A Nobel laureate barred her for being a woman. She became India’s first woman doctor of science.
In 1933, a Nobel laureate refused to let a woman into his institute. She had just finished at the top of her class.
Her name was Kamala Sohonie.
She came from a family of chemists, and she had beaten every man in her year to a degree in chemistry and physics from Bombay University. The natural next step was the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the finest research institution in the country. She applied to study biochemistry.
The director was C.V. Raman, one of the most celebrated scientists India had ever produced, a Nobel laureate for his work on the scattering of light. He turned her down. Not for her marks, which were the best on offer. For her sex. Raman held that women were not competent to do research, and he would not have one in his laboratory.
She did not accept it. She and her family pressed him, again and again, until he gave way. He admitted her as the first woman ever allowed into the Institute. He also made the terms a punishment.
She would spend her first year on probation. Her work would count only if and when Raman personally judged it good enough. And she was to do her research at night, so that her presence would not disturb the male students.
She took the terms, and she met them. In 1936 she submitted her research and took her master’s degree with distinction. Her work was good enough that Raman began admitting other women after her. It is one of the ironies of the record that his refusal is now remembered as the moment his institute was forced open, and that it was her persistence, not his judgment, that opened it.
In 1937 she won a scholarship to Cambridge. There, in a little over a year, she found that the cells of plants contain cytochrome c, an enzyme that sits at the center of how living things turn food into energy. It was a real discovery, and it earned her a doctorate in fourteen months. In 1939 she became the first Indian woman to hold a PhD in any scientific field.
She could have stayed abroad. She went home. At the Royal Institute of Science in Bombay she became the first scientist to work out the proteins in the pulses that feed the subcontinent, the lentils and beans that stand between millions of people and hunger. She developed Neera, a cheap supplement made from palm nectar that measurably improved the health of malnourished children and pregnant women, and she was given a national award for it.
She spent a career making food do more for people who had little. And she spent it having disproven, at every stage, the one thing a Nobel laureate had told her she could not do.
In 1998, at a ceremony held to honour her work, Kamala Sohonie collapsed and died.
C.V. Raman has a Nobel Prize and a physical effect that carry his name into every physics textbook. Sohonie had to work through the night for the right to be in the building. One of them was asked to prove himself. The other was told to disappear, and refused.
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