E. K. Janaki Ammal Crossed Sugarcane With Erianthus and Maize at Coimbatore, Co-Wrote the 1945 Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants and Reorganised the Botanical Survey of India

Janaki Ammal spent 1934 to 1939 at the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore, where she crossed sugarcane with Erianthus, maize and other grasses. The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which she wrote with the geneticist Cyril Darlington, appeared in 1945, and the government turned to her when India reorganised its national botanical survey in the 1950s. The Indian National Science Academy (INSA), which elected her a Fellow in 1957, wrote her memoir after her death on 7 February 1984.

A Tellicherry girl at Michigan

Edavaleth Kakkat Janaki Ammal was born on 4 November 1897 at Tellicherry (now Thalassery) in Kerala. According to the INSA memoir, her father, E. K. Krishnan, was a sub-judge there. Schooling began at the Sacred Heart Convent in the town and continued at Queen Mary’s College in Madras, followed by an honours degree in botany at Presidency College in 1921 and a master’s in 1923.

Teaching at the Women’s Christian College in Madras came next, then the University of Michigan, where a Barbour Scholarship gave her an MSc in 1925. After more teaching she returned to Michigan as the first Oriental Barbour Research Fellow, and the INSA memoir records a DSc there in 1931. An essay for Science Gallery Bengaluru, by the historian Vinita Damodaran, says the dissertation dealt with chromosome studies in a garden plant, Nicandra physaloides.

What she did to sugarcane at Coimbatore

The Sugarcane Breeding Station at Coimbatore had been set up in 1912 under the Madras Presidency’s agriculture department. Its history page says the site was picked for the way cane flowers and sets seed there, and that in 1918 it released Co 205, its first commercially successful hybrid between cultivated cane (Saccharum officinarum) and the wild Saccharum spontaneum. The INSA memoir says she joined as geneticist in 1934 and “laid the foundation” for cytogenetic study of Saccharum and its relatives. Cytogenetics means reading how chromosomes behave to understand how plants inherit and cross.

Her papers show what she tried. A Nature letter of October 1938 reports crosses of sugarcane with Imperata, and of the wild cane with two kinds of sorghum. Sugarcane with maize was the next attempt, using many thousands of flowers of a male-sterile cane variety called Vellai, and got a single seedling. It carried 40 chromosomes from the cane parent and 12 from maize. The INSA memoir adds that the plant flowered some 40 years later, in the 1970s, and is kept at the Sugarcane Breeding Institute. A 1972 note in the journal Heredity, written with two Coimbatore scientists, Jagathesan and Sreenivasan, is titled “Further studies in Saccharum-zea hybrid”.

The cross with Erianthus, a related grass genus, is described in the INSA memoir as a success. The wild cane Saccharum spontaneum was crossed with Erianthus ravennae, and the offspring looked more like the cane parent. These crosses are covered in her 1941 paper “Intergeneric hybrids of Saccharum”, in the Journal of Genetics (pages 217 to 253), which the memoir’s bibliography lists in three parts, Erianthus, Imperata and Zea. Earlier, in May 1938, she had also counted chromosomes in sugarcane and bamboo hybrids made at the station by T. S. Venkatraman, noting that the gap bridged was wider than in cane crosses with sorghum or with Erianthus, which had already been made in Java.

The RHS library article credits her with higher-yielding cane suited to Indian conditions. The INSA memoir and her papers document the chromosome studies and the hybrids, and they do not name a commercial variety as hers. For the plant-breeding work that followed after independence, see Swaminathan and the Green Revolution, and for the crop’s longer history India Gave the World Sugar.

Wartime Britain and the chromosome atlas

She left India in 1939. The INSA memoir gives her post at the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London as assistant cytologist, 1940 to 1945. Her biographer Savithri Preetha Nair, in an excerpt published in The Wire, dates the John Innes stint from April 1940 to December 1943 and quotes a letter that she wrote in February 1945 from the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew. The John Innes Centre itself says 1940 to 1945.

The Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) blog says she and Darlington met in 1931, and the Royal Horticultural Society’s library says they kept in touch by letter until his death in 1981. Their book, the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, came out from George Allen and Unwin in London in 1945. The NatSCA post gives it as 397 pages.

Nair describes it as a reference arranged by chromosome number, covering some 8,000 species of flowering plants, with an index of their uses and another of where they grow. A profile poster by the illustrator Lisa Graves gives a larger total, about 100,000 plants. The authors thanked the economic botany department at Kew and dedicated the book to the plant explorer Nikolai Vavilov, who died in a Soviet prison camp in January 1943. By the authors’ own account, they had “merely added a fourth foot” to the tripod of form, distribution and breeding: the chromosome count.

Magnolias and colchicine at Wisley

In 1946 she became cytologist at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley in Surrey, staying to 1951. The RHS collections page calls her its first female salaried employee. According to NatSCA she started on 1 October 1946 at £300 a year, and within seven months the garden’s advisory committee heard of a new tetraploid asparagus from her work.

Colchicine was her tool, a drug that doubles the number of chromosomes in a cell. The RHS says the doubled plants grow bigger and faster. Seedlings of Magnolia kobus got the treatment, and one of the resulting trees, Magnolia kobus ‘Janaki Ammal’, grows on Battleston Hill at Wisley, where NatSCA gives its size as over 6 metres tall and wide.

A rose also carries her name. Girija and Viru Viraraghavan, plant breeders in Kodaikanal, named a yellow grandiflora ‘E.K. Janaki Ammal’ after getting permission from her great-niece Vinita Damodaran. The John Innes Centre announced it on 5 June 2019 and says plants went to John Innes, Wisley and the Botanical Survey of India’s gardens.

Rebuilding the Botanical Survey

The Botanical Survey of India says it was founded on 13 February 1890 under Sir George King, and that it “was reorganized in 1954, under the leadership of Dr. E.K. Janaki Ammal.” The survey now works through 11 regional centres.

The INSA memoir lays out her posts. Officer on special duty for the reorganisation from 1952 to 1954, she became in 1954 the first Director of the Central Botanical Laboratory, kept at first in Chhatar Manzil in Lucknow and later moved to Allahabad, and held that post until 1959. The RHS library’s account says Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited her home in 1951 for the job. NatSCA gives 1952. A 1954 paper of hers on the scope of the reorganised survey is listed in the INSA bibliography.

From 1959 she worked at the Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu. The memoir records a colchicine-doubled mint (Mentha arvensis), with over 5 percent oil in one selected seedling, named the Jammu mint and propagated vegetatively. Among aromatic grasses of the genus Cymbopogon, polyploid races carried more oil, and the memoir gives, for Cymbopogon flexuosus, 0.5 to 1.0 percent oil in diploids and 1.5 percent in tetraploids.

What the chromosome counts showed

The memoir credits her with chromosome counts across a long list of plants, including Viburnum, Rhododendron, Magnolia, Philadelphus, Camellia and Datura. The black mulberry, Morus nigra, she reported at 308 chromosomes, which she said was the highest number known in a flowering plant. Near Shoranur in Kerala she found Sukumari, a natural citron and lemon hybrid.

A presidential address to the Indian Botanical Society took the counts to the Himalayas. High chromosome numbers in Magnolia, Viburnum and Rhododendron, she argued, cluster where the Himalayas bend over the Assam plateau, and she read that as a zone where new species are forming. Her offices included Secretary of the Botanical Society of India from 1935 to 1938 and its President in 1960. The INSA memoir also lists the Birbal Sahni Medal in 1961, the presidency of the Indian Society of Genetics and Plant Breeding the same year, and an honorary LLD from Michigan in 1956. The palaeobotanist the medal is named for has his own profile, Birbal Sahni and the fossil plants.

Madras, Silent Valley and the Padma Shri

From November 1970 she worked as an Emeritus Scientist at the University of Madras’s Centre for Advanced Study in Botany, at the Maduravoyal field station about 15 kilometres from the city. Work continued until two weeks before her death, when she was taken to hospital. The Government of India gave her the Padma Shri in 1977, a date the INSA memoir and a 2019 Madras Musings profile both give.

UNSW Sydney’s profile says that late in her career she joined the campaign against destroying Silent Valley, a rainforest in Kerala. Mongabay India describes a planned 120 MW hydroelectric project that would have submerged 830 hectares of forest, which the Union government shelved in October 1983. Silent Valley became a national park on 15 November 1984, about nine months after her death, and the Prime Minister dedicated it on 7 September 1985. The last entry in her INSA bibliography is a paper with a co-author on chromosome numbers of plants from Silent Valley, in the Indian Journal of Forestry. Others are credited with the campaign too, and the profile of Salim Ali covers the ornithologist’s part in it. Silent Valley is also one of the components of the Western Ghats World Heritage site.

Savithri Preetha Nair’s biography, Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist, published by Routledge in 2023, runs to 650 pages and draws on her correspondence with Nehru, Darlington and Haldane.

Dates that sources give differently

Accounts of her differ on small points. INSA gives her birth as 4 November 1897, UNSW as 5 November. INSA has her DSc in 1931, while the John Innes Centre calls it a PhD. Science Gallery Bengaluru dates her Wisley appointment to 1944, against 1946 in the RHS and NatSCA accounts. The same gallery essay puts the Michigan honorary degree in 1955, the INSA memoir in 1956. UNSW says she died at 87, while the INSA memoir, which gives 7 February 1984, puts her at 86 and her birth date makes that the right count.