Despite the magnitude of her contributions to Indian meteorology from the 1940s to 1990s, and the respect she earned from figures such as CV Raman and Vikram Sarabhai, Anna Mani has remained a startlingly well-kept secret. A new biography attempts to restore her to public memory.
The photograph of a rocket being wheeled in on a bicycle on its way to the launchpad in Thumba, Thiruvananthapuram, on November 21, 1963, has seared itself into the brains and hearts of millions of Indians. It even inspired the plot of the hit OTT series Rocket Boys which is a semi-fictionalized account of the lives of Homi J Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai as they set up India’s space programme.
While a lot has been written and memorialized about this part of India’s scientific history, the story of the person that Sarabhai turned to when he needed to set up a meteorological observatory at Thumba shortly before D-Day is nowhere featured. Data from weather instruments would be crucial to determine the elevation and other settings of the rocket, and Sarabhai knew just the physicist for the job. Time was running out, but the physicist and their team managed to identify an unused 200-foot-tall tower at Poona, reinstall it in Thumba, fix the appropriate instruments on it, and commission the instruments—just two days before the launch!
So, who was this physicist? Her name was Anna Mani—at the time she was Director (Instruments) at the Indian Meteorological Department, Poona. A new biography titled The Uncut Diamond, written by neuroscientist and history of science researcher Asha Gopinathan, delves into Mani’s life and her scientific contributions.
The book opens by threading together the earliest parts of Mani’s life—her childhood in a scenic hill town in Idukki, her schooling in Trivandrum and Aluva, and finally her move to Madras for higher studies. Gopinathan was in the unenviable position of having access to little to no archival material directly related to her protagonist’s early life. However, she makes up for it with rich reconstructions of the historical context and the academic atmosphere of the schools and colleges Mani went to. She includes origin stories and notes on her school’s founders, the rules she had to follow and the subjects that were taught in the years she studied there. There are even excerpts from an article about a Maths teacher and the memoirs of Mani’s father. All these may not directly have to do with Mani herself, but they successfully paint a vivid picture of the world around her, shaping her into the person she grew to be.
The chapter about Mani’s years at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore—arguably the turning point in her life—is illuminating for anybody interested in the history of modern science in India and women in STEM. Mani was one of the few women students to work in CV Raman’s laboratory. Despite working for nearly six years in his lab, and publishing six papers in that time, she and her close friend Sunanda Bai were refused their Ph.D. for reasons that remain unclear. Both were understandably distraught.
Interestingly, the quality of their work was good enough to earn them postdoctoral positions abroad. Mani accepted a scholarship to go to the UK and Sunanda Bai seemed all set to leave for Sweden. Tragically, the latter committed suicide on the eve of her departure. Gopinathan’s book offers a rare opportunity to learn a little more about Sunanda Bai, who has for long been a figure shrouded in mystery, if not completely absent from history. I loved finding out about Mani and Sunanda Bai’s mutual affinity for socialist literature and admiration of Sarojini Naidu. ‘Both women worked very hard for their doctoral degrees,’ writes Gopinathan, ‘often curling up under the laboratory tables to snatch a few hours of sleep as the long experiments were being carried out.’
Perhaps other readers too will feel a ripple of anger upon reading: ‘After this episode [of her suicide], he [CV Raman] shut the doors of his laboratory to any other woman.’
Though Mani rarely expressed bitterness about her own Ph.D. refusal, she later told sociologist Abha Sur in an interview that her late friend deserved one at least posthumously. In The Uncut Diamond, published nearly 25 years after Mani’s death in 2001, Gopinathan makes a strong case for both women receiving posthumous doctorates. It will be interesting to see if the Indian Institute of Science ever considers this.
Gopinathan’s biography stands out for doing something that should be most natural—focusing on her work in science. This aligns with her belief that it is wrong to obscure the scientific aspect of a scientist’s life, but it is also an outcome of the fact that Mani’s published papers were all the biographer had when she started out on her research. I admire the author’s deep engagement with Mani’s research and her determination to be thorough.
Consequently, the reader gets at least a hundred pages dedicated to the important details of all the areas of physics that Mani busied herself with. This may overwhelm a section of readers, but those who are brave enough to not skip these pages will be rewarded with a holistic understanding of the breadth and quality of Anna Mani’s expertise in her field. Moreover, Gopinathan does offer the reader occasional breaks from the heavy bits with colourful anecdotes, reminiscences and excerpts from letters.
The chapter titled ‘Anna in her Own Words’ was put together using a box of letters that the author came upon by chance. This box contained exchanges between ‘Miss Mani’ as she was popularly known and her junior colleague GP Srivastava from 1964 to 1997. Gopinathan makes an interesting choice to present the letters as is, instead of quoting from them and drawing her own interpretations. In this way, she allows readers the space to make up their own minds about the strong and complex personality that Mani was. The reason this works is that Mani was an excellent writer with a great sense of humour. I especially enjoyed her descriptions of the various landscapes she visited around the world and her descriptions of different cultures and the people she met on the way.
Anna Mani was by no means perfect. Just as Rosalind Franklin, Veronica Rodrigues, and numerous other more contemporary talented women scientists, she too had a reputation of being difficult to work with. In her case, it seems to have been because of her perfectionism when it came to precise measurement and her no-nonsense nature. Traits that, one may point out, would typically be considered favourable in a scientist; and traits that male scientists are rarely penalized (in fact, maybe even glorified) for. I wonder if that is why practically nobody in science except for sociologists and journalists has written or spoken about her. Somehow, Anna Mani’s legacy has remained sort of a secret.
Asha Gopinathan’s book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in an uncompromisingly researched account of a woman in science in newly independent India, and the unexpectedly exciting evolution of international meteorology from the 1940s to 1990s.
Nandita Jayaraj is an independent science journalist, author and co-founder of the feminist science media project Labhopping.