great number of research projects and papers. She had a number of research students
and when she came to the end of her term as emeritus scientist she noted that six out
of her seven students had submitted their PhDs.80 Her detailed letters to Darlington
indicate the nature of her scientific experiments in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Her
work in ethnobotany got a big boost with her study of medicinal plants and included
travels to Nepal, and later in the 1960s to Ladakh.81 When the Bhabha Institute of
Atomic Energy invited her as advisor she noted: “what advice can I give in the latest
trends in biology which is all biochemistry?” She was disappointed with the trends

296 · VINITA DAMODARAN
in Indian science by the late sixties noting that “except for Swaminathan and his
school in Delhi, Indian science is a mere copying of what is being done elsewhere
and I am very disappointed in the work in the universities”.82 But her pioneering
work in ethnobotanical studies ensured a revival of interest in traditional folk culture
and ethnomedicine.
EUGENICS, DARLINGTON AND HALDANE
Whilst she actively pursued her ethnobotanical interests Ammal was not averse to
providing her colleagues with ethnographic details of tribes and castes they were
interested in. In 1960, Darlington returned to his old interest on the origin and structure
of society and his letters to Ammal pushed her for information on caste in India and,
in particular, the distribution of criminal castes. He had moved on from the study of
chromosomes to social genetics and to an interpretation of language, class, race and
society in biological terms. Darlington had always been interested in the link between
man, culture and biology. In 1927 he had joined the Eugenics Society. “It is widely
appreciated among biologists in general that the neglect of biological and genetical
knowledge in modern legislation may lead to incalculable damage to our own people
and those of other civilised communities.” In 1937 he had visited India and he had
begun reading on a variety of subjects from the history of different peoples, empires,
religions and the behaviour of man.83 In 1947, along with the biologist R. A. Fisher,
Darlington co-founded Heredity: An international journal of genetics.84 Fisher, like
Darlington and others of their generation including Haldane, was interested in the
application of genetics to man. As eugenicists they believed that genetics needed
to become the causal framework not only of biology but of the social sciences too.
For the first forty years of the century, as Majumdar noted, genetics was synony-
mous with eugenics.85 Between the wars as noted “it was still possible to be a scientist,
a socialist, a meritocrat and a eugenicist”.86 The most advanced mathematical meth-
odologies employed in genetics were embraced in the 1930s by the critics of genetics
led by Lancelot Hogben, Haldane and Lionel Penrose, because each was in his own
way appalled by the crude class prejudices manifested by mainline eugenics. What
was ironic was that these critics sought to produce a truly objective science of genetics
by equipping themselves with methodologies created by the supporters of eugenics in
Germany where as we now know the programme was pushed to ultimate extremes.87
Haldane, who became the first Weldon Professor of Genetics at the University of
London in 1957 was at the forefront of these debates. His outstanding contribution
was in mathematical genetics. He mathematically dealt with problems dealing with
Darwinian variation and established the relationship of Mendelian genetics to evolu-
tion. A lifelong Marxist and a member of the communist party, he was critical of the
Lamarckianism of anti-communist eugenicists such as E. W. Macbride. A commit-
ted geneticist and selectionist his views like those of Darlington ran counter to the
egalitarian and environmentalist emphasis of Lysenko’s biology, which was based on
Lamarkian theories and had by 1948 become official Soviet party biology. However,
Haldane and Darlington fell out over Haldane’s failure adequately to understand the

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 297
threat posed by Lysenko and his stranglehold over Soviet science. In Stalin’s Russia,
Mendelian genetics was exiled and its practitioners punished. Many Marxists who
had been sympathetic to the socialist experiment joined the anti-Soviet campaign.
However, Haldane, due to his Marxist allegiances, showed a remarkable reluctance
to damn Lysenko, whilst Darlington and other western geneticists were openly
critical of Lysenko, especially in the journal Heredity. In the face of overwhelm-
ing evidence against Lysenko Haldane withdrew from Communist Party activities
before finally leaving it.88 The relationship between Darlington and Haldane was at
an all-time low. Haldane moved to India in 1957 over the Suez crisis, denouncing
western imperialism, and joined the Indian Statistical Institute. He took the Journal
of genetics with him and ran it with his wife Helen Spurway, inviting Janaki Ammal
to contribute to it.89 Also interested in anthropology, he was critical of a new journal
Mankind quarterly and its crude racial typologies edited by Robert Gayre and with
Ruggles Gates on the editorial board. He noted in a letter to Ammal that “I should
avoid even correspondence with any journal with which RR Gates is connected.... I
am only surprised that it does not have C. D. Darlington on its editorial board. This
is the best thing I have heard about Darlington for some time.”90 And then again in a
more humorous vein, “an editor called Gayre of Gayre, has classified men by their
hayre, in Mongols it’s straight, in negroes crenate, in Caucasians curly and fayre.” He
clearly shared Ammal’s prejudices with regard to Ruggles Gates. In India, Haldane
saw the Darwinian theory of evolution from a fresh perspective, noting that Hinduism
did not distinguish between humans and other animals — unlike in Christian theol-
ogy. Ammal wrote to Darlington, “Haldane was very much in the papers lately over
a fast he undertook for a silly reason ... he comes to scientific meetings in pyjamas
and wears dhotis — i.e. loin cloth at home chews betel leaves while Helen smokes
beedis and sips gin.”91
Janaki Ammal had been part of this growing interest in eugenics in the 1930s
and its study of the practice of selective breeding as applied to human beings. She
joined the Eugenics Society in 1931 and always retained an interest in eugenics.
It is possible to see here the point made in the introduction where “individuals
become meeting points for influences”.92 Janaki had willingly obliged Darlington
in his collections on aboriginal races of India providing ethnographic details of
tribes and castes in south India from the 1930s well into the 1970s. This had also
become a developing interest of her own, as she had become interested in medicinal
plants. In 1961 she wrote, “I have posted three more books by Majumdar — you
will find blood groups of castes in one”.93 She however did not seem to propagate
the social genetic ideas of C. D. Darlington and confined herself to publishing only
her scientific work. In fact her interests in the ethnology of tribes and in ethno-
botany was to fuel her later environmental activism and her critique of government
developmental policy.

298 · VINITA DAMODARAN
NETWORKS, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SCIENCE AT
THE END OF EMPIRE AND AFTER
Ammal’s range of academic contacts and colleagues extended around the world. Her
networks allow us to understand how science was constituted at that time of Indian
independence and allow us to analyse the relationship between a metropolitan sci-
ence and science in the periphery both during and after colonial rule. Her extensive
scientific correspondence from the 1940s to the ’70s extended to scientists and aca-
demics in institutions such as Kew, Edinburgh Botanic Garden, Wisley, University
of Sydney and to individuals such as G. B. S. Haldane, H. Newton Barber (Profes-
sor of Botany at the University of Sydney who sent his student Constance Margaret
Eardley, later to become lecturer in Botany in Adelaide, to work with her at Wisley),
Pio Kollar, Hungarian geneticist and Professor of Cytogenetics in the Institute of
Cancer research in London, several Edinburgh- and Kew-based botanists such as B.
L. Burtt, and physical anthropologists such as Ruggles Gates and Eileen Mcfarlane.
She kept a copious correspondence with many of these, but few of her letters and
collections have survived. To Burtt she wrote wistfully in 1974, “you brought back
memories of Kew, Wisley and Edinburgh. I wonder if Mr Balfour is still working at
the botanical garden in Edinburgh ... I feel unhappy I have not been able to revise
my work on the cytogeography of Rhododendrons, the nomenclature must have
changed very much since I worked on the genus at Wisley.”94 Her Indian scientific
friends included eminent agricultural scientists such as M. S. Swaminathan, and B.
P. Pal geneticist and plant breeder and Director of the Indian Council of Agricultural
Research. She valued her personal friendships with many of them and called Swami-
nathan and Pal her “good friends.”95 To her old friend Pio Koller, her correspondence
included references to his daughter Christa and academic ideas. She wrote to him in
1976: “Thank you very much for your kind letter and your photograph of you and
Christa — why isn’t she married she is so pretty.... Our new project-financed by the
University Grants Commission is on primitive cultures of our economic plants. This
will give me a chance to go back to my favourite genus Saccharum.”96
Ammal’s experience of translocation and geographical displacement provided
opportunities for building international friendships and she worked successfully as a
respected female scientist in many public institutions normally the preserve of men.
By forging new networks that spanned imperial space in the 1930s she can be said in
Lambert and Lester’s terms to have altered the spatiality of empire in enduring ways.
In such a conceptualisation, “imperial space is the sphere of a multiplicity of trajec-
tories, many of which were given impetus and direction by individuals collaborating
in pursuit of specific projects”. 97 That these networks of scientific enquiry included
an Indian woman is telling of the ways in which the internal frontiers of science and
empire were reshaped by people “who moved within, between and outside of imperial
boundaries”.98 That these networks continued in the immediate post-independence
period altering only gradually is indicative of the high esteem within which she was
held. A study of these formal and informal networks has the potential of revising our
understanding of science in the periphery in the early post-colonial period. Many

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 299
practioners of science, such as Ammal, contributed regularly to scientific journals
in Europe and north America and continued to be participants in a republic of letters
that transcended national boundaries. In the later period, when the agendas of the
nation state took over, science moved along narrow paths driven by nationalist goals
of self reliance and import-substitution frequently at the cost of basic research.99 With
the growing financial hardship of India’s universities and research institutions this
gulf was only to grow wider.
RETIREMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM
The last decades of her life were taken over by active research and her strident
criticism of India’s pursuit of scientific industrialism at all cost. By 1962 she saw
herself as too old to be employed by the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR) and was looking for new avenues of research. But she continued
in the laboratory as emeritus scientist, toying with the idea of cytogeography of
flowering plants. 1969 was also an important year for her as it saw the flowering of
her Sacchurum-Zea cross after nearly thirty years. This vindicated her even further,
and she wrote euphorically to Darlington, “Gates told Venkatraman he doubted the
cross — the Blighter”.100 Darlington was very excited by this urging her to bring the
hybrid to the next Chromosome Conference. Janaki was increasingly irked by the
lack of adequate recognition of her work and said pointedly that she deserved to be
elected FRS.101 That Ammal was never elected to the Royal Society is indicative, at
least partly, of the male stranglehold on these institutions. The Royal Society was
founded by wealthy male scientists who did not even bother to exclude women
constitutionally, they merely assumed that women would not be interested. The first
female fellows were not elected until 1945 when 89% of the votes went in favour
of the biochemist Mary Stephenson and the crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale. In
1970 Janaki wrote of her increasing frustration at being marginalised: “I am enclos-
ing the parentage of the best canes of Coimbatore all of which have the ‘blood’ of
my Saccharum (POJ 2725) -Imperata hybrid (SG 63/32), which we considered as
a genuine hybrid of Imperata, see 1941 Journal of Genetics papers ‘Intergeneric
hybrids of Saccharum’... in the parentage given to the new canes 63/32 is considered
a parthenogentic derivative of POJ 2725. This is Venkatramanism.”102
Shortly thereafter (1972) she wrote a paper on the chromosome behaviour of
the Zea/Saccharum hybrid. Darlington helped her to get it published in the journal
Heredity, sending a note to the editor Professor Jinks F.R.S. of the Department
of Genetics, University of Birmingham, in his characteristic style: “I enclose for
Heredity a paper which I have been fostering for 20 years. It has all the defects of
India but still I believe it ought to see the light since it describes the most remarkable
plant hybrid ever produced.”103 Darlington, as ever, saw the importance of Janaki’s
work but sought either to play it down or to take credit for it. His racial prejudices
continue to be evident.
In the last decade of her life Janaki was as active as ever, writing papers, attempting
a chromosome atlas of medicinal plants, but her work was taking new directions in

300 · VINITA DAMODARAN
the form of an environmental campaign to preserve the Silent Valley in Kerala against
the building of a dam on the Kunthipuza River as part of a hydro-electric project.
The Silent Valley in Palakad district in Kerala is home to a rich variety of plants,
mammals and birds endemic to the Western Ghats and it was noted that the flower-
ing of Cullenia exarillata (related to the durian) was responsible for the occurrence
there of the lion tailed macaque. In 1976 the Kerala state electricity board announced
plans to begin dam construction, which would have the effect of flooding 8.2 km2
of virgin rain forest, and the issue raised a huge public outcry. On 14 August, 1977
Janaki wrote to Darlington “I am sending you a booklet of the Silent Valley which
is being sacrificed to provide power to Kerala. I did my best to save it at a meeting
of the Science and Technology group of the Indian National Science Academy of
which I am a member.104 A week later she wrote: “My dear Cyril, I am about to start
a daring feat. I have made up my mind to make a chromosome survey of the forest
trees of the ‘Silent Valley’ which is about to be made into a lake by letting in the
waters of the river Kunthi”.105 Due to the outcry by activists and scientists such as
herself, the Silent Valley project was abandoned by the government. As she wrote:
You will be pleased to know that the Kerala government has been forced to give
up destroying the Silent Valley. As the oldest forest of India, if not the world,
we have set up a project to the Indian government to make a genetic study of the
trees ... we will bring some of the plants and grow them in our ethnobotanical
garden — my ethnobotanical garden at Shoranur, Kerala, which has a climate
similar to the valley — being only some 40 miles or so away. I will be leaving
for Jammu on the 13th and will run up to the Dehra Dun Forest research Institute
for seeds of the genera of plants of the valley ... so that I can make a beginning
straight away.106
Her support of the Silent Valley was significant as it was India’s most important
environmental movement of the decade. Other eminent scientists who backed the
movement included her old friends M. S. Swaminathan and B. P. Pal. The work of
these scientists helped to declare the Silent Valley a national park in 1985 and put a
short term break on the increasingly dominant discourse of scientific industrialism
and development.
In 1978 Ammal continued to lead an active life as a scientist and as advisor to the
Ministry of Science and Technology. Her laboratory garden in Maduravayle at the
University of Madras boasted an important collection of economic plants gathered
from the wild, and she was asked by the Government of India to produce a book on
the medicinal plants of South India. She was already 82 years old. “I am well enough
to go to the Irula tribes ... who sell medicine plants and sell them to the ‘native physi-
cians’. I found an interesting solanum hybrid specimen ... used for family planning by
the tribe.”107 As it was by then becoming increasingly expensive to access publications
in expensive international journals from India, she wrote to Darlington in October
1978: “I wish you could send me your reprints and even your books. I could review
them in the Indian journals — like Current science, Indian journal of the botanical

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 301
society, and the Indian journal of genetics and plant breeding. I am too poor to order
them from England for myself”.108 National boundaries and the poverty of Indian
research institutions in post-independence India was beginning to assert itself.
Having retired to the University of Madras she worked quietly in the botanical
research lab in Maduravayle in the last few years of her life, her passion for science
undimmed. Her last letter to Darlington is dated 4 July 1980 some months before he
died: “when shall I see you again — will I before I die — I long to be with you.”109
With the death of Darlington ended a correspondence that had lasted over fifty years.
Ammal died working in her research lab at the University of Madras on 7 February
1984. She was eighty-seven years old. Several of her articles continued to be pub-
lished posthumously. Widely cited in scientific journals and well respected among
scientific circles in her own lifetime, her contribution to Indian science has never
been adequately recognised and she has now been largely forgotten. This paper along
with the recent study of Subramanian goes a small way towards acknowledging her
contribution to a broad spectrum of science, “her epochal work” in cytology, genet-
ics, evolution, phytogeography and ethno botany.110 Also her institutional work — in
directing the Central Botanical Laboratory in Lucknow, restructuring the Botanical
Survey of India in a newly independent India, in the creation of regional research
laboratories, as scientific advisor to several Government Institutions, and finally her
environmental activism in protecting the Silent Valley.
Abha Sur notes that the entry of women into advanced science in India was
“unobtrusive though not uncontested”.111 The invisibility of women in science was
rendered even starker by the active discouragement of women in science even by
India’s pre-eminent physicist in the twentieth century, C. V. Raman, who was less
than welcoming to women students. The obstacles that Ammal faced in her work
were multiplied by the fact that she had the ambition to want to work in a metropoli-
tan context and to publish in prestigious international journals such as the Journal
of genetics, nature and Heredity. In the process she made notable contributions to
the several fields of science that included genetics, evolution and ethnobotany and
exemplified the strength and vigour of Indian scientific enquiry in the period. It is
also possible to argue, as I have that it was her positioning on the boundaries of
caste and race that allowed for so individual a trajectory. One cannot underestimate
her strength of character and her resilience against all odds. The fact that she could
not have operated in the circumstances without a mentor and that C. D. Darlington
provided that mentoring very often grudgingly and without grace is also important.
Their fifty year correspondence spanning different periods and continents is testimony
to the high regard that he held for her scientific work and her tenacity in maintaining
high standards of scientific performance, refusing to be cowed down by either the
male scientific establishment in India or in cytogenetic circles in Britain. Furthermore,
her career as a mixed race Indian female scientist also highlights the possibilities of a
higher degree of scientific vocation as a result of exclusion or marginality in hierar-
chies and the politics of research. In the process, she challenged racial and gendered
categories modifying them in new spaces and circumstances. Her networks spanned

302 · VINITA DAMODARAN
several continents moving across time and space, contributing to an understanding
of trans-imperial networks and helping us to re-evaluate the status of Indian science
as dynamic and innovative in the immediate post-independence period.
Was Ammal a feminist in her approach to her life and career? Ammal chose to live
her life alone devoted exclusively to science. She certainly did not see her problems
as associated with being a woman in a man’s world or being non-white in an almost
exclusively white scientific establishment. In any case, she did not articulate it as such.
One could say that she “practised rather than preached feminism through a lifelong
insistence and personal demonstration that devotion to science is not incompatible
with a women’s gender”. The problem, as one researcher has argued, is that women
scientists most usually work in isolation and never address their problems collectively.
A life of science, but lived in isolation, probably best describes her feminist choices.
In the process she reshaped the internal frontiers of science, empire and nation in
significant ways and helped to rethink the vision of India’s national future as emerging
from many sources that also embraced the tribal, the traditional and the ecological.
REFERENCES
1. William L. Thomas (ed.), Man’s role in changing the face of the earth (Chicago, Illinois, 1956).
2. Ibid. Introduction
3. Nathaniel Shaler, Man and the earth (New York, 1905).
4. Ibid.
5. E.g. Glacken, lecture to the University of Virginia Summer School, Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
18 July 1981 entitled “Writing a successor to Traces on the Rhodian Shore”; and personal
communication with Richard Grove.
6. C. D. Darlington and E. K. Janaki Ammal, The chromosome atlas of cultivated plants (London,
1945). Ammal was to note many years later that the meeting was in Preston, that she was the
“only participant from India” and that “there were over 70 participants and we were treated
royally by the Wenner Gren Foundation”. Ammal to Darlington, 11 August 1979, CD Darlington
Papers, The papers and correspondence of Cyril Dean Darlington, 1903–81, GB0161 (hereafter
DP) Bodleian Library, Oxford.
7. Roy Macleod, Nature and empire, science and the colonial enterprise (Chicago, 2000), 1–2.
8. See G. Basalla, “The spread of western science”, in Science, clvi (1967), 611–22. Lewis Pyenson,
Cultural imperialism and the exact sciences: German expansion overseas, 1900–1930 (New
York, 1985), and Empire of reason: Exact sciences in Indonesia, 1840–1940 (Leiden, 1989).
Roy Macleod, Nature and empire, science and the colonial enterprise (Chicago, 2001); Richard
Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of
environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995). Satpal Sangwan, “From gentleman amateurs
to professionals: Reassessing the natural science tradition in colonial India, 1780–1840”, in R.
Grove, V. Damodaran and S. Sangwan (eds), Nature and the Orient: The environmental history
of South and South East Asia (Delhi, 1998).
9. Richard Grove, “Conserving eden: The (European) East India companies and their environmental
policies on St Helena, Mauritius and in Western India, 1660–1854”, Richard Grove, Ecology,
climate and empire, colonialism and global environmental history, 1400–1940 (Cambridge,
1997), 66–67.
10. Mark Harrison, “Science and the British empire”, Isis, xcvi (2005), 60. See also Pratik Chakrabarti,
Western science in modern India: Metropolitan methods, colonial practices (Delhi, 2004); Dhruv

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 303
Raina and S. Irfan Habib, “The unfolding of an engagement: ‘The dawn’ on science, technical
education and industrialisation, 1896–1912, Studies in history (1993), 87–117.
11. V. V. Krishna, “The colonial model and the emergence of national science in India, 1876–1920”, in
Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami and Anne Marie Moulin (eds), Science and empire (Dordrecht,
1992).
12. Deepak Kumar, “The culture of science and colonial culture, India 1820–1920”, The British journal
for the history of science, xxix (1996), 204–5.
13. See for example the article by Abha Sur, “Dispersed radiance: Women scientists in C. V. Raman’s
laboratory”, in Neelam Kumar (ed.), Women and science in India: A reader (Delhi, 2009).
14. C. S. Subramanian, “Edavaleth, Kakkat Janaki Ammal”, Resurgence, xii (2007).
15. Royal Horticultural Society, Timeline.
16. Ibid.
17. E. K. Janaki Ammal, “Preliminary memorandum on the reorganisation of the botanical survey of
India” (Calcutta, 1953, Calcutta botanic Garden Archives).
18. Ibid.
19. Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, Uneasy careers and intimate lives: Women in science,
1789–1979 (New Brunswick, 1987). The sources of this paper are sadly limited and based largely
on the correspondence and private papers of individuals such as Darlington, which include letters
to him from Ammal. Janaki Ammal’s papers and slides were not preserved by the family and did
not go into any archive or herbarium. With the sale of her family home at Edathil in the 1980s
many of her papers, herbarium collection and library were destroyed (personal communication
Ram Damodar).
20. David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial lives across the British empire: Imperial careering
in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 2006), 3. For earlier work that looks at imperial
networks of science, see Richard Grove, Green Imperialism, colonial expansion, tropical island
edens and the origins of environmentalism (Cambridge, 1995), 309–79
21. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (eds), Telling lives in science (Cambridge, 1996), 14, quoted
in Lambert and Lester, Colonial lives (ref. 20), 20.
22. J. Clifford, “Hanging up looking glasses at odd corners: Ethnobiographical prospects”, in D. Aaron
(ed.), Studies in biography (Cambridge, 1978), quoted in Lambert and Lester (ref. 20), 20.
23. See recent conference call; “Between subaltern and sahib: Equivocal encounters across the British
world” (Leeds, July 2012).
24. His father John Caulfield Hannyngton born 1807 was deputy commissioner Chotanagpur 1843–56.
John Caulfield was credited with having invented a useful slide rule; his largest work was a table
of logarithms used in computing distances for the nautical almanac. In the 1881 census he is
recorded as living in Lewisham in Kent. He died in 1885.
25. Martha Feukes died on 7 July 1884 in childbirth. Hannyngton was devastated. He wrote to his Indian
son-in-law, E. K. Krishnan, “your letter of the 9th to hand. I feel I am not equal to the task of writing
details regarding Martha’s death.... I feel her loss to me to be the loss of everything”, Hannyngton
to Krishnan, 14 July 1884. Personal family papers courtesy Ram Damodar, Bangalore.
26. According to William Dalrymple in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century one in three British
women in India were living with Indian women, many taking on Indian ways, clothes, habits
and even religions, crossing cultures to become “white mughals”. See William Dalrymple, White
mughals (London, 2003).
27. P. J. Marshall and Glyn Williams, The great map of mankind: Perceptions of new world in the age
of enlightenment (Harvard, 1982).
28. Hannyngton to E. K. Krishnan, 27 March 1883, Personal family papers, Ram Damodar, Bangalore.
29. 1897 Diary of E. K. Damodaran born 1879, died of plague in 1904. Personal family papers, Ram

304 · VINITA DAMODARAN
Damodar, Bangalore.
30. Ibid.
31. This is an argument not made in the recent work of Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella, Social mobility
in Kerala: Modernity and identity in conflict (London, 2000). Elsewhere, among Anglo Indians
as in Bengal, social mobility and choice of professions was confined to certain professions for
example, the railways which tended to be dominated by Anglo Indians.
32. Queen Mary’s which opened its doors in 1917 was one of the few colleges started by the British to
further women’s education in India.
33. Memoirs of E. K. Sita, in author’s possession.
34. Ibid.
35. One sister E. K.Sumitra’s married life was exceedingly unhappy and she was fed up of the reckless
and wild ways of her husband.
36. Recent research has shown that despite constraints, women were able to break the barriers of the
separate spheres in Britain. L. Davidoff argues that after World War 1 in the more “transparently
public institutions meritocratic rules gave women opportunities to make claims on the basis of
individuality and enhanced educational qualifications”. See L. Davidoff , “Gender and the great
divide: Public and private in British gender history, Project muse, xv (2003), 20–21. Elsewhere,
Ann Meredith has argued that while domesticity and home were the main function for married
middle class women there was a contradiction in the increasing number of single young women
who worked and the importance given to providing them with an appropriate training. See Anne
M. Meredith, “Middle class women in horticultural education, 1890–1939” (Unpublished thesis,
University of Sussex, 2001). Meredith however also shows how most of the organisations offering
horticultural education in the period including John Innes Institute, Royal Horticultural Society
and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, had a strong male culture and excluded women from its
horticultural training until well after World War I. See p. 217.
37. Neelam Kumar (ed.), Women and science in India: A reader (Oxford, 2009), p. xvi
38. Abha Sur, “Dispersed radiance: Women scientists in C. V. Raman’s laboratory”, in ibid., 99.
39. J. J. Endersby, quoting Ann Shteir, Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian
science (Chicago, 2008), 121.
40. Ammal to Darlington, 11 August 1978, DP.
41. Oren Solomon Harman, The man who invented the chromosome (Harvard, 2004).
42. Ibid., 83
43. Ammal to Darlington, 29 May 1931, DP.
44. Ammal to Darlington, 14 November 1931, DP.
45. Harman (p. 85) mentions Ammal in his book dismissing her as one of many women Darlington had
affairs with at this time that included another colleague Eileen Erlanson.
46. Ammal to Darlington, see letters dated 10 August 1934, 31 October 1934, 22 November 1934. The
10 August letter was addressed as “dearest Cyril” and signed as “yours passionately”. Ammal
to Darlington, DP.
47. Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy careers and intimate lives (ref. 19), see chap. 9–11 section 2 on the
careers of mathematician Sofia Koral Evisham, physicist Marie Curie and astronomer, Cecelia
Payne Gaponschkin.
48. Lambert and Lester, Colonial lives across the British empire (ref. 20), 28.
49. Ammal to Darlington, 31 October 1934, DP
50. The scientific practices of T. D. Lysenko later were to bring many areas of science especially
agricultural genetics in Russia into disrepute. As director of agricultural affairs under Stalin
Lysenko used his position to denounce the traditional scientific practices of biologists giving
Russian science a bad name.

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51. E. K. Janaki Ammal, “A Saccharum-Zea Cross”, Nature, 1938. The abstract of the paper noted;
“both Saccharum and Zea are distinguished by the readiness with which they cross with related
genera. For example, while Mangelsdorf and Reeves1 have crossed Zea Mays with Euchlcena
and Tripsacum, Venkatraman and Thomas2 Have crossed S. officinarum with a species of
Sorghum and even the remotely related Bambusa3. I have also crossed S. officinarum with
ImperataCylindricaBeaew. and S. spontaneum L. with Sorghum Durra and Sorghum halepense.
In spite of Zea and Saccharum being in two different sections of the Gramineæ — Andropogoneae
and Maydeae (Bews) — I thought it worth while to cross them, and after several attempts using
many thousands of flowers of a male sterile variety (Vellai) of S. officinarum 2n = 80 = 8x as the
female parent, and variety Golden Beauty of Zea Mays 2n = 20, 2B as the male parent, I obtained a
single seedling. This plant has received the expected 40 chromosomes from the Saccharum parent
and 12 chromosomes from the male parent Zea. Amongst these the VI nucleolar chromosome
of Zea Mays is recognizable.”
52. Ammal to Darlington, 8 August 1938, DP.
53. T. S. Venkatraman (1884–1963) from 1912 to 1942 head of the Sugarcane Breeding Institute
(knighted by the British in 1942).
54. John Russell to Darlington, 10 May 1937, DP.
55. Darlington to John Russell, 13 May 1937, DP.
56. V. V. Krishna, “The colonial model and the emergence of national science in India, 1876–1920”, in
Petitjean, Jani and Moulin (eds), Science and empire (ref. 11).
57. Reginald Ruggles Gates was professor of Botany at King’s College London 1921–42. A FRS in
1931 and an anthropologist, botanist and geneticist he seems to have been regarded as an expert
by Indian scientists who took his views seriously. By the 1930 he, like most geneticists including
Darlington, was very interested in human genetics, founding the Mankind quarterly. In 1937
when he encountered Janaki Ammal he had travelled to India to collect material on jungle tribes.
He returned in 1958 to study the Kurumbas and Kanhars in south India and the Asurs and the
Maria Gonds in north India. He was briefly married to Marie Stopes.
58. Ammal to Darlington, 28 August 1938, DP.
59. E. K. Janaki Ammal, “Chromosome numbers in sugarcane × bamboo hybrids”, Nature (1938),
research article. The Abstract noted: “the sugarcane × bamboo hybrids recently produced at this
station (Venkatraman, 1937); provide material for the study of the phylogenetic relationship of
the genus Saccharum with other grasses. The gap covered by this cross is considerably wider
than in the case of the Saccharum × Sorghum hybrids, or the Saccharum × Erianthus hybrids
effected in Java.”
60. Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist who taught botany at Dundee and sociology in Bombay.
He can be seen as a precursor to the modern environmental movement. See R. Guha,
Environmentalism a global history (New Delhi, 2000), 59.
61. J. C. Bose to Geddes, 20 October, 1917, quoted in D. Kumar, “The culture of science and colonial
culture, India 1820–1920”, The British journal of the history of science, xxix (1996), 205.
62. Another letter to Nature, “On chromosome numbers in sclerostachyafusca”, was published on 23
March 1940.
63. C. D. Darlington and E. K. Janaki Ammal, Chromosome atlas of cultivated plants (London, 1945).
64. Darlington to Carstairs, 27 September 1946. See also the correspondence between Carstairs of the
Colonial office and Darlington, 30 August 1946, DP.
65. Ammal to Darlington, 20 November 1950, DP.
66. V. V. Krishna, “The early history of the CSIR, 1934–47”, in Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds),
Technology and the Raj: Western technology and technical transfers to India (Delhi, 1995), 311
On the science and culture group which was active in shaping questions about India’s future

306 · VINITA DAMODARAN
scientific development, see D. Abrol, “Colonised minds or progressive national scientists: The
science and culture group”, in ibid., 265–88.
67. Ibid., 312.
68. Ibid., 316.
69. Ibid., 314.
70. Ammal to Darlington, 8 July 1969, DP.
71. Ammal to Darlington 24 November 1948, DP.
72. Ammal to Darlington 22 February 1950, DP.
73. E. K. Janaki Ammal, “Preliminary memorandum on the reorganisation of the botanical survey of
India”.
74. Ammal to Darlington, 6 March 1950, DP.
75. Ammal to Darlington, 25 September 1953, DP.
76. Ammal to Darlington, 4 October 1954, DP.
77. Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy careers and intimate lives (ref. 19), 8.
78. Ammal, “Preliminary memorandum on the reorganisation of the botanical survey of India”, 6.
79. Ibid., 7.
80. Ammal to Darlington, 21 May 1969, DP.
81. Ammal to Darlington, November 1948. About Ladak she wrote, “I am back from a most interesting
and breathtaking trip to Ladak ... I brought back a lot of plants and seeds. They grow naked
barley there — I have handed over the seeds to Dr B. P. Pal and his staff”. Ammal to Darlington,
13 August 1962, DP.
82. Ammal to Darlington, 8 July 1969, DP.
83. Harman, The man who invented the chromosome (ref. 41), 196.
84. Ibid., 208.
85. Pauline M. Majumdar, Eugenics, human genetics and human failings: The Eugenics Society, its
sources and its critics in Britain (London, 1992).
86. Gavan Tredoux, Two geneticists: J. B. S. Haldane and C. D. Darlington, http://www.cycad.com/
cgi-bin/pine/apr2000/articles/tredoux-haldane-darlington.html.
87. Ibid.
88. Harman, The man who invented the chromosome (ref. 41), 154–5.
89. The journal of genetics was the oldest English language journal in genetics, founded by W. Bateson
and R. C. Punnett in 1910 and later edited by J. B. S. Haldane. When Haldane and his wife Helen
Spurway went to India in 1957 they took the journal with them. Haldane edited the journal from
India until his death in 1964 after which Helen Spurway continued to publish the journal with
Madhav Gadgil and H. Sarat Chandra. The journal was discontinued after her death in 1977 and
was restarted by the Indian Academy of Sciences after permission from the Haldane estate, and
Haldane’s sister Naomi Mitchison.
90. J. B. S. Haldane to Ammal, 30 December 1960, DP.
91. Ammal to Darlington, 16 February 1960, DP.
92. Lambert and Lester, Colonial lives across the British empire (ref. 20), 20.
93. Ammal to Darlington, 3 June 1961, DP.
94. Ammal to B. L. Burtt, 12 October 1974, RBGE.
95. Ammal to Darlington, 9 November 1979, DP.
96. Ammal to PioKollar, 16 January 1976, DP.
97. Lambert and Lester, Colonial lives across the British empire (ref. 20), 12–13.
98. Ann Stoler, “Tense and tender ties: The politics of comparison in north American history and (post)

GENDER, RACE AND SCIENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA · 307
colonial studies, The journal of American history, lxxxviii (2001), 23–24, quoted in Lester and
Lambert, Colonial lives (ref. 20), 13.
99. V. V. Krishna, “The early history of CSIR, 1934–47”, in Macleod and Kumar (eds), Technology
and the Raj (ref. 66), 316.
100. Ammal to Darlington, 21 May 1969, DP.
101. Ammal to Darlington, 11 June 1969, DP.
102. Ammal to Darlington, 29 October 1970. DP.
103. Darlington to Jinks, 30 July 1971, DP.
104. Ammal to Darlington, 14 August 1977, DP.
105. Ammal to Darlington, 31 August 1977, DP. This work was published as scientific papers some of
them after her death, see, E. K. Janaki Ammal with P. Nagendra Prasad, “Chromosome number
report form some plants from Silent valley”, Indian journal of forestry, 1985.
106. Janaki Ammal to Darlington, 10 December 1979, DP.
107. Ammal to Darlington, 31 August 1978, DP.
108. Ammal to Darlington, 17 October 1978, DP.
109. Ammal to Darlington, 18 July 1980, DP.
110. C. S. Subramanian, “Edavaleth, Kakkat Janaki Ammal”, Resurgence, xii (June 2007).
111. Abha Sur, “Dispersed radiance: Women scientists in C. V. Raman’s laboratory”, in Neelam Kumar
(ed.), Women and science in India (ref. 13), 99.