How it all added up
On the eve of Ramanujan’s 124th birth anniversary, Indulekha Aravind talks to the team that’s bringing him alive on screen.
I have set myself a task in these lectures which is genuinely difficult... to try to help you to form some sort of reasoned estimate of the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics; a man whose career seems full of paradoxes and contradictions, who defies almost all the canons by which we are accustomed to judge one another, and about whom all of us will probably agree in one judgement, that he was in some sense a very great mathematician.”
That was how Cambridge professor G H Hardy began his lecture on the Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan at Harvard in September 1936. Three-quarters of a century on, British director Roger Spottiswoode and American scriptwriter David Freeman have set themselves a somewhat similar task with their film on Ramanujan, A First Class Man, currently in the pre-production stage.
Ramanujan’s story by itself is captivating — in his brief life of 32 years (1887-1920), the impoverished mathematician from Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu with little formal training in maths went on to stun first Cambridge and then the world with his astounding mathematical theorems. It caught the attention of Freeman during his trip to India in 1987, when newspapers were full of articles commemorating Ramanujan’s birth centenary. His interest was raised but it was when he read about Hardy, the Trinity professor who recognised Ramanujan’s genius and brought him to Cambridge, and the relationship between the two, that he was truly drawn in. “They were two wildly different men: one a famous Cambridge mathematician, a veritable mandarin, and an atheist; the other, a relatively obscure but brilliant mathematician, who attributed his inspirations to his goddess,” says Freeman who’s now in Los Angeles. (Hardy was also a closet homosexual, a cricket fanatic and a handsome man who, strangely, could not abide his reflection.) A First Class Man, Freeman says, is not a biopic on Ramanujan but about the friendship he and Hardy shared, about faith versus reason, and the difficulties an outsider faces in a closed society — Ramanujan’s years in the unfamiliar world of Cambridge. Freeman began writing it as a novel but it became a play and finally evolved into a screenplay at the suggestion of friend and director Spottiswoode, who also came under the story’s spell.
“Ramanujan’s was a fascinating character, and the play’s script intrigued me,” says Spottiswoode, director of the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and critically-acclaimed films like And The Band Played On. “This is a film about a great character and about a friendship, and is a very Indian story.” For his research, Freeman relied on S R Ranganathan’s Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician and Ashis Nandy’s Alternative Sciences, among other books.
This will, surprisingly, be the first feature film about Ramanujan, though there were other efforts. Stepehen Fry and Dev Benegal had announced a biopic, while producer Ed Pressman had acquired the rights to Robert Kanigel’s definitive biography on Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. However, none of these projects made it to the screen. Another coup of sorts is Cambridge granting permission to shoot the exteriors of Trinity College, the first time the university is doing so for a feature film.
A First Class Man, though, is not a faithful rendition of Ramanujan’s life — one major deviation is the introduction of the fictional character Esme, a bohemian painter who falls in love with Ramanujan but who he ultimately rejects. But both Freeman and Spottiswoode feel she’s essential to the story.
Tamil actor Siddharth (of Rang De Basanti fame) will play Ramanujan after the director’s first choice, Aamir Khan, declined it. Spottiswoode is still finalising the rest of the main cast, and is trying to tie up the all-important finances (“always the most difficult part”). Shooting will happen over eight weeks next year and the film, he says, will be released in 2013. Spottiswoode is also in discussions to have versions made in Tamil and Hindi.