Janaki Ammal and the Genetical Society

Janaki Ammal and the Genetical Society

dir. Susan Thomson 

The short film traces the biography of Janaki Ammal from a small town of Tellicherry in Kerala in 1897, to becoming an internationally recognised botanist and an eminent scientist at a national level, in the reformation of the BSI by the 1950s in Post-independence India. Ammal's family wasn't well-to-do, and she represented a lower caste in the caste hierarchy. As a result, throughout her career she came up against the Brahminical hierarchies in India and the patriarchy and racism of Western science in the form of two British biologists, C.D. Darlington and J.B.S. Haldane in the 1930s. As a colleague of hers attested, "Though cytology was her  forte all through, her work embraced genetics, evolution, phytogeography and ethnobotany." She cowrote the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants with C.D. Darlington in 1945 and refused to be brow-beaten into rewriting a second edition in 1949. She was a member of several international societies, including the Linnean Society. She had been a member of the Eugenics Society since 1931 and provided Darlington, who was on the right of the Eugenics movement, material for his works on Caste and tribes. These debates formed a key side of the Eugenics movement. The scientific landscape changed after the second world war as an anti-racist science movement grew, under the auspices of UNESCO, culminating in the 1951 Statement on Race, and scientists globally began to reject Eugenic ideas, including J.B.S. Haldane. While not directly involved in the UNESCO debate, as she was in India, having been recalled by Nehru to reform the BSI, she celebrated India's diverse cultures. Her work on Ethnobotany and her celebration of the Erula tribe pay tribute to this. Her forays in the field and her reforming of the BSI, against the "Kew Paradigm" and towards a more local understanding of Botany. She was the only Indian and the only woman to attend the landmark meeting on Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, This meeting marked the beginnings of a new post-war environmentalism, that was both scholarly and popular, paving a way for the Popular environmentalism of the 1960s.  The last decades of her life were spent embracing the Silent Valley Project, against the Hydroelectric Dam on the Kunthipuzha River. Along with another Indian stalwart  M.S. Swaminathan, she made a strong case for preserving these forests. Her correspondence with Darlington lasted 5 decades and crossed continents, a testimony to a global  scientific vision. She lived simply, never married and always wore a Sari, even during her trips to Russia. Most of her peers were men, white and brown. She may not have seen herself as a feminist, but she certainly practiced feminism through her independent scientific thinking and being in the world of men.