[Savithri Preetha Nair’s Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist — E K Janaki Ammal, A Life 1897-1984 is an extraordinary achievement. It carefully-lovingly- follows the life, times, and achievements of a woman achiever from Malabar in the early twentieth century, who was almost forgotten in Kerala till very recent times. Nair is a historian of science and independent scholar based in London. Below is an excerpt from the book — which reminds us of how women as knowledge-makers are so easily forgotten and rewarded so late. But speaking from Kerala, it might seem that Janaki was able to pursue science avidly only because she was outside Kerala — so hostile is this state to thinking women outside literature]
In 1977, when she was almost eighty, the Government of India finally decided to award Janaki a Padma the fourth-highest civilian award; a terribly belated recognition for the first Indian woman to be awarded a doctorate in the botanical sciences, the first woman to head a central government institution of science, the only Indian female presence at landmark international scientific conferences, and symposia, even up until the 1960s, and perhaps the only practising Vavilovian evolutionary biologist and plant ecologist, male or female, in the country at this time, precociously aware of the need to conserve forests and genetic resources in general. It goes on to show how little her science and its significance mattered to powers that be; that she was a woman and a nomad didn’t help either.
The belated recognition is ever more surprising given how close she was to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and V K Krishna Menon, in her capacity as a world-ranking expert on plant biology. Several male Indian botanists/agricultural scientists/geneticists, (almost all whom worked with her at sometime or the other except perhaps M S Randhawa, and most with far less research experience or international exposure) had been already honoured with a Padma…
… Speaking of the few women Padma awardees prior to 1977, these were chiefly in recognition of their contributions to ‘public affairs’, ‘civil service’, ‘literature and education’, ‘arts’, and ‘social work’; a few went to the field of medicine (nursing chiefly, but one went to a doctor), one to sports (Aarti Saha, 1960) and only two to scientists: Savitri Sahni ( Padma Shri ,1969, as science administrator rather than for a direct contribution to science), and Asima Chatterjee born 1917 (Padma Bhushan, 1975: earned her doctorate in chemistry in 1944 from the University of Calcutta). Perhaps Janaki (born 1897: earned her doctorate in 1931 from the University of Michigan) took consolation from Mary Poonnen Lukose (1886-1976) from her home state of Kerala, who was the first woman Surgeon General in India, but was awarded the Padma Shri as late as 1975, just a year before she died, at the age of ninety!
Swatantryavaadini 