Forgotten scientist who measured skies

On her eighth birthday, when most children might have longed for trinkets or toys, Anna Mani asked her father for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was a small gesture that revealed a great deal about her character. Even as a child in a conservative household in a family of the princely state of Travancore, which now forms the southern parts of Kerala, Mani was staking her claim to a life driven by curiosity and intellect.

That choice would echo through her career, for Anna Mani became one of India’s pioneering scientists, a physicist and meteorologist who helped the country achieve self-reliance in measuring its skies, winds, and solar radiation. And yet, despite the brilliance of her work, she slipped almost completely out of public memory.

‘Anna Mani: The Uncut Diamond’ by neuroscientist and writer Asha Gopinathan is an act of recovery. It restores to history a figure whose fingerprints are everywhere in India’s scientific story but whose name remains unfamiliar to most Indians. The book reminds readers that the story of Indian science is not only that of CV Raman, Vikram Sarabhai, and Homi J Bhabha, but also of women who worked in quiet brilliance, whose contributions were folded into institutional successes without the recognition they deserved.

Anna Mani was born in 1918 in Peermade, a hill town in what is now Kerala, into a well-to-do Syrian Christian family. Her father was an engineer; her mother, a homemaker. Known at home as Ammini, she was a serious, bookish child, far removed from the expected roles of her generation. By the time she joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in the 1940s to work under Nobel laureate CV Raman, she had already established herself as someone unwilling to be defined by conventional norms.

In Raman’s laboratory, she undertook painstaking experiments on the luminescence of rubies and diamonds, producing a thesis that made a significant contribution to spectroscopy. She and her colleagues came close to discovering the ruby laser, a testament to how closely Indian science was connected to global developments and to how deeply involved Mani was in the heart of that moment.

Her career might have remained within physics research, but newly-Independent India was in urgent need of scientific infrastructure. After a short training stint in England, Mani joined the India Meteorological Department in Poona in 1948. Mani led teams that designed, manufactured, and calibrated devices for measuring weather, solar radiation, and atmospheric ozone. Her work helped create a culture of self-reliance, enabling India to monitor its own atmosphere with precision and confidence.

She went on to lead some of the earliest wind energy surveys in the country, laying the foundations for renewable energy programmes that would gain importance decades later.

Despite her achievements, Mani did not become a public figure. She preferred the life of precision and anonymity, the tedious and unglamorous work of building instruments and refining data.

She once described herself as “the right person in the wrong place”, acknowledging the systemic barriers that women scientists faced. Although she rose to the position of Deputy Director General at the Meteorological Department, she never became Director General, a role many of her colleagues felt she deserved. Her career, like those of so many women scientists of her generation, bore the weight of gender bias.

Gopinathan’s book is strongest when it highlights these silences. Why was Anna Mani forgotten? Because the history of science has rarely had patience for those who worked in the background, and even less for women who refused to play by the rules of visibility. Mani wore simple khadi saris, mended her own clothes, raised dogs and birds, and lived a life of quiet frugality.

She scorned ornaments and ostentation, never married, and devoted herself fully to her work.

The portrait that emerges from ‘The Uncut Diamond’ is not only of a scientist, but of a personality: eccentric, exacting, fiercely independent, deeply attached to her dogs and birds, and supported at home by her housekeeper Yashoda Bai, who enabled her single-minded devotion to science for nearly four decades. By highlighting such details, Gopinathan reminds readers that science is not created by solitary geniuses alone, but by ecosystems of labour, often invisible and unacknowledged.

Mani withdrew from public life as she aged, particularly after receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Plus syndrome in the 1990s. She moved to Thiruvananthapuram to live with her sister, and continued to advise young researchers. She died in 2001, leaving behind no children but an intellectual family spread across institutions that continue to use the standards she set.

Recognition came late and in fragments. The library of the National Institute of Wind Energy bears her name, and the Indian Wind Manufacturers’ Association honoured her in 2023. Yet even today, her name does not appear in school textbooks, nor is her photograph displayed in museums alongside India’s more famous men of science.

For every Janaki Ammal or Anna Mani who is belatedly remembered, there are countless others who never enter the record at all. Even now, women in Indian science face the dual burdens of institutional discrimination and cultural invisibility.

That is why Asha Gopinathan’s biography matters. A neuroscientist herself, with a career in computational modelling of the brain, Gopinathan turned to the histories of science and gender to ask difficult questions about whose contributions are preserved. Her next project, a biography of botanist EK Janaki Ammal, is another step in this direction.

What makes ‘The Uncut Diamond’ compelling is not only its meticulous research and archival detail, but also its empathy. Gopinathan writes with the clarity of a scientist and the care of a storyteller. She does not lionise Anna Mani into an untouchable icon, but instead presents her in her full humanity: brilliant, exacting, sometimes difficult, always principled. It is a portrait that inspires admiration precisely because it is so real.

— The writer is an independent journalist based in South India