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Dr. E K Janaki Ammal

Called the first Indian woman botanist, Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal (4 November 1897 – 7 February 1984) was one of India’s first plant scientists, best known for her work with the sugar breeding station in Coimbatore which helped create sugarcane hybrids that yielded sweeter sugar. She was the co-author of The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated plants with C.D. Darlington, a key text of botany for scholars of the field even today. She took an interest in ethnobotany and plants of medicinal and economic value from the rain forests of Kerala, India. The flower Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal – a variety of rose – is named after her.

Biography

Janaki Ammal was born in 1897 in Tellicherry, north Malabar now in the state of Kerala. Her father, Dewan Bahadur Edavalath Kakkatt Krishnan, was a judge in the subordinate court system in Tellicherry. He kept a garden in their home and wrote two books on birds in the North Malabar region of India. Ammal obtained a Bachelor’s degree from Queens Mary College, Madras and an Honours degree in Botany from The Presidency College. She was granted a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan, US from where she completed her MS in 1925. She returned and taught at Women’s Christian College, Madras for a while and after that she went to Michigan again as the first Oriental Barbour fellow. She completed her Doctorate in 1931, becoming the first Indian woman to receive that degree in botany from the US. She returned to India and worked as a professor of Botany at Maharajas College of Science, Trivandrum in 1932. In 1934, she joined Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore as a geneticist. In 1940, she moved to England to work as assistant cytologist at the John Innes Horticultural institution in London. From 1945 to 1951, she worked as cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley. She returned to India on the request of none other than Jawaharlal Nehru to restructure the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) in 1951. In 1952, she was appointed as an officer on special duty to the BSI and eventually became the Director General of BSI. She also served the Government of India in various other capacities including heading the central Botanical laboratory located at Allahabad. During the latter part of her career, she worked for a while at the Bhabha Atomic Centre, Trombay and then moved to Madras in 1970 where she was named an emeritus scientist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Botany, University of Madras. Professor CV Raman made her a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1935 and she was elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1957. The University of Michigan gave her an honorary LLD in 1956. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1977, and in 2000, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry created the National Award of Taxonomy in her name. The Janaki Ammal Herbarium in Jammu is also a tribute to her. She passed away in February 1984.

Major Contributions

Following a series of famines, she returned to India at the request of the Prime Minister to use her knowledge to help increase food production. However, she had disagreements with the deforestation taking place in an effort to grow more food. She became an advocate for the preservation of native plants and successfully saved the Silent Valley from a hydroelectric project. It is now a national park. She is best remembered for her work on sugarcane and eggplant. She used her expertise to develop sugarcane crops suited to India’s climate. An expert in cytogenetics (the genetic content and expression of genes in the cell), she conducted research on chromosome numbers and ploidy in a variety of garden plants while she was in England which led to new findings on the evolution of species and varieties. At the Royal Horticultural Society, Wisley, she studied how to rapidly grow larger plants using colchicine. She presented a paper on the subsistence economy of India and importance of the indigenous knowledge of tribal communities for sustainable development in 1956 in a meeting at Chicago Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Paying particular attention to the sharp differences between patriarchal, matriarchal and tribal agronomy, it can be said that Ammal pioneered both indigenous and gender environmental approaches to land-use history.
References

References

  • Grove, Richard, and Vinita Damodaran. “Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676–2000: Part II.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 42 (2006): 4497–4505. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4418841. (Accessed 9 Aug. 2022)
  • Dutta, Sharanya. “Do You Know the Botanist Janaki Ammal, She of the Magnolia Kobus Fame?” The Wire, 21 Oct 2016. https://thewire.in/science/janaki-ammal-magnolia-kobus
  • “DR. Janaki Ammal, Ph.D.” AWIS. https://www.awis.org/historical-women/dr-janaki-ammal/ (Accessed 8 Aug. 2022)
  • “Janaki Ammal Biography.” TheFamousPeople.com. https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/janaki-ammal-6543.php
  • “Edavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal – An Introduction.” iiim.res.in. https://iiim.res.in/herbarium/edavaleth-kakkat-janaki-ammal.htm
  • “Janaki Ammal.” Wikipedia. Last edited 6 Aug 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janaki_Ammal
  • McNeill, Leila. “The Pioneering Female Botanist Who Sweetened a Nation and Saved a Valley.” Smithsonian, 21 July 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pioneering-female-botanist-who-sweetened-nation-and-saved-valley-180972765/