Ramanujan’s troubled nationalism |
The same year as Asia’s first Nobel, an FA dropout clerk of the Madras Port Trust gathered courage to write to Prof. G. H. Hardy, who led the mathematical establishment of Britain in his era, with a small sample of his mathematical results backed by no institutional credibility or proof. What followed in the next few years was a collaborative hurricane of unbelievable findings, scribbling of ideas that would take more than a century to realize, and international scientific limelight straight on the face of an ‘enigma like the Hindu Ramanujanwho arrives unexpectedly out of nowhere’.
Shockingly, apart from academic circles locally, contemporary nationalists remained oblivious to the existence and the untimely death of perhaps the most brilliant Indian brain of the 20th century. The year Ramanujan died was that of the Khilafat and Non-cooperation movements. No prominent leader in British India bothered to pay homage to the man of international acclaim as the second Indian F.R.S., the first Indian Fellow of Trinity, and arguably he most productive Indian mathematician ever, all in 32 years of life. Witnesses saw in Ramanujan ‘the immemorial wisdom of the East’. No mortal could comprehend the mind map to his striking insights.
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Almost always right, he could do more math in his head than most of his peers could on paper – and by math here, I do not mean just numerical manipulations, but analysis of structures abstract and vast. For Bruce Berndt ‘still covered by a curtain that has barely been drawn’, to E. T. Bell his artistry was ‘all but supernatural’. Bell........