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Kamala Sohonie's story is often told in one line: the woman who made C.V. Raman change his mind. The full story is better, and more useful to a science student, because it is about what she did once she got in. This post sticks to what the records show, including one popular claim that does not hold up.
Why was she refused at IISc?
The most detailed account is The Life and Times of Kamala Bhagvat Sohonie by Anirban Mitra, published in the Indian Academy of Sciences journal Resonance in April 2016 (DOI). Mitra records that Kamala Bhagvat was born in Bombay on 18 June 1911. Her father and uncle had studied chemistry at the institute in Bangalore that became the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). She topped the BSc (physics and chemistry) examination of Bombay University and applied to IISc, as family tradition suggested.
The director, C.V. Raman, rejected her. Mitra writes that she protested by sitting outside his office until he agreed to admit her, on three conditions: she would be on probation for a year, she would work late under her guide's supervision, and she must not be "a distraction" to male colleagues. She accepted, and joined in 1933-34.
Years later she said of Raman, in words Mitra quotes from earlier accounts: "Though Raman was a great scientist, he was very narrow-minded. I can never forget the way he treated me just because I was a woman."
What did she study at IISc?
Under her mentor M. Sreenivasaya she studied proteins in milk, legumes and pulses. Her first paper, The non-protein nitrogen of pulses (with Sreenivasaya), appeared in the Biochemical Journal in April 1935. By 1936, Mitra counts, she had five research articles. He adds that Raman did not again keep women out of the institute, and his own laboratory soon took women students. Our post on C.V. Raman and light scattering covers his science.
What did she find at Cambridge?
In 1937 she went to Cambridge. After work with Derek Richter on amine oxidases, she joined Robin Hill's group. With Hill she published Cytochrome oxidase in flowering plants in Nature in April 1939. Cytochrome oxidase is the enzyme at the end of the respiratory chain that passes electrons to oxygen. Mitra quotes the paper's conclusion that it "now proves the presence of a true cytochrome oxidase in the higher plants and a respiratory mechanism identical with that found in yeast and animals".
Her PhD thesis described the cytochrome system and its role in the respiration of plant cells. Mitra notes it was only 40 pages long, and that she became the first Indian woman to receive a doctorate from Cambridge.
You will also see her called "the first Indian woman to earn a PhD in science". Mitra's own wording is narrower: the first Indian woman to receive a Cambridge doctorate. When two sources differ, use the narrower claim the evidence supports.
How did she use biochemistry for India?
She returned in 1939. At the Nutrition Research Laboratory in Coonoor her group developed chemical and microbiological methods to measure vitamins such as C, B1 (thiamin) and nicotinic acid in foods. After her marriage to Madhav Sohonie in 1947 she joined the biochemistry department of the Royal Institute of Science, Bombay. There her group studied trypsin inhibitors in beans and potato, including crystalline trypsin inhibitors from potato reported in Nature in 1955, and the nutrient content of foods such as Bombay fish and double beans.
At the suggestion of President Rajendra Prasad, Mitra writes, she studied Neera, the palm nectar drink, showing that it contained vitamin C and compounds that protected vitamins during storage, and she promoted it as a cheap supplement for poor families. She received the Rashtrapati Award and became director of the institute. After retiring in 1969 she worked with the Consumer Guidance Society of India on testing food quality, and wrote science books in Marathi.
What can a student take from her way of working?
Answer doubt with work. Her reply to Raman was a set of published papers, not an argument.
Measure carefully. Much of her career went into reliable methods for measuring nutrients. Good measurement is unglamorous and essential.
Pick problems that matter where you live. Pulses, fish, Neera: she studied what Indians actually ate.
Check the popular version. The cytochrome claim shows how a story drifts when people copy each other instead of reading the paper.
If enzymes and respiration feel abstract, our guide to respiration in plants covers the electron transport chain where cytochrome oxidase works. The Fermi Concept Library has every concept in biology and chemistry with its own lesson, so you can look up one idea, like oxidative phosphorylation, and return to your chapter.
Tonight, draw the electron transport chain from memory and mark where cytochrome oxidase sits.
