Dr Janaki Ammal - Infinite Women

Born: 4 November 1897, India
Died: 7 February 1984
Country most active: India
Also known as: E. K. Janaki Ammal, Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

Born in 1897, Indian botanist Dr. Edavaleth Kakkat (E.K.) Janaki Ammal was the tenth of 19 siblings. While several of her sisters entered arranged marriages, Ammal completed her Bachelor’s degree at Queen Mary’s College in Madras and an honors degree in botany from the Presidency College, at a time when India’s literacy rate for women was less than one percent. Offered a scholarship to the University of Michigan, she earned her doctorate in 1931 while studying plant cytology and genetics, with a focus on breeding hybrids. She was the first Indian woman to receive a doctorate in botany in the U.S.
In 1940, Ammal moved to England to work at the John Innes Institute. There, she co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which continues to be an important reference text in botany and became the first salaried female staff member of England’s Royal Horticultural Society in 1946. Ammal also hybridized different varieties of sugarcane to produce a sweeter crop that thrived in India’s climate, publishing her paper on “Intergeneric hybrids of Saccharum” in the Journal of Genetics in 1941.
She returned to the newly independent India in 1948, where she was appointed head of the Central Botanical Laboratory. At the same time, she led the reorganization of the Botanical Survey of India, which collected and surveyed the native plant life. Ammal was also a conservationist, working to save indigenous plants and ecosystems from deforestation policies like the “Grow More Food” campaigns. She delivered a landmark speech in 1955 at an international symposium, about India’s subsistence economy and the significance of tribal populations and their cultivation of native plants, emphasizing the matrilineal traditions that valued women as managers of property and condemning the mass production of cereals at the cost of indigenous flora. She was a key player in the campaign to save Kerala’s Silent Valley from destruction. It was named a national park in November 1984, nine months after she passed away at age 87 still conducting research in her lab.

The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.

Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal was a prominent Indian botanist known for her work in plant breeding, cytogenetics, and phytogeography. Her significant research focused on sugarcane and eggplants (brinjal). She co-authored the “Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants” in 1945 with C.D. Darlington, a key contribution to cytogenetics. Dr. Ammal also explored ethnobotany and the medicinal and economic plants found in the rainforests of Kerala, India.
In addition to her primary research, Janaki conducted extensive studies on plant genera like Solanum, Datura, Mentha, Cymbopogon, and Dioscorea, as well as various medicinal and other plant species. She also suggested that the higher rate of plant speciation in the cold and humid northeast Himalayas, compared to the cold and arid northwest Himalayas, could be attributed to polyploidy.