Dispersed Radiance: Women Scientists in C.V. Raman's Laboratory

Dispersed Radiance Women Scientists in CV. Raman's Laboratory ABHA SUR I can neverforget the ivay he treated mejust because I was a woman. —Kamala Sohonie, Biochemist But you make too much o/my "equanimity," Sonya. It is simply my u>ay When I suffer notto utter a word —Jane Cooper, 'Threads: Rosa Luxumbergjrom Prison" I had barely introduced my project on writing a history ofwomen scientists in India to Professor Anna Mani, when one ofher colleagues at the Raman Research Institute came over to us. Mani, with a quizzical smile turned to her colleague and introduced me: "Meet Dr. Sur. She is from America and thinks I am history." I mumbled incoherent protests but to no avail. She continued questioning my gendered motivations and their American origins, thoroughly amused by my obvious discomfiture. "Why do you want to interview me? My being a woman had absolutely no bearing on what I chose to do with my life. What is this hoopla aboutwomen and science? Theywanted me to participate in one such session in Trieste as well. It must be getting difficult for women to do science these days. We had no such problems in our time" (Mani 1993). The disjunction between AnnaMani's perceptions ofwomen in science in India and the lived reality of the majority of Indian women could not have been more acute. In 1913, the year ofMani's birth, the literacy rate for women in India stood at less than 1 percent. The total number of women enrolled in colleges (that is, above grade ten) was less than one thousand (Louis 1986). By the time Mani went to college in the 1930s, things had improved only marginally and opportunities for women [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2001, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 95-127]©2001 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 95 to pursue science were few and far between. There was a consensus at that time that education for women should be tailored to their particular roles as mothers and homemakers.1 However, failures at the level of whole systems often have little or no bearing on selective successes. Statistical reality gives no indication ofthe experience ofthose who belie the probabilities. Mani, who had risen to the post of the assistant director general of India's meteorological society and, at the time I spoke with her, was running her own environmental enterprise after retirement, was being neither facetious nor ironic when she claimed thatwomen did not encounter many difficulties in pursuing science in her time. To be sure, Mani was notreferringto ordinarywomen, rather, her "we" happened to be a highly selective and privileged group ofwomen whose urban, upper-caste, and Western-educated families ensured their individual access to higher education .2 Even so, Mani's summary dismissal ofthe influence ofgender in science warrants greater scrutiny. It is, on the one hand, typical of the response ofsuccessful women scientists all over the world and, on the other, reflective ofher particular circumstances in the context ofIndian society. Following the lead offeminist critics ofscience in the West, one could attribute Mani's denial ofthe significance ofgender to an internalized acquiescence to dominant ideologies which emphasize the objectivity and neutrality ofscientific knowledge.3 However, through many extended conversations with Anna Mani, I came to realize that while she accepted implicitly the standard criterion for success in science and guarded zealously her hard-earned recognition , she was deeply aware ofand willing to discuss the pervasive butvery personalized gender discrimination women endured as scientists. She seemed implicitlyto differentiate between social relations in laboratories, which mimicked gender relations ofthe society at large, and the bureaucratic structures of scientific and technical institutions, which touted their "gender-blind" rules and regulations. Her "disavowal ofdifference" then could be read as simultaneously an assertion of equity with men insofar as evaluative structures in science were concerned and an expression ofidentification with Indian women in general who faced gender discrimination in many, ifnotall, aspects oftheirlives. In this respect, for women, doing science was not any more difficult than or qualitatively different from pursuing a career in literature or history. In this essay, through a collective history ofAnna Mani and her two women colleagues Lalitha Chandrasekhar and Sunanda...