The Indian Clerk and the Trinity Man
SPEAKING VOLUMES
| The "Indian clerk" was Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the hundred theorems he attached with this unprepossessing letter caught the attention of G H Hardy, considered one of the finest British mathematicians of his day. Ramanujan had no qualifications and no formal training in mathematics, but Hardy recognised the stamp of a brilliant mind and invited the clerk to study under him at Cambridge. Their partnership would result in discoveries and insights that would provide rich fodder for future mathematicians, but it was abruptly cut short when Ramanujan died in England at the age of 32. |
| David Leavitt's novel, The Indian Clerk, is not the first book to be written for the general reader on Ramanujan, but it offers perhaps the most unsettling perspective. It's bound to be compared to Thomas Kanigel's pathbreaking 1991 The Man Who Knew Infinity, but the two books are very different. |
| Kanigel researched his subject and South India with such thoroughness that he was able to shift his vision, to see Trinity through Ramanujan's eyes as an "exotic" place. From his first paragraph, he made it clear that his focus was on Ramanujan: "He heard it all his life "" the slow, measured thwap...thwap...thwap... of wet clothes being pounded clean on rocks jutting up from the waters of the Cauvery River. ... Later, back in India, fevered, sick and close to death, he would hear that rhythmic slapping sound once again." |
| Leavitt's approach is different, with the focus on Hardy from the first paragraph onwards. In an interview with The Elegant Variation, Leavitt said, "I wanted Ramanujan to exist for the reader much as he existed for the men and women he encountered upon his arrival in Cambridge: as an enigma, an emissary from a mysterious and alien world." The letter Hardy receives in January 1913 is "lumbering and outsize and none too clean, like an immigrant just stepped off the boat after a very long third-class journey". Later, examining the envelope, Hardy notices that it has left "a curious smell on his fingers, of soot and what he thinks might be curry". |
| This is how we will see Ramanujan in Leavitt's reimagining of his life in Cambridge "" at a remove, through the eyes of strangers as he struggles to make sense of English beds, English weather, English food, English clothes. Kanigel's interest lay in Ramanujan's life, in solving the puzzle of whether the mathematician was religiously devout or not, in presenting the beauty of his numbers and the grandeur of the Riemann Hypothesis. |
| Leavitt's interest is in Hardy, and Trinity, and the larger world of England. The war will take over their lives, and affect Ramanujan's ability to obtain the fresh vegetables he needs, hastening his death. Cambridge will go through upheaval as the philosopher Bertrand Russell instigates controversy. Failed relationships litter the lives of Hardy, a closet homosexual, and his friends; the Cambridge circle of risque, bright young men he sometimes joins seems far removed from his austere, dry relationship with Ramanujan. |
| For an Indian reader, the distance Leavitt maintains from Ramanujan has two consequences. The first is that The Indian Clerk remains chiefly Hardy's story, and this may upset those who expect it to be Ramanujan's story. The second, and more interesting consequence, is that Leavitt's approach makes it easier to see Ramanujan as an outsider whose needs, emotional and physical, baffle those who would willingly have helped him had they known what he wanted. The rasam he makes for himself and the dals and curries he painstakingly cooks are peculiar, odd-smelling messes to Hardy and other English friends. His inability to stand the English winter is inexplicable to those who have lived in England all their lives. If Leavitt had chosen to show us Ramanujan's struggles from the young mathematician's point of view, it would not have been as poignant as it is now. |
| Did Ramanujan die of tuberculosis or of lead poisoning, or was his death a much simpler matter? He needed to be out of his element, away from the circumscribed life of an Indian clerk, in order to live as a mathematician, and yet it was being out of his element that killed him. In this finely crafted, intelligent novel, Leavitt lets us see what a distance there was between the man who knew infinity and the men who knew him. Disclaimer: The author is chief editor, Westland and EastWest Books; the views expressed here are her private opinion |