Finding Ramanujan

Number One

With the fast approaching birth anniversary (December 22) of mathematician Ramanujan comes frenetic activity, on celluloid, to film his life and times.

The first account of the mathematical genius was written by Hardy, an eminent mathematician himself, out of personal interest.

A spate of books have appeared since, from writers mainly from the West, who may have not known him or even had an inkling of the kind of life that the originally poor, superstitious and religious Brahmin from a remote village in Tamil Nadu once led.

An Indian librarian, Dr Ranganthan, famous father of Librarian Science, also went on the Ramanujan trail.

Ranganathan came from the same stock as Ramanujan, one which was steeped in Tamil Brahmin culture, a culture that  remained similar to the one Ramanujan had left behind.

In the making
In the quest of Ramanujan are three filmmakers. The most unlikely is Roger Spottiswoode, who made the Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. His take on
Ramanujan, titled A First Class Man, will have actor Siddharth Narayanan taking on the mathematician’s role, apparently because the actor is also a South Indian Tamilian. Siddharth can dance and romance well, as he has proven in the
super-hit Telegu film Bommarillu, but Ramanujan? A far cry.

Then, Edward Pressman and Mathew Brown will film one of the books on
Ramanujan — The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kunigal, an American
author.

The British actor, Stephen Fry, and Dev Benegal, British-based Indian director of English August fame, announced their film in 2006. I do sincerely hope Stephen Fry is not playing Ramanujan. It would be as comical as one portrayed by Siddharth. Perhaps, someone else is eyeing David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, another book on Ramanujan.

I can imagine so many pitfalls in these valiant efforts. To fix Ramanujan visually, one has to be adept with the South Indian world of late 19th and early 20th century, which was extremely traditional, deep dyed culture of interior Tamil Nadu, where he lived in extreme poverty.

He practically lived on weekly charity meals from different households. That fact itself is beyond the reach of many biographical writers’ imagination, and even that of filmmakers. The task is so daunting that even writing an authentic account of his life is elusive, now that practically everyone known to him are long gone. Ramanujan lived for only 32 years, mostly in obscurity, and came into spotlight in the last five years of his life.

Biographicals
Only two of them did know or meet his original ‘biographer’, G H Hardy, the great mathematician who recognised Ramanujan’s genius and convinced him to come to England. While one was Dr Ranganathan and the other was C P Snow, Hardy’s biographer.

If it were not for Ranganathan, the life of Ramanujan would have been lost in the darkness of anonymity. He picked on every trail and talked to everyone who had
anything to do with Ramanujan, even a classmate who had seen him picking pieces of paper near the Madras Harbour, as he needed them for his mathematical work.

Ranganathan met about 60 such persons and recorded their statements faithfully.
While poring through the archives at Madras University, he came across a
mention of a frayed notebook that once belonged to Ramanujan, a notebook that had been lost in England.

In 1925, arriving in England, Ranganathan went in search of the notebook. The search took him to King’s College, Oxford, where Hardy had shifted from Cambridge. Hardy produced the frayed book and is supposed to have reportedly said to Ranganathan, “Ramanujan belongs to your country. The proper place for this is your library.”

Variations
It is most interesting to contrast the attitude of a biographer like Ranganathan, steeped in the Indian traditions, with that of C P Snow, Hardy’s biographer, who was based out of England. The only source of information for C P Snow was Hardy, while Ranganathan, living in Madras, was able to meticulously record every trivia of
Ramanujan’s life by meeting those who knew him and visiting places where he had been in his short life.

The key note of Ranganathan’s approach is humility, reverence and deep affection. Barring the affection of a kind, the other attributes are absent in the approach of Snow towards Hardy.

This is understandable to a certain extent because Snow was a friend of Hardy’s for some years. Hardy also remained a nagging influence on Snow’s life. From the time Snow became famous with Rede lectures (The Two Cultures) of 1959, there has been a reference to Hardy in every one of his writings. His monumental work (Strangers and Brothers in 11 volumes) is a meticulous bacon and egg narration of the Cambridge academic life of Lewis Eliot, who bares a certain resemblance to Hardy, according to Snow. Otherwise, Snow differed greatly from Hardy.

Snow, however, did recognise that the association between Hardy and Ramanujan was a strangely touching one. Hardy was the product of the best education that England could offer. Ramanujan had struggled all his life to educate himself. Hardy had even said that if he had been better educated, he would have been less of  a Ramanujan.

One would rather believe Hardy who, in his biography, says with touching candour, “I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people — ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’ It is to them that I owe an unusually late maturity.”.

Now, contrast this with the attempts being made to place the erstwhile life of a great, little, meek, God-fearing, traditional genius in the four-cornered frame of a film! Can anything be more absurd?