After completing her master’s, Thankam had planned to become a lecturer in Kerala so she could live close to her mother. But when she did the math, she realized even a lecturer’s salary wouldn’t be enough to cover her own living expenses with enough left over to send to her family. The entire point of completing these two degrees had been to help her family live a better life. Meanwhile Balakrishnan was still very keen that his genius sister re-apply to BARC and move to Bombay for work. Thankam agreed to reapply and this time her mother (realizing that the best opportunities were not in Kerala) didn’t stop her.
In 1961, Thankam cleared the BARC entrance exam with flying colours and became part of the very first generation of female scientists in India. STEM was an almost entirely male-dominated field back then; women’s enrolment in engineering in India was near zero in 1950 and only increased in the 1980s, reaching 10 per cent by the end of the century. The 1960s, is categorized as an era of very early, single-digit, representation for women in the sciences. For example, when Sudha Murthy enrolled in the B.V.B. College of Engineering in the late 1960s, she was the only girl in a class of almost 600 boys.
Thankam is truly a trailblazer for joining BARC as a nuclear physicist in the early ’60s. While it was possible to start working directly at BARC, the best applicants were put through a rigorous year-long training programme. They had to give weekly exams and these marks were the basis of their final appointment. After a year of being a trainee, Thankam joined the institute as a Scientific Officer (SC) in 1962. She had finally done the unthinkable, become a scientist and made her family proud. But perhaps more importantly, she had broken a class barrier and could now support her family financially.
However, moving to Bombay and living away from her family was a big adjustment for the young woman. Bala was residing in a lodge for men so for the first three months, she lived in a girls’ hostel with a roommate. The other inhabitants of the hostel were mostly young, working women who wanted the lights out by 9 p.m. because they woke up early for their jobs. Thankam, meanwhile, needed to study for the BARC training exams at night so her roommate suggested that she take her books to the common living room where she could keep the lights on as long as she needed to. Thankam found her kind but internally, she was miserable. The hostel served meat and Thankam was a strict vegetarian, so she had trouble eating the food that was provided for her.
‘Life in a big metro was far from easy because I was coming from a rural village in Kerala,’ Thankam explained. ‘I couldn’t even speak English properly, so I bought a dictionary to learn English – I still have that copy with me after all these years. I used to cling to my brother’s hand when we crossed the wide roads which were full of big, honking vehicles. Walking around in chappals was a task because I was used to being barefoot at home. I remember thinking: why on earth have I paid for chappals just to struggle to walk while wearing them?’
Thankam’s mother was so concerned about her well-being that she sent Bhagirathi to Mumbai to live with her two children and help them settle into a new city. Bala rented a flat in an industrial worker’s quarter in Ghatkopar because that was the only accommodation they could afford and the three of them began living together. Their aunt looked after the home while Thankam and her brother were at work. The BARC campus in Trombay had a bus service for their employees so her commute was taken care of.
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A woman in science
Despite the rough beginnings in Bombay, Thankam’s career was off to a great start. BARC had three experimental reactors called Apsara, CIRUS and ZERLINA and Thankam worked with ZERLINA – a Zero Energy Reactor used for lattice investigation and new assemblies. She would conduct experiments and her results were used to create power reactor builders. Thankam mainly worked with thermal reactors where the neutrons given out are very energetic and their speed has to be brought down using a moderator like heavy water (D2O). There was a tank into which fuel materials were inserted to a certain geometry and then it was filled with the moderator. Then scientists like Thankam studied the reactions through monitors and tried to ascertain the optimum configuration needed for that particular reactor.
Thankam started out in her career as a Scientific Officer SC in 1962 and then rose through the ranks to become Scientific Officer SD, SE and then SF. She worked at BARC for thirty-one years and had she stayed longer she would have reached the highest rank of SG but she took voluntary retirement six years early in 1993.
‘Today, you see women making progress in the workplace and getting the opportunities that they deserve,’ she notes. ‘But back when I worked as a scientist, women were looked down on by men and considered less smart. I was the only lady in a division of twenty-three people and I was treated differently because I was a woman. I remember once I had a meeting with a senior officer in another division and my male colleague was accompanying me. After the meeting ended, we went back to our desks but my male colleague came up to me and asked me not to accompany him next time because that senior officer didn’t like me attending the meetings. Even with regards to promotions, you’d get one after a certain number of years but if you had friends in the office, you could find out what the assessment meeting would be like and prep beforehand. The guys coached one another to do well and they always had an edge, but I never even knew these sorts of things existed. Only later I realized what was going on. Despite all the progress, even today, how many women do you see as CEOs or Senior management? We have a long way to go.’
This excerpt from ‘Bullet Nani’ by Jasreen Mayal Khanna has been published with permission from Pan Macmillan India.