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Dr. Janaki Ammal: The First Indian Woman Botanist.
About Dr. Janaki Ammal:
Janaki Ammal Edathil Kakkat was an Indian botanist who researched cytogenetics and phytogeography. Her most significant works are those on sugarcane and eggplant. She gathered a variety of useful medicinal and commercial plants from Kerala's rain forests.
Janaki Ammal was born in 1897 in Tellicherry, Kerala. Her father was Dewan Bahadur Edavalath Kakkat Krishnan, a sub-judge in the Madras Presidency. Devi (1864-1941) was the illegitimate daughter of John Child Hannyngton and Kunchi Kurumbi. She has six brothers and five sisters.
Education and Major Contributions:
Ammal's family encouraged females to pursue academic interests and the beautiful arts, but she decided to study botany. After attending school in Tellichery, she proceeded to Madras, where she earned a bachelor's degree from Queen Mary's College and an honours degree in botany from Presidency College in 1921. Janaki Ammal developed an interest in cytogenetics after being influenced by Presidency College instructors.
Ammal taught at Women's Christian College in Madras, with a stint as a Barbour Scholar at the University of Michigan in the United States, where she earned her master's degree in 1925. She returned to India and continued to teach at Women's Christian College. She returned to Michigan as the first Oriental Barbour Fellow and earned her D.Sc. in 1931. Janaki is mentioned among Indian Americans of the Century in an India Currents magazine article published on January 1, 2000, by S.Gopikrishna and Vandana Kumar: "In an age when most women didn't make it past high school, would it be possible for an Indian woman to obtain a Ph.D. at one of America's finest public universities while also making seminal contributions to her field? Ammal, who was born in Kerala, was perhaps the first woman to get a Ph.D. in botany in the United States (1931), and she is still one of the few Asian women to have received a D.Sc. (honoris causa) from her alma school, the University of Michigan. During her tenure in Ann Arbor, she resided in the Martha Cook Building, an all-female resident hall, and worked with Harley Harris Bartlett, Professor of Botany. She created the "Janaki Brengal" cross, with brengal being the Indian term for eggplant. In 1932, she published her Ph.D. thesis, "Chromosome Studies in Nicandra Physaloides".
Janaki returned to India after receiving her PhD to become Professor of Botany at the Maharaja's College of Science in Trivandrum, where she taught from 1932 to 1934. From 1934 until 1939, she worked as a geneticist at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore, with Charles Alfred Barber. During these years, she conducted cytogenetic analyses on Saccharum spontaneum and created various intergeneric crosses, including Saccharum x Zea and Saccharum x Sorghum. Ammal's research at the Institute on the cytogenetics of Saccharum officinarum (sugarcane) and interspecific and intergeneric hybrids between sugarcane and allied grass species and genera such as Bamboo (bambusa) was significant.
She worked as an Assistant Cytologist at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London from 1940 to 1945, and then as a cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society in Wisley from 1945 to 1951. During this time, she released chromosomal counts from species such as Sclerostachya fusca. She is well known for co-authoring the seminal book "Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants" with C. D. Darlington. The John Innes staff file has a statement by Ellis Marks that "She smuggled a palm squirrel into the country and kept it at J.I.I. for many years." Its name was 'Kapok'." She released chromosomal counts for Rhododendron and Nerine species.
In 1951, at Jawaharlal Nehru's request, she went to India to reorganize the Botanical Survey of India. On October 14, 1952, she was assigned as an Officer on Special Duty for the BSI. She was the Director-General of the British Standards Institution.
Ammal produced various intergeneric hybrids, including Saccharum x Zea, Saccharum x Erianthus, Saccharum x Imperata, and Saccharum x Sorghum. Since then, Ammal has worked for the Indian government in a variety of positions, including as the director of the Central Botanical Laboratory in Allahabad and as an officer on special duty at the Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu. She briefly worked at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay before relocating to Madras in November 1970 to become an Emeritus Scientist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Botany, University of Madras.
She resided and worked at the Centre's Field Laboratory in Maduravoyal, near Madras, until her death in February 1984. Her obituary reads: "She was devoted to her studies and research until the end of her life." Her obituary includes well selected words from the Rig Veda that illustrate her love of plants: "The sun receive thine eye, the wind thy spirit; go as thy merit is, to earth or heaven." Go, if it be thy lot, to water; go build thine habitation in plants with all thy parts."
During her stay in England from 1939 to 1950, she studied the chromosomes of a variety of garden plants. Her research on chromosomal counts and ploidy shed insight on the development of species and variants. The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which she co-authored with C. D. Darlington in 1945, included much of her own research on several species. In addition to medicinal and other plants, Ammal researched the genera Solanum, Datura, Mentha, Cymbopogon, and Dioscorea. Polyploidy, she said, was responsible for the faster rate of plant diversification in the chilly and wet northeast Himalayas than in the cold and dry northwest Himalayas. According to her, the presence of Chinese and Malayan components in northeast India's flora resulted in natural hybridization between these and the region's native flora, resulting to additional plant diversity. Following her retirement, Ammal continued to work, specializing in medicinal plants and ethnobotany. She continued to publish the original results of her study. She established a medicinal plant garden at the Center of Advanced Study Field Laboratory, where she lived and worked. She also worked on cytology and ethnobotany.
Dr. Janaki, a geneticist working for the Royal Horticultural Society's Garden Wisley in the early 1950s, was studying the effects of colchicine on a variety of woody plants, including Magnolia. A stock solution in water is prepared and applied to the growing tip of young seedlings once the cotyledons (seed leaves) have fully expanded. Chromosomes are doubled, providing the cells twice as many as normal. The resultant plants have heavier-textured leaves, and their blooms are varied, generally with thicker tepals, allowing them to live longer. As Magnolia kobus seeds were plentiful, Dr. Janaki Ammal treated a number of seedlings before planting them on Battleston Hill at Wisley.
Ammal was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1935 and the Indian National Science Academy in 1957. She received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Michigan in 1956. In 1977, the government of India awarded her the Padma Shri. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry of the Government of India established the National Award of Taxonomy in her honor in 2000.
