Botanist E.K.Janaki Ammal

E.K. Janaki Ammal, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 9.25" x 12.5", 2021

Botanist Janaki Ammal (4 November 1897 – 7 February 1984), a trailblazer for women in science in India, worked on genetic crosses, breeding sweeter sugarcane varieties which could thrive in India, was an expert in cytogenetics and phytogeography and coauthor of the influential Chromosomal Atlas of Plants. The first woman in India to earn a doctorate and the first woman in the US to earn a doctorate in botany, she became an environmental activist and wrote about the importance of incorporating indigenous knowledge when working toward sustainable development. Her name lives on in the names of plants like the Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal and the eggplant (known as brinjal or brengal in India) Janaki Brengal, and the recently developed delicate yellow rose named in her honour.

One of 13 siblings born to Dewan Bahadur E. K. Krishnan, a sub-judge in Madras Presidency who wrote books about local birds, and his second wife Devi Krishnan, in a blended family of 19 with 6 children from his first marriage, Janaki grew up in a home with many books on nature and wildlife. She was nonetheless born into the Thiyya caste, which was considered backwards, and this later affected her treatment as a scientist. She went to a missionary school in Tellichery before studying for her botany degree at Queen Mary College in Madras (now Chennai) and graduating with an Honours degree from Presidency College in 1921, where she developed a love of cytogenetics. She took a job teaching Women’s Christian College. Granted a prestigious Barbour Scholarship at the University of Michigan, she was able to avoid a marriage to a cousin, having watched so many sisters have arranged marriages, and come to the US for graduate school. Her niece recounted that she was detained at Ellis Island until she was mistaken for an Indian princess dressed in her traditional silks, with long dark hair, and she told her niece, “I did not deny it.” After her masters in 1925, she returned to teaching at the WCC, and then complete her doctorate as a Barbour Fellow in 1931, becoming the first woman in the US to earn a doctorate in botany. As a plant cytologist she focused on hybridization on plants, producing interspecific and intergeneric hybrids. Her thesis "Chromosome Studies in Nicandra Physaloides" saw her produce a triploid eggplant cross known as "Janaki Brengal."

She returned to India as a professor of botany at the Maharaja's College of Science, Trivandrum, from 1932 - 1934 before spending five years at the Imperial Sugar Cane Institute, Coimbatore along with Charles Alfred Barber, as a geneticist working to develop a sweeter sugarcane hybrid which could thrive in India and reduce their dependence on imports from Indonesia and grow more food domestically. She worked on the cytogenetics of Saccharum spontaneum, the sugarcane species grown in India, as well as developing hybrids with related grass species like zea, sorghum, and bamboo. She was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1935. Her cross-breeding research, using a labour intense process called polyploidy, provided the means for consistent results in hardy sugarcane with higher sucrose content. Her work on hybrid plants which could survive the tropical climate was important to India's recovery from famines (including the 1943 Bengal famine that claimed nearly 3 million lives).

Frustrated by discrimination she faced due to her sex, single status and her class, she moved to England in 1940 where she worked as Assistant Cytologist at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London, throughout the Blitz, until 1945. For company, she smuggled a palm squirrel named Kapok in the folds of her sari, into the UK and it lived at the John Innes Horticultural Institution for many years! She met and worked with many celebrated geneticists (and eugenicists) there. She had been invited to work with famous geneticist Cyril Dean Darlington, and together wrote the monumental Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which remains an important botany text on economic plants today. They took a different approach; rather than mapping the occurrence of plants of different classifications, their atlas recorded the chromosome numbers of 100,000 plants to show evolutionary patterns of botanical groups. She also published chromosonal counts, ploidy and on the origin and evolution of numerous garden species including grasses, Rhododendron and Nerines. S.D. Darlington and the renown J.B.S. Haldane (who coined the term ‘genetics’) remained friends and mentors throughout her career.

Then she worked as a cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley from 1945 to 1951; she was their first salaried female staff member. She researched the effects of the medication colchicine on woody plants like magnolia. When applied in water to the growing tip of young seedlings once their seed leaves had fully expanded it caused a doubling of chromosomes in cells, giving them heavier leaves, variable flowers with often thicker tepals which make them more durable. She planted many magnolia shrubs which still bloom every spring and a variety (with white petals and purple stamens) has been named Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal after her.

After a chance meeting on a plane, none other than Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lured her back to India post-Independence by personally requesting she return in 1951 to be Officer on Special Duty then later Director General of the Botanical Survey of India, which had been a colonial institution set up by Kew Gardens in 1890 to gather specimen (and export them to England). She found the colonialist European-biased tradition continued and she worked to have house Indian plant specimens in India. She wrote, “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.” She worked to document indigenous knowledge of plants and their cultural role. She argued that the way Chinese and Malayan flora mixed with Indian plants in north-east India led to natural hybridisation and resulted in great biodiversity. In 1956 the University of Michigan gave her an honorary LL.D. Nobel laureate C. V. Raman founded the Indian National Academy of Sciences and selected her as fellow in its first year in 1957.  She worked the rest of her career as a government scientist in various roles within India such as at Central Botanical Laboratory at Allahabad, as officer on special duty at the Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu, and at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay before settling in Madras in 1970 as Emeritus Scientist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Botany, University of Madras. She lived and worked in their Field Laboratory at Maduravoyal near Madras for the rest of her life and made her own garden of medicinal plants. She was the first woman scientist to have the prestigious Padma Shri conferred on her by the Government of India in 1977. During her retirement years, she focused on researching and publishing on medicinal plants and ethnobotany, travelling the country and interacting with remote tribes and making tremendous contributions to research on Northeast and Himilayan flora.

Her focus shifted to protecting the environment and biodiversity for the future. The push for food cultivation was leaving to massive deforestation, including 25 million acres claimed by the government under the Grow More Food Campaign. She used her renown as a leading scientist to defend the rainforest in Kerala with the Save Silent Valley campaign when the government planned to flood 8.3 square kilometres for a hydroelectric project. At 80 years old she used all her prestige to protect this pristine rainforest and all the biodiversity it contains, as well as putting her expertise to work mounting a chromosonal survey of all the plants it contains. The campaign was successful and the area became instead a national park, after her death at age 87 in 1984.  

Born under British rule, to a caste deemed backwards, when only 1% of Indian women were literate, and less than 1000 advanced beyond 10th grade, Janaki Ammal rose to prominence as a scientist. She spent years working in scientific institutions which were otherwise white male enclaves. She lead an ascetic life of Ghandian simplicity, always dressed simply in saris, wishing to be remembered for her scientific work at the cutting edge of cytogenetics and cytogeography.  She was a trailblazer for applying indigenous knowledge in environmentalism. Her name lives on in plant varieties, and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Government of India National Award of Taxonomy, and several scholarships but her work lives on in the great swathes of rainforest she helped preserve, the sweetness of Indian sugarcane hybrids, hardy magnolias still living in England and much more.

References

Janaki Ammal, wikipedia, accessed April, 2021 

Sharanya Dutta, Do You Know the Botanist Janaki Ammal, She of the Magnolia Kobus fame?, The Wire, October 21, 2016

Archana Nagarajan, Janaki Ammal, Sci-illustrate Stories, July 7, 2019.

Janaki Ammal Edvaleth Kakkat, University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School Barbour Scholars Spotlight, accessed May 2021.

Janaki Ammal, History of Scientific Women on scientificwomen.net, accessed May, 2021.

Vinita Damodaran, Janaki Ammal - My work is what will survive, PHYTOPIA Science Gallery Bengalaru on sciencegallery.com, accessed May, 2021. 

Leila McNeill, The Pioneering Female Botanist Who Sweetened a Nation and Saved a Valley, smithsonianmag.com, July 31, 2019.

Geeta Doctor, Celebrating Janaki Ammal, Botanist and a Passionate Wanderer of Many Worlds, The Wire, July 6, 2016

Mandeep Matharu, Yvette Harvey & Matthew Biggs. "My Work is What Will Survice". NatSCA blog. April 26, 2019.