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.
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 particularly identified him with his affiliation to the exotic land of Hindus. His advent in England was mythically majestic, and veni, vidi, vici! Ramanujan led a life of strict religious observance, up to his personal space. He continued with his vegetarian diet into the sanatorium of Matlock.
For him, his deity Namagiri uncovered secrets of mathematics. He pictured equations as thoughts of G o d. He went deep enough into spirituality to attribute human action, like in an electric streetcar, to ‘the current that flows in the overhead wires. That is the way maya works in this world.’ Hardy, his colleague, insisted that his religion was simply ‘a matter of observance and not of intellectual conviction’.Baron Snow chose not to trust Hardy’s insight in this. Hardy’s self-proclaimed ‘distaste for all forms of mysticism’ might have affected his view, but on the contrary, ‘Hardy’s deep reverence for mathematics… was precisely of the same kind as impels other people to the worship of God.’ To Dr. George Andrews, a special case ofmathematicians’ reacting to subconscious flashes of insight was Ramanujan’s attachment of that to his Hindu outlook.
The earliest extant mathematics of India is embedded intexts of architecture and rhythm, the Śulbasūtras and the Chandaḥśāstras, where principles of geometry and combinatorics are stated and utilized to make the perfect yajña altar and the exquisitely resonating hymn. Scholars like Baudhāyana and Piṅgala have stated the synopses of their deductions as Vedic truths. Following Alexandria’s fall, more original work had been produced here, of which the use of zero as a number apart from place value has taken up all prominence, but which also encompasses Brahmagupta’s extension of Euclid’s magnum opus and Bhāskara’s work on Diophantine number theory.
Dr. Cajori’s book, published by AMS Chelsea, calls it the phase of “the Hindus”. The UGC’s new undergrad syllabus emphasizes math ‘made in India’. Algebra, often misattributed to Arab compiler Khowarizmi’s Al Jebr, and Varāha Mihira’s development of trigonometry as a tool for astronomy flourished here before the medieval Dark Ages after the eclipse of Nalanda and Taxila. By the time Ramanujan was born, India was a subcontinent engulfed in ignorance and shadowed by colonialists. Ramanujan hailed from a corner distant in infrastructure and culture from the anglicized capitals of Bombay and Calcutta. Ramanujan, with all his familiarity of Sanskrit, could not have read the works of the Indian stalwarts, which had been pushed to obscurity.
As India had to re-learn math from a British framework, so did Ramanujan. With no formal training, he studied Carr’s textbook that listed just formulae, so never cared for rigorous deduction. His style of writing in notebooks that hide to date a mine of surprises, erasing any deduction on slate, is similar to the assertions of Vēdāṅga math, but in a manner adapted from perhaps the worst example of an English formula manual, not from sages to whom formulae were as important as their mystic interpretation. His inheritance of Hindu spirituality tuned into perfect harmony the non-academic faith and the secular math he had picked up from distinct sources. Tr uths, whether in mathematics or in the Upanishads, mattered equally to him.
In an age when the flood of wartime technological advances would motivate the acceleration of theoretical sciences, Ramanujan, like his advisor Hardy, remained faithful to pure mathematics not ‘useful’ in war or amenity, that Hardy was convinced did not make, ‘for good or ill, the least difference to’ the material world’. They both defied gracefully the peril of civilization during the world war and dedicated their efforts to the unadulterated pursuit of Truth, which to Hardy was, as to Keats, synonymous with beauty, and to Ramanujan stood for his religious integrity. Besides sourcing his math from Carr, Ramanujan willingly learnt the literary conventions of modern mathematics at Trinity. He kept his mysticism to himself; his cultural affiliation packed in his suitcase.
Hardly in a position to flaunt his nationalism, not being born in affluence that allows one to toss aside a job under the British, he never spoke against the British Raj nor indulged in politics. If he had made friends with Indian students like Mahalanobis in Cambridge, that was only because of shared roots and emotions. Yet, the Tamil man in European attire, with his hair tuft cut off and his tilak wiped off, to his Western peers seemed to personify the treasures of clouded India that Max Müller, Vivekananda and Tagore were revealing to them – perhaps more vividly than Gandhi in dhoti and chaddar.
(The writer is a research scholar in the Department of Mathematics, IIT, Bhilai.)