Refused a doctorate on a technicality, she went on to build the instruments that measure India's weather.
In August 1945, Anna Mani submitted a doctoral thesis to the University of Madras. She had spent five years in C. V. Raman's laboratory in Bangalore, sometimes running a single experiment for fifteen to twenty hours, and had five research papers in print under her name alone. The university turned her down: she had an honours degree, but no master's. She never received a doctorate.
She sailed for England on a troop ship instead, on a government scholarship to learn a subject she had never studied: weather instruments. That detour shaped the rest of her life. Within five years of her return, India had stopped importing surface weather instruments altogether. Over the next three decades she went on to measure the country's sunlight, its ozone and its wind.
Eighty-two years, one instrument at a time
The lifeline
1918
Born 23 August at Peermade, in the hills of Travancore, seventh of eight children
1940
Wins a scholarship to the Indian Institute of Science and joins C. V. Raman's lab
1945
PhD refused for want of an M.Sc.; sails for England to train in weather instruments
1948
Joins the India Meteorological Department at Pune, in its instruments division
1964
Her Indian-built ozonesonde makes its first successful flight from Pune
2001
Dies 16 August in Thiruvananthapuram, a week short of 83
By the numbers
The measure of her
5
Single-author papers on diamond and ruby, 1942–45, before a PhD was refused her
~100
Weather instruments whose drawings her team standardised for Indian production
5 yrs
From her start at Pune until India stopped importing surface weather instruments
~150
Stations in her national wind-energy survey, grown from 21 in 1984–85
What she built and measured
The work
1942–45
The light of diamonds and rubies. Under Raman she studied how rubies and diamonds absorb light and fluoresce, work published in five papers under her name alone.
1948 on
Made in India. She started with a recording rain gauge, then hygrographs, thermographs, barographs and anemographs, nearly a hundred instruments in all. She wrote the specifications, drawings and manuals for each one.
1957–58
A network for sunlight. For the International Geophysical Year India opened four radiation stations with European instruments. She then designed pyrheliometers and pyranometers to be built in Pune, and by 1969 the network had 24 stations.
1962–64
Ozone overhead. She set out to build an Indian balloon-borne ozonesonde. After a run of failures it made its first successful sounding in September 1964. Indian sondes later flew on Antarctic expeditions from 1982 and recorded the ozone hole.
1969
To Delhi. She became Deputy Director General of Observatories for Instruments. She held the post until she retired in 1976, and she led WMO working groups on radiation instruments.
1980–92
Sun and wind as power.Handbook of Solar Radiation Data for India (1980), Solar Radiation over India (1981) and the four-volume Wind Energy Resource Survey in India guided where India built its wind farms.
Turned away, then remembered
Recognition
In her lifetime
Denied a PhD in 1945 despite five published papers; she never held a doctorate
Steered from physics into weather instruments by the scholarship she was offered
Her life's work was instruments and data: essential, but rarely what people celebrate
A stroke in 1994 left her immobile for her last seven years
Today
INSA's K. R. Ramanathan Medal, 1987
The World Meteorological Organization marked her centenary in 2018
A Google Doodle on 23 August 2022, her 104th birthday
Remembered as India's "Weather Woman"
From the hills to the instrument workshop
Peermade, Travancore
She was born into a Syrian Christian family in the Western Ghats of Travancore. Her father, an agnostic, built roads and bridges for the state, and her mother was a teacher. Holidays were spent on the family's cardamom estates, where she roamed the forests watching birds and animals. As a girl she was stirred by the Vaikom satyagraha, Travancore's struggle to open temple roads to all castes, and she took to wearing khadi. She never married.
7th
Of eight children: five boys and three girls
1924–25
The Vaikom satyagraha that turned her toward Gandhi and khadi
Pune
Where, from 1948, she made India's weather instruments
"We have only one life. First equip yourself for the job, make full use of your talents and then love and enjoy the work."
— Anna Mani, WMO Bulletin interview, 1991