Janaki Ammal, India’s first home grown woman scientist, who went abroad and returned accomplished breaking every caste and gender barrier through her work, remains unknown to most Indians. She obtained a PhD from one of the finest American universities. She also remains one of the few Asian women to receive a honorary Doctorate by the University of Michigan back in 1931.
After long and arduous experiments on cross breeding in the laboratory of Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore in the 1930s, she created the indigenous variety of sweetened sugarcane that we consume today. Till then India was producing sugarcane in abundance and yet importing as they were not as sweet as the ones grown in the Far East. During the World War II bombings in the 1940s, she continued her phenomenal research into chromosomes of thousands of species of flowering plants at the John Innes Horticultural Institute, Norfolk, where she worked with some of the best names in cytology, genetics, and botany. While working on the gorgeous Magnolia, she co-authored “The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants” with renowned biologist CD Darlington.
The magnolia saplings she planted on the Battleston Hill in Wisley continue to bloom every Spring and one of the pure white blooms is named after her, the Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal and apparently only few nurseries in Europe have the variety today. At a time when most Indian women did not even attend school, she received scholarship and obtained her MS from University of Michigan in 1925 and later returned as the first Indian Oriental Barbour Fellow.
Her name deserves to be in history books and more and more Indians, not just in the field of Botany or Education should be made aware of her immense contribution.
