Friday, July 11, 2025, 6.30pm

Bangalore International Centre

EK Janaki Ammal and the Re-Ordering of the Western Ghats

 

Wednesday, July 16, 2025, 4pm

Xavier Hall, PG Block, St Joseph's University

The museum–zoo–garden complex in the 19th century Indian city

 

Friday, July 18, 2025, 4pm

PJEC Hall 2, Mount Carmel College

A Laboratory of Her Own: Taking Science to Women in South India

 

 

 

 

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Details:

 

Friday, July 11, 2025, 6.30pm

Bangalore International Centre

EK Janaki Ammal and the Re-Ordering of the Western Ghats

The Western Ghats enjoyed a central place in the life and science of cytogeneticist E. K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984). To her, the dense and tall tropical evergreen forests found here was the epitome of climax vegetation in India, or the mature stage of ecological succession. In order to understand how this balance was reached and stability attained, she undertook a grand and pioneering project— a study of the relationship between peoples and plants of the region, both in deep history and the immediate present. One of her chief aims was the making of a modern and decolonialised version of the Hortus Malabaricus— a new compendium of medicinal plants from the Western Ghats, reordered on the basis of chromosomes, and containing information on their uses, as gathered from the forest dwellers, who she believed were the primary interlocutors of indigenous medico-botanical knowledge. Also, quite tellingly, in her advancing years, rather than expend energy directly wrestling with the Kerala government on the Silent Valley issue, she championed for its conservation by mobilising international support and creatively embarked on an innovative project— the cytogenetics of the flora of these undisturbed forests.

 

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025, 4pm

Xavier Hall, PG Block, St Joseph's University

The museum–zoo–garden complex in the 19th century Indian city

It was an uneasy marriage between commerce and enlightenment rationality that led to the founding of the earliest public museums in India. Intended primarily as an agent of economic progress and accumulation of capital, the public museum underwent a dramatic shift in conception towards the latter part of the 19th century propelled by a stronger social argument. As a result, a socially constructed place for Nature came into being at the heart of the colonial Indian city—the museum-zoo-garden complex. At least two models of urban modernity appear to have found expression in Indian cities. If the colonial capital, Calcutta, mirrored the metropolitan capital, London, by situating the three allied institutions at some distance from each other albeit closely knit, provincial Indian cities and towns, especially in the Princely States, predominantly followed a Parisian pattern, locating the three institutions contiguously in a unified physical space. However, “geographies of connection” do not result in mere transfers of ideas or technologies, but involve complex interactions and negotiations to give rise to unique articulations of modernity. 

 

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Friday, July 18, 2025, 4pm

PJEC Hall 2, Mount Carmel College

A Laboratory of Her Own: Taking Science to Women in South India

Structured along the lines of a liberal arts college, the Women’s Christian College (WCC) of Madras, played a major role in promoting science at the college level among young women in South India from as early as 1920. The WCC encouraged women to pursue science and medicine to advanced levels and was the earliest such institution in India, to provide women with laboratories of their own. Privileging the sciences of chemistry and biology, the emphasis was on laboratory-based pedagogy— on mastering techniques, and on the collection and ordering of specimens. The approach was empirical rather than theoretical, the cornerstone of science teaching at the men’s institutions. It represented a new way of doing science—one that was college centred, and women centred, and employed modern teaching methods thanks to the exceptionally qualified science faculty, comprised almost wholly of women, to whom doing science meant a re-affirmation of one’s worthiness and value as an individual in society. Importantly, the WCC made the choice of being single, legitimate, and even desirable, which went a long way in producing some trail-blazing Indian women of science.

 

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Bio:

Dr Savithri Preetha Nair is the Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science, 2024-25 (https://archives.ncbs.res.in/OS). She is a Historian of Science, and her research spans a fascinating range of topics, including the history of science, modernity and enlightenment at the turn of the nineteenth century, history and politics of collecting for science, the sociology of knowledge, the public museum, and women in science in colonial and post-colonial India. Among her notable publications are Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E. K. Janaki Ammal, A Life: 1897-1984 (Routledge, 2022), Science and the Changing Environment in India: A Guide to Sources in the India Office Records, 1780-1920 (co-authored with Richard Axelby, British Library, 2010), and Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore, 1786-1832 (Routledge, 2012).