Born in 1897 AD in Tellicherry in the British Raj, unlike other Indian girls at the time, her parents encouraged Janaki Ammal Edavaleth Kakkat to pursue her intellectual interests – which soon focused on botany. One of 19 children to her father’s two wives, there wasn’t a lot of money to spare for her higher education; nevertheless, she moved to Madras and obtained a bachelor’s degree from Queen Mary’s College and an honors degree from Presidency College there in 1921. After a brief teaching career, she won a scholarship to the University of Michigan and obtained her master’s degree in 1925, returning again to complete her doctorate in 1931.

Ammal soon joined the Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore in an effort to create varieties of high-yield cane that would thrive across the subcontinent. However, her status as a single female (she never married) led to irreconcilable “differences” with the rest of the research staff; she left for London in 1940, eventually taking a cytologist position at the Royal Horticultural Society. Working at the famed Kew Gardens, Janaki completed chromosome studies on a wide variety of common plants, throwing new light on the evolution of a wide range of these, with special focus on medicinal ones.

She didn’t return to India until she received a personal invitation in 1951 from Jawaharlal Nehru to reorganize and head the Botanical Survey there. Janaki’s work on developing genetic hybrids of sugarcane and bamboo at the institute were pivotal for the advancement of Indian agriculture. In 1970, she settled in Madras as emeritus professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Botany, until her death in 1984. Her major interest in her final years was the care of her large brood of cats and kittens … just another crazy cat lady.