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pioneering woman in Indian science, passed away on August 16. Highly regarded in
scientific circles and admired as a woman of great character, she was one of
India's early feminists. She transcended the delimited cultural and physical
spaces available to her.
Anna Mani came from a large family (she is the seventh of eight children, three
girls and five boys) in the former state of Travancore, (now part of Kerala) in
the southern part of India. Her father was a prosperous civil engineer who owned
cardamom estates. Although Mani's family belonged to an ancient Syrian Christian
church, her father was an agnostic. By the time she was eight, Mani had read
almost all the books in Malayalam at her public library. On her eighth birthday,
when she was gifted with diamond earrings, as was the custom in her family, she
opted instead for a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
As a child, Mani was drawn to Gandhian politics. Gandhi had visited Mani's
hometown when she was a little girl. He spoke of self-reliance and promoted a
large-scale boycott of foreign goods, especially of cloth from British mills. Mani
recalled, with a touch of pride, how she took to wearing only khadi after that.
Averse to wearing any jewellery, she mused, ``in the olden days they would compile
all the family assets on papyrus. If a woman's worth had to be measured by her
jewellery and assets, wouldn't it be easier for the woman to wear a list of these
assets around her neck?'' Anna Mani could not be bothered about marriage either.
She said she could ``handle only one Syrian Christian at a time'' as, in her own
words, they were always ``hatching, matching, and dispatching.''
In the matter of education, Mani followed her brothers, who were groomed for high-
level careers in government service. While there was no opposition to her desire
for higher education in physics from her family, there was little encouragement.
In 1940, a year after finishing college, Anna Mani obtained a scholarship to do
research in physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She was
accepted in Raman's laboratory as a graduate student. Mani worked on the
spectroscopy of diamonds and rubies. She recorded and analysed fluorescence,
absorption and Raman spectra of 32 diamonds. She studied temperature dependence
and polarisation effects in these spectra. The experiments were long and
painstaking: the crystals were held at liquid air temperatures, and the weak
luminescence of some of the diamonds required 15 to 20 hours of exposure time to
record the spectrum on photographic plates. Between 1942 and 1945, she published
five single-authored papers on the luminescence of diamonds and ruby. In August
1945 Zsubmitted her Ph.D. dissertation to the Madras University and was awarded a
government scholarship for an internship in England, where she specialised in
meteorological instrumentation.
Mani returned to Independent India in 1948. She joined the Indian Meteorological
Department at Pune, where she was in charge of construction of radiation
instrumentation. She published a number of papers on subjects ranging from
atmospheric ozone to the need for international instrument comparisons and
national standardisation of meteorological instrumentation. She retired as the
deputy director general of the Indian Meteorological Department in 1976 and
subsequently returned to the Raman Research Institute as a visiting professor for
three years. She published two books, The Handbook for Solar Radiation Data for
India (1980) and Solar Radiation over India (1981), and worked on a project for
harnessing wind energy in India in 1993. Despite her interest in, and involvement
with, issues of environment, Anna Mani ``got out of the business,'' as
environmentalists (``carpetbaggers'' as she called them) seemed to be ``always in
orbit.'' She preferred to stay in one place.
Anna Mani displayed a healthy disdain for victim politics as well. To the extent
that the discourse of discrimination carries with it aspersions of inequality, so
that personal achievement and success become contaminated with ``special
consideration'' and patronage, the stoic and proud Anna Mani would have no part of
it. ``I had worked hard to gain my academic qualifications and was judged fit to
carry out the work that was needed,'' she would insist when asked whether her
being a woman had any impact on her work. ``Selection for the scholarships at
Bangalore and in the United Kingdom had nothing to do with one's sex.''
Yet, as I asked Anna Mani about the social environment and the support of her
peers, a deep-seated hurt and anger surfaced. ``He was an odious man,'' she said,
referring to a colleague who had done his best to make the women feel inept, both
as scientists and as women. Any slight error the women made in handling
instrumentation or in setting up an experiment was immediately broadcast by some
men as a sign of female incompetence. When Mani audited a course on theoretical
physics, it was generally assumed that the material would be beyond her ken (which
Mani, with her characteristic humour, admits it was).
As a graduate student, Mani became close to Mrs. Raman, who treated her ``as if I
was her own daughter.'' On a visit to a famous Hindu temple near Madras, Mrs.
Raman smuggled her into the inner sanctum, which was forbidden to non-Brahmins and
widows. The priest, horrified to see Anna Mani without red kumkum on her forehead,
which signifies a Hindu woman who is not a widow, was about to throw her out of
the sanctum when Mrs. Raman intervened. She deftly put kumkum on Mani's forehead
and chided her in front of the priest. ``Saraswati,'' she said, ``why are you so
careless about your appearance?'' Anna Mani told me that she was pleased Mrs.
Raman had referred to her as Saraswati, the goddess of learning and wisdom, and
not as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth.
The scientific institutions, however, perpetuated their own gender biases. Anna
Mani was never granted a doctoral degree. Her completed Ph.D. dissertations remain
in the library of Raman Research Institute, indistinguishable from other bound
dissertations. Madras University, which at that time formally granted degrees for
work done at the Indian Institute of Science, claimed that Mani did not have a
M.Sc. degree, and therefore could not be granted a Ph.D.
There has been a lingering hope among feminists that the participation of large
numbers of women in traditionally male- dominated fields of inquiry would change
not only the institutional biases but also, more importantly, the very nature of
these fields. The slow trickle of women into the higher echelons of education in
the late nineteenth century did over time change the institutional response to
women. However, altering the very nature of science would have required a self-
conscious affirmation of gender identities by the women scientists in opposition
to the coercive womanhood forced upon them by their male colleagues and the
society at large. The received enlightenment of Anna Mani's generation was washed
clean of its tainted history — the history of exclusion of women and people of
colour from political participation in the West.
A low profile politician, Sucheta Kriplani would have been quite overawed when she
was offered to step into C.B. Gupta's shoes after he resigned. Probably there were
more senior and seasoned leaders in Gupta's cabinet to fit the bill but the Nehru
clan strangely enough handpicked Mrs. Kriplani for the prized post.
She administered Uttar Pradesh with a visible sense of fairness and transparency.
The first ever strike by the state employees continued for 62 days during her
regime. She relented only when the employees' leaders became restless for coming
to the talking table. Like a firm administrator she refused their demand for pay
hike but at the same time did not retrench a single one of them.
Sucheta hailed from an orthodox Bengali family. She was born in Ambala (Punjab) in
June, 1908. After teaching for a while in the Benaras Hindu University, she
decided to join the Congress Party. U.P. became her political pasture. She won an
assembly seat of Kanpur in a by-election in 1948. Elected to the Lok Sabha in 1952
and 1957, she was inducted as the minister for village and small-scale industries
in 1960. She again won an assembly seat from Kanpur in 1962 general elections.
Married to the famous socialist leader Acharya J.B. Kriplani, Suchetaji remained a
die hard Congress leader. The couple used to indulge in sweetly sarcastic remarks
about each other's political philosophy even in public. The made-for-each-other
couple was often found in late night movie shows even when Suchetaji was the chief
minister. In public functions Kriplaniji used to walk behind her illustrious wife
whereas in social occasions Suchetaji used to walk behind her husband like an
orthodox Indian wife.
After relinquishing the charge as the chief minister on March 13, 1967 due to the
expiry of the Vidhan Sabha term, Suchetaji got elected to the Lok Sabha again in
1967. An active office-bearer of several social organizations in Delhi, she died
on December 1, 1974.