Kamala Sohonie

Kamala Bhagvat was born on June 18, 1911, in Indore, then a princely state within British India. Chemistry ran in the family: her father, Narayanarao Bhagvat, and her uncle, Madhavrao Bhagvat, had both studied the subject at the Tata Institute in Bangalore, the campus that later became the Indian Institute of Science ^[1]. Growing up in a household where laboratory work was ordinary conversation, she decided early that she would follow the same path.

She enrolled at Bombay University and took her BSc in chemistry, with physics as a subsidiary subject, topping the university's merit list in 1933 ^[1]. For a male graduate, that result would have guaranteed a place at any research institution in the country. For a twenty-one-year-old woman in colonial India, it guaranteed nothing, as she was about to discover.

Any Kamala Sohonie biography has to reckon with what happened next, because the episode became one of the defining stories of women's entry into Indian science. She applied for a research fellowship at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Its director, the physicist and Nobel laureate C. V. Raman, turned her down on the stated ground that women were not competent for research ^[2].

Rather than accept the rejection, Bhagvat traveled to Bangalore and staged what she later described as a satyagraha, a peaceful protest in the Gandhian style, outside Raman's office ^[2]. She pressed him to justify excluding a candidate who had placed first in her university. Raman relented, but on humiliating terms: she would be admitted for a probationary year, would not be treated as a regular student, and would work under conditions he set. She accepted, judging that the door mattered more than the terms on which it opened ^[2].

At the institute she worked in the biochemistry laboratory under M. Sreenivasayya, a mentor she remembered with warmth, studying proteins in milk and in Indian pulses and legumes ^[1]. Her results were careful and productive, and by the end of the probationary year Raman had changed his position. From 1934 onward the Indian Institute of Science admitted women to its research programs, a shift that those who have written about the episode trace directly to her performance ^[3]. She completed her MSc through Bombay University in 1936 on the strength of this work ^[1].

The confrontation carried a cost she never minimized. In a speech late in life she recalled that even after Raman conceded her ability, the atmosphere of suspicion toward women in the laboratory persisted, and she resented that a Nobel laureate had behaved, in her words, so narrowly toward her ^[2].

In 1937 she won a scholarship for research at the University of Cambridge, a rare opportunity for any Indian scientist of the period and rarer still for a woman ^[1]. She initially worked in the laboratory of Derek Richter, and when he moved on she continued under Robin Hill, the plant biochemist known for his work on photosynthesis ^[3].

Her Cambridge research produced her most cited scientific finding. Working with potato tissue, she demonstrated the presence of cytochrome c, an electron-carrying enzyme central to cellular respiration, and showed that it occurred across plant cells rather than being confined to animal tissue ^[3]. The result fed into the rapidly growing understanding of biological oxidation in the late 1930s.

The doctorate itself became part of her legend. She completed the research in about fourteen months, and her thesis ran to roughly forty typewritten pages, unusually short for the genre ^[2]. When Cambridge awarded her the PhD in 1939, she became the first Indian woman to receive a doctorate in a scientific discipline, a milestone regularly cited in accounts of who was Kamala Sohonie and why she matters to the history of Indian science ^[1].

She returned to India in 1939 as war broke out in Europe, declining the chance to build a career abroad. Her first appointment was as head of the newly created biochemistry department at Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi ^[1]. She then served as assistant director of the Nutrition Research Laboratory at Coonoor in south India, where her research turned toward the practical question that occupied the rest of her career: what the poor of India actually ate, and what it did to their bodies ^[3].

In 1947 she married Madhav Sohonie, an actuary, and moved to Bombay. Two years later she joined the Royal Institute of Science as professor of biochemistry ^[1]. There she built a research group that analyzed the nutritional content of foods consumed by low-income Indian communities: pulses, paddy varieties, and other staples that Western nutrition science had largely ignored. Among Kamala Sohonie achievements from this period was her group's work on the trace nutrients in legumes and on foods eaten by some of the poorest groups in western India ^[3].

Her best known applied project began with a suggestion from Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, who asked whether science could say anything useful about neera, the sweet sap tapped from palm trees. Sohonie and her students showed that neera contained significant vitamin A, vitamin C, and iron, and that it kept these nutrients through processing into palm jaggery and molasses ^[2]. Feeding trials indicated that neera supplements improved the health of undernourished adolescents and pregnant women from tribal communities. The work earned her the Rashtrapati Award, a national honor presented for research of public value ^[2].

Sohonie rose to become director of the Royal Institute of Science in Bombay, among the first women to head a major scientific institution in India ^[1]. By her own account the appointment was delayed for years despite her seniority, and she attributed the delay to the same prejudice she had fought in Bangalore two decades earlier. She held the post until her retirement in 1969 ^[3].

Retirement did not end her public work. She became active in the consumer protection movement, joining the Consumer Guidance Society of India, the country's first consumer rights organization, where she wrote and lectured on food adulteration and food safety and served for a period as an office holder in the early 1980s ^[3]. Testing what sellers put into milk, oil, and grain was, for her, a natural extension of a lifetime spent analyzing what Indians ate.

Her death carried an almost scripted symmetry. On June 28, 1998, at the age of eighty-seven, she collapsed during a ceremony held in New Delhi by the Indian Council of Medical Research to honor her, and she died shortly afterward ^[2]. The scientific establishment that had once barred its doors to her was, at the moment of her death, in the act of celebrating her.

Sohonie's importance rests on two foundations. The first is institutional: her probationary year in Bangalore forced open the Indian Institute of Science to women, and generations of Indian women scientists have entered through the gap she made ^[3]. The second is scientific: her demonstration of cytochrome c in plant tissue was a genuine contribution to enzymology, and her nutrition research put rigorous data behind foods and populations that colonial-era science had overlooked ^[1].

Recognition has grown steadily since her death. The Indian Academy of Sciences included her among the women profiled in its 2008 volume Lilavati's Daughters, which helped fix her story in the standard history of Indian science ^[1]. On June 18, 2023, her 112th birthday, Google marked the occasion with a doodle seen across India, introducing basic Kamala Sohonie facts, her Cambridge doctorate, the Raman episode, the neera research, to an audience far beyond the scientific community ^[4].

She is now a fixture in Indian textbooks and lectures on women in science, cited alongside contemporaries such as Anna Mani and Asima Chatterjee as part of the first generation of Indian women who made research careers possible in the subcontinent ^[5]. Her advice to younger women, repeated in interviews and speeches, was blunt: excellence would be doubted, so it had to be undeniable.