Anna Mani and India’s fog of doubt

New Delhi’s worsening air quality has once again pulled India’s pollution crisis into uncomfortable focus. Over the past week, a troubling gap has emerged between official readings and what residents can actually feel in their lungs.

Government monitors have shown the Air Quality Index hovering around 200 or as “Poor,” but improving. Independent sensors in neighbourhoods like Anand Vihar told a harsher truth, with levels shooting past 400 into “Severe” territory.

This disconnect between data and lived reality cuts deeper than a seasonal episode of smog. It reflects a growing national unease: of disputed claims, opposing narratives and lack of verifiable data. And at a moment when India is debating the credibility of its own environmental data, the National Book Trust has published a biography of a woman who dedicated her life to the uncompromising precision of measurement.

Asha Gopinathan’s Anna Mani: The Uncut Diamond reintroduces to Anna Modayil Mani, the Malayali physicist whose work quietly shaped the foundations of Indian meteorology. It is one of history’s subtle ironies that a nation now struggling to trust its air-quality numbers was once guided by a woman who insisted that accuracy was a moral duty.

Different Tune: Born in 1918 into a progressive Syrian Christian family in Peermedu, Kerala, Mani grew up in a household filled with books, curiosity and the understated resilience of girls who refuse to conform. She chose physics at a time when very few Indian women had the freedom or the encouragement to do so. But entering the world of Indian science in the mid-20th century meant stepping into a field governed almost entirely by men, and those men often carried assumptions that travelled unchallenged.

But Mani defied expectations. She studied at the Women’s Christian College in Madras and graduated in 1939 with honours in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. A brilliant student and voracious reader, she developed a fascination for instrumentation while working as a demonstrator at the college. 

When the young Malayali researcher walked into CV Raman’s laboratory at the Indian Institute of Science in 1940, she was met not with encouragement but with a dismissive remark: “You seem to know precious little about physics,” were the words from the Nobel Laureate himself.

Raman Effect: For Anna, this was neither the first nor the last time she would face condescension disguised as academic judgment. Raman – one of India’s greatest scientific icons and the first Asian Nobel laureate in physics – was a man of brilliance, discipline and pride. But he also believed, quite openly, that women lacked the intellectual stamina for advanced scientific work.

His grudging acceptance of female researchers came with conditions: rigid supervision, limited access, and an absence of the academic warmth extended to male colleagues. Female students were expected to stay invisible – neither mingling with men nor asserting too much presence in the lab.

Yet it was Mani who would eventually reshape India’s meteorological capabilities and build the scientific infrastructure that sustained the country for decades.

Despite the prejudices she faced, Mani’s research on the fluorescence of diamonds reflected astonishing rigour. Her thesis earned praise but not a doctorate. The rules shifted; the goalposts moved. Discrimination claimed not only opportunities but lives – as seen in the tragic story of her colleague Sunanda Bai, whose promising career crumbled under similar pressures. These experiences pushed Anna not towards defeat, but toward reinvention.

New Horizons: In 1945, she left for London to study meteorological instrumentation – a seemingly obscure field at the time, but one that held immense national importance. When she returned to India after Independence, she found a fledgling nation dependent almost entirely on imported weather instruments even though they lacked the capability to give accurate readings. The Indian Meteorological Department lacked capacity, equipment and confidence. Mani would change all three.

In Pune, she built better instruments and led a small workshop that transformed India’s atmospheric science from an import-dependent operation into a self-reliant enterprise. Within a few years, the team she trained was producing almost every essential surface instrument needed to measure temperature, pressure, wind and rainfall.

“IMD Pune had the unique distinction of being the only meteorological office in the world where any surface instrument could be designed, manufacturedand repaired,” writes Gopinathan.

By the early 1950s, her workshop was the only one in the world manufacturing such a complete suite of meteorological instruments under one roof. Her colleagues spoke of her late-night inspections, her relentless exactness and her refusal to overlook even the smallest calibration error.

Far and Wide: Her influence went far beyond equipment. She published on cloud physics, atmospheric electricity and solar radiation. When India prepared for the Indian Ocean Expedition, she headed the IMD team, yet she herself was forbidden from boarding the research vessel because she was a woman as per the Navy rules. 

Gopinathan’s biography reveals another overlooked chapter – her foundational role in setting up upper-air measurement systems for the early Indian space programme. Vikram Sarabhai relied on Mani to build the meteorological backbone for the nascent Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. The installation of the 60-metre (200-foot) tower for upper-air measurements, which Mani supervised and her contributions, remain largely absent from official space histories.

By the 1970s, she was measuring ozone long before global environmental policy took shape. At the Raman Research Institute, she helped develop India’s first millimetre-wave telescope for atmospheric studies. After retirement, she turned her exacting mind to renewable energy, mapping India’s solar and wind resources decades before such work became fashionable.

Lasting Legacy: She spent her last years in Trivandrum and died in 2001 – without a doctorate, without the institutional honours many lesser men received, and without the recognition she had earned as, arguably, the true Mother of Indian Meteorology.

Recovering her story is not merely an act of remembrance. It is a reminder of what scientific integrity looks like at a time when it is slipping from public trust. Delhi’s air-quality debate shows that India’s challenge is not only environmental; it is also a crisis of credibility. Whether institutions still have the courage to report inconvenient truths and whether the scientists can retain the trust of the public.

Mani’s life offers a clear answer. Science, she believed, begins with honesty and integrity is a core value of research. Instruments must measure reality, not aspirations. Institutions must serve the truth, not convenience.

We cannot clear the skies if we refuse to see them clearly. And few Indians understood that with more clarity or lived it with more conviction than Anna Mani who calibrated the nation’s winds with precision, and its conscience with even greater exactness.

[Additional inputs by Hari Kumar]

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