Archiving the Silences of Our “Institutional Pasts”
The Triumphs of India’s Pioneering Physicist Anna Mani
23rd August 2026
Well, I’ve always loved reading biographies of great minds. It’s like having a private audience (over a cuppa coffee) 😊 with some of the most influential, brilliant, and resilient people from the pages of history.
In fact, having a peek into the lives of such famous figures has always been such a high-return investment for my own personal growth.
In our past blogposts, I remember having reviewed scores of such biographies that have had such a great impact on me! Be it reading about how Steve Jobs and how he was fired from his own company, or how Nelson Mandela survived 27 years in prison without losing his vision, or how Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before inventing a working lightbulb provides us with such great life lessons that enrich our lives for the better.
In like manner, almost around a month ago, I started reading a lovely biography, that I wanted to finish in time for posting it on her birthday! 😊
A biography that was so compelling, that it turned out to be a real unputdownable read of sorts. Call it the font, or the line spacing, or the sentence pacing, or what you will, 😊reading through each page of the biography was indeed a revelation.
A compelling revelation of sorts!
A revelation that went on to ‘reveal’ layers and layers of institutional power structures and academic gate-keeping that had been in vogue for longgg in academia.
Before we proceed, a short introduction to the “heroine of this biography” merits our attention! 😊
Anna Mani (1918-2001) was an Indian physicist who was born in Peermede in the High Ranges of the state of Kerala. Her father Modayil Pothen Mani was the first ‘native’ engineer to work for the Travancore Public Works Department. Her mother Ammamma was a homemaker who raised five boys and three girls. Anna was their seventh child.
An avid reader, she completed her schooling from Christava Mahilalayam, Aluva, with distinction topping all the girls of her batch for which she was awarded a medal. She moved to Chennai for higher education, first at Women’s Christian College (WCC) and then at Presidency from where she graduated with a BA (Honours) degree in 1939. After spending a year in WCC as a demonstrator she joined the laboratory of Professor C.V Raman in 1940 for a Ph.D.
Anna was one of three women in the laboratory then. After working on the optical properties of rubies and diamonds using Raman spectroscopy among other tools, she graduated in 1945. Despite six single author papers during this period both she and her lab mate Sunanda Bai (who published ten single author papers) were never awarded the doctorate. The reason behind this is clouded in mystery.
(as quoted in her official website)
Coming back -
In the early 20th century, (as was the case in many western nations as well) female literacy in India was hovering below an abysmal one percent, and college enrollments for women were exceptionally rare. This was also reflected in the Madras university’s administration that was highly skeptical of female scholars entering “advanced research spaces”.
No wonder then that, Anna Mani’s doctoral dissertation was rejected by the Madras University in 1945 – a rejection that perfectly illustrates how institutions were ‘careful enough’ to use administrative exclusionary rules and tactics to exclude women and other marginalised groups from such “advanced research spaces”.
Quite surprisingly, Anna Mani was one of those rare few women scholars in Physics, who had secured a competitive scholarship to conduct research at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science. In the period between 1940 and 1945, she had also published five original, peer-reviewed papers on the spectroscopy of diamonds and rubies. However, when she finally submitted her dissertation to Madras University, it was summarily rejected.
The examiners praised the high and original quality of her research, but… the university administration denied her the PhD! on a singular technical point – that, she did not possess a master’s degree.
Although her undergraduate performance was demonstrably sufficient to earn direct funding for graduate research, this bureaucratic technicality provided a convenient, “objective” mechanism and rule to deny the highest academic credential to a female scientist.
Quite interestingly, this rule was applied rather selectively; it was frequently bypassed or waived for male researchers with similar academic backgrounds.
By controlling who was awarded such prestigious titles, the university had – in the past - only reiterated that it retained the exclusive power to “dictate” who was recognised and who was “unrecognised” as a legitimate producer of knowledge.
In a way, then, this revelation paved the way for a revolution – that necessitated a radical reimagining of higher education in India.
And this is where the biography stands tall!
It has in fact, resuscitated the memory of such a great genius as Anna Mani back into the public domain!
The biography by Asha Gopinathan is aptly titled, Anna Mani: The Uncut Diamond, as she had worked in the Raman Lab on rubies and later on diamonds to study the optical properties including the Raman spectra of these materials in order to understand their properties.
A meticulously researched book of 315 pages, that gives such descriptive detailing on Anna Mani’s personal life, research and significant contributions. What’s more? The book also has the Fundamental Duties of Every Citizen of India printed in the closing page of the book!
A fitting closing statement!
To me personally, the book can be seen - not only as an insightful chronicle of the life of a pioneering Indian physicist and meteorologist, but also as a critical examination of how institutional power had been exercised in such esteemed institutions of learning, in the pretext of “academic gatekeeping”.
As such, the book can be seen as an invaluable documentation of the silences of the past, and the unseen labours of love that have been quietly sustaining scientific advancement in India across the ages.
In this regard, I am so happy to note that Asha Gopinathan has been bold enough in her biographical documentation of the life of Anna Mani, by highlighting the technical barriers that Anna Mani had faced because of the coercive gender structures, especially within C.V. Raman’s laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science in the early 1940s.
The rejection of her dissertation can hence be seen as an “institutional example” of how academic highhandedness (if I may use that phrase) selectively weaponised certain rules to carefully maintain the status quo and thereby quietly exclude marginalised voices in the process.
The biography foregrounds Anna’s approach to her work – which is a lovely inspiration of sorts.
Asha highlights a fascinating aspect of Anna’s daily routine. It seems, each morning before going to her office to engage in high-level theoretical meteorology, she used to spend her mornings in the workshops and laboratories alongside the technicians.
Science, in Anna’s practice, was never divorced from the physical act of creation. She built the instruments - like India’s first indigenous ozonesonde - that made her theoretical measurements possible.
This hands-on ethos directly challenges the traditional academic hierarchy that elevates abstract intellectualism over practical, mechanical execution. By honouring the laboratory assistants, the biography highlights how Mani naturally closed the gap between knowing and doing.
Moreover, Asha also traces Anna’s formative intellectual development to her time at Women’s Christian College (WCC) and Presidency College. It was at WCC, serving as a tutor after her honours degree, that she honed her commitment to laboratory work and practical building - a foundational period that shaped her entire trajectory as a scientist.
And for these insightful biographical anecdotes, Asha Gopinathan has spent an entire decade combing through rare letters, interviews, and institutional archives to construct this narrative.
I strongly recommend this biography as a must-read for anyone interested in how the subaltern and the marginalised figures navigate and subvert entrenched academic power structures to leave an indelible mark on their respective fields.
Giving below a few excerpts gleaned from the biography for us all –
Some years ago, I was coordinating a series of popular science workshops called Cafe Scientifique along with the Alliance Francaise de Thiruvananthapuram. One of these sessions in March 2015 was on Women in Science. During the question-and-answer session, I asked the young audience if they could name any woman in science. There was pin-drop silence. Then one hand shot up and said, Marie Curie.
I decided then and there to tell the story of Anna Mani and Janaki Ammal - two scientists who made their mark both nationally and internationally. They were both from Kerala. (During their childhood, the state of Kerala did not exist. It was Travancore, Kochi and Malabar. Anna’s family hailed from Travancore while Janaki Ammal’s from Malabar.)
This book is about Anna Mani, a physicist who was born in 1918 in Peermedu, Kerala, and died in 2001 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She went to school in Kerala and college in Madras. After that, she joined Sir C.V. Raman’s laboratory for her doctoral work.
Upon completion of her doctorate, she moved to the UK to specialise in meteorological instrumentation. She returned to India and had a very successful career in the India Meteorological Department (IMD). Even though she was very well known, very few outside her world of physics have heard of her.
Why is that so? Have we not been told stories about C.V. Raman, Vikram Sarabhai, Homi Jehangir Bhabha, J.C Bose, S.N. Bose, Meghnad Saha and S. Chandrasekhar among others?
In the Innovation Hub of the Kerala State Science and Technology Museum where I have done most of this writing, there is a wall with pictures of famous scientists. Obviously to provide inspiration. I see Stephen Hawkings, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, C.V. Raman, S. Chandrasekhar and Homi Bhabha among others and only one woman Marie Curie.
Is it then surprising that children have never heard the name of Anna Mani or any other Indian woman who has contributed significantly to the world of science and technology in India?
This book hopes to correct this misperception,
says Asha.
She also adds,
It is important here to mention the lack of archives for scientists. Barring some very important scientists, mostly men, India does not have a tradition of archiving. To date, there is no institution where a scientist can leave her notebooks, letters, diaries or photographs for posterity if she chooses to do so.
Thus, I consider myself very lucky that I was able to get hold of some material from the papers saved in Anna Mani’s flat in Bengaluru by her niece Anna Philipose and also at the RRI in Bengaluru. Anna Mani was a prolific letter writer and stayed in touch with all her friends and colleagues by letters, mostly hand-written. If I could lay my hand on more letters written by her to other colleagues and friends, this book would become more interesting.
I have paid attention to putting Anna Mani and her achievements in context of her family background, the times she grew up and the wider world in which she was an important player. The historian Patricia Fara writes:
When historians focus on famous individuals, they leave out many vital people who made science central to everyday life. Science’s intellectual class system rates the achievements of gentlemen far higher than those of artisans and women. What about the technicians and administrators who made instruments work, recorded observations, collected and prepared specimens, catalogued results, organised the laboratory?
In this book, a conscious effort has been made to meet and speak to the many people who made Anna Mani's work possible - from foundrymen, carpenters and office assistants to her devoted housekeeper, Yashoda Bai.
During Anna’s lifetime, many place names were changed to the Indian version. Poona became Pune, Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram and so on. I have used both names depending on the period she was living there.
Anna Mani was a trailblazer. She had almost no women role models. She had a few men who supported her either as teachers or colleagues. The rest was all her own brilliance, hard work and a certain measure of luck thrown in.
There is a quote attributed to Anna Mani, ‘You can but do your best.’
Well, Anna, I have tried,
signs off Asha.
The biography of Anna Mani bespeaks to the fact that, when we finally begin to archive the silences of our “institutional pasts”, who knows… we might stumble upon those very voices we had so badly needed to be our guiding lights for our future.
PS: So happy to note that, the Astronomical Society of India (ASI), has come up with a laudable initiative titled, the Anna Mani Gender Equity Lecture Series, to increase gender sensitisation and promote equity within the Indian astronomy and physics communities. It sports
The page also features prominent women in science, including renowned figures like astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and physicist Rohini Godbole.
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