[8] C. V. Subramanian was born on 11 August 1924 at Kochi in Ernakulam district, the commercial capital[9] of the south Indian state of Kerala, to T. D. Parvathi Ammal and C. M. Venkatachalier, a lawyer.
Before completing his master's degree (MA) in mycology in 1944, he prepared his first dissertation on Acanthus ilicifolius, a halophyte found in the saline waters of western coastal India.
Subsequently, he joined Toppur Seethapathy Sadasivan[note 1] as the first research student of the plant pathologist who also headed the Centre for Advanced Studies in Botany of the University of Madras during that time.
He received his doctoral degree (PhD) in 1948 for his thesis, Soil conditions and wilt diseases in plants with special reference to Fusarium vasinfectum Atk.
[11] During this period, he continued his researches and his published work, Floristic and taxonomic studies on Fungi Imperfecti, earned him the degree of DSc in 1957 from the University of Madras.
A year later, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute created a new Chair in Plant Pathology and invited Subramanian to hold the position which he did till his move to the University of Rajasthan in 1960.
[6] It was reported that Subramanian personally appealed to Indira Gandhi, the then Indian prime minister, to abandon the proposed hydro-electric project in the Silent Valley, a bio-reserve area in his home state of Kerala, eventually leading to its declaration as a national park in 1985.
He also proposed a new nomenclature protocol based on Sanskrit terminology;[11] MycoBank, an online repository managed by the International Mycological Association has listed 384 genera of fungi named by him and Angulimaya,[16] Dwayabeeja,[17] Kutilakesa, Nalalanthamala, and Tharoopama[18] are some of them.
[10] The scientific community honoured Subramanian for his work; Subramaniula, Subramanianospora, Subramaniomyces, Subramania, Ceeveesubramaniomyces, Civisubramaniana and Ascosubramania are seven species of fungi named after him.