The Indian clerk in American writer David Leavitt’s ambitious,
dense and expansive novel of the same name is the celebrated mathematician
Srinivasa Ramanujan. The
novel traces the last five years of Ramanujan’s life during which he
collaborated with the British mathematician G.H. Hardy—a body of work that
would ensure that Ramanujan would be remembered by posterity— before he died at
the age of thirty-two.
There are not many
fields in which it is possible to be a prodigy. Music is one; mathematics is
another; maybe chess. You never hear of a prodigy nurse, or a prodigy civil
servant. Ramanujan chose his field well. He would have struggled to become a
prodigy had he trained as a social worker. But he chose to be a mathematician;
rather mathematics chose him. He could no more have stayed away from playing
with numbers than he could have lived without breathing.
Born into a poor but
cultured Brahmin family to an overbearing and ambitious mother and ineffective
father in the present day Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Ramanujan was an
autodidact. He probably was also an idiot savant. Having little aptitude
for, and less interest in, subjects other than mathematics, Ramanujan
struggled through school, and did not achieve qualifications. Languishing in a
dead-end clerical job in what was, in the second decade of the twentieth
century, Madras, the self-taught maverick worked on mathematical formulae,
trying to find answers to unsolved riddles. He then proceeded to send his
intriguing theorems, unsupported by proofs—partly because he did not want to
give away too much lest the recipients pass off his discoveries as their own,
but also because, having received no formal training in the subject, he was
indifferent to the need of backing up his postulates –to a number of British
mathematicians. Most of them did not take the trouble to reply. Then Ramanujan
wrote to the Cambridge-based mathematician G.H. Hardy. Hardy—a forgotten name
these days, but, in the years before the First World War, one of the leading
mathematicians in England— detected, in the pages crammed with wild theorems
and quaintly ornate English, the extraordinary intellect that was at work.
After discussing with his Cambridge colleague Littlewood—the two were working
diligently on the number theory and felt Ramanujan’s genius would be of
valuable assistance—Hardy came to the conclusion that he had to get Ramanujan
to Trinity.
It is G.H. Hardy who
is the narrator of The Indian Clerk; he is the protagonist, not
Ramanujan. The story of Ramanujan, rather the five years he spent—years that
coincided with the First World War—in England, unfolds for the reader through
the eyes of Hardy. And it is not the story just of Ramanujan. Leavitt, through
his protagonist, provides an arresting description of the prevailing ambiance
at the Trinity around the time of the Great War. Hardy is a droll, temperate,
unaffected observer and chronicler of what goes around him. In an earlier,
non-fiction, account of Ramanujan’s life, The Man Who Knew Infinity,
Hardy is depicted as cold and aloof. Leavitt chooses to describe his fictional
Hardy as a man possessing—despite his outwardly sceptical and cold manner—of
great warmth and loyalty. He is not so much haughty and aloof as shy, reticent
and private. Indeed, as the novel progresses, you feel that you know Hardy a
lot better than Ramanujan. It is Hardy’s life—the experiences that shaped him,
his uneasy relationship with his mother and sister—that is described with great
depth and seems flavoursomely imagined. Leavitt makes full use of the poetic
license while exploring Hardy’s sexuality. G.H. Hardy of The Indian Clerk
is a practising homosexual, albeit closet. Leavitt describes with obvious relish
the private shenanigans of luminaries such as John Maynard Keynes and other
Cambridge homosexuals, outwardly wedded to the manners and etiquettes of the
Edwardian and Georgian England, and gently pokes fun at the two-faced approach
of the British society—at least of the privileged class— towards sexual mores.
However, the sexual life of Hardy, for whom Leavitt reserves a great deal of
affection, is laced with pathos. The fictional Hardy is haunted by the suicide
of his lover, Russell Gaye (a real life person, one of the many who appear in
the novel, who shot himself in 1909). Gaye is always on Hardy’s mind, and his
ghost frequently visits Hardy. It is a testimony to Leavitt’s great narrative
skill that the encounters between Hardy and Gaye’s ghost, which would have run
the risk of becoming overly theatrical and tawdry, instead, leave the reader
with a sense of deep sorrow and loss. The secret meetings of the Cambridge
fellows, who, in the great tradition of academic snobbery, belong to a
centuries-old secret club entitled the Apostles, are described with great
verve. Some of the characters peripheral to the story, such as the philosopher
and mathematician Bertrand Russell, Hardy’s colleague at Cambridge, are hilarious (and uproariously believable).
Since Ramanujan’s years in Cambridge were also the years when the Great War was
raging in Europe—Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge a few months before the
assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and returned to India a year after the
war ended—it was inconceivable that the war would not have an impact on the
intellectual world of Trinity. Russell was a pacifist; so was Hardy. The
difference between the two, if you believe Leavitt’s ‘fiction’, was: while
Russell was publicly mutinous about it and even contrived to get himself
expelled first from Trinity and then be sent to gaol for inflammatory
pamphleteering, Hardy kept his view to himself and quietly left Cambridge for
Oxford at the end of the war.
What about Ramanujan,
the Indian clerk fetched by Hardy from his Indian obscurity to the rarefied
corridors of Trinity? Ramanujan remains an enigma for the reader. When you
reach the end of the 477th
and the last page of the novel, you still do not think that you really know the
man. He is like the blurred outline of a face you glimpse outside your window
on a rainy day—you can just about make out the features but can’t see how the
blurred features go on to make the whole face. Ramanujan’s life in Cambridge is
recounted to the reader by Leavitt’s proxy, G.H. Hardy, the narrator. And
Hardy, perhaps in keeping with the reserve of the Englishman of his generation,
is either not curious about Ramanujan’s background or else thinks it is
impolite to inquire too much. Such information as is provided about Ramanujan’s
life in India is sketchy and remains encased in the stereotype of Ramanujan’s
puritanical Brahmin background. The five years of collaboration throw scarcely
brighter light on Ramanujan. Hardy scrupulously avoids getting to know
Ramanujan, no doubt following the sound English policy that it is better to
have cordial, if distant, relations with the ‘Hindu Calculator’ than trying to
get to know him really well and discover that they actually dislike each other.
And Ramanujan does not seem to do much in Trinity outside of his meetings with
Hardy and Littlewood: other than lamenting the lack of choices for vegetarians,
boiling rasam—a kind of spicy, vegetarian soup; he is ecstatic when he
receives tamarind, an essential ingredient for the rasam, apparently,
brought from India by an Indian student—, and goes to London from time to time
in the company of a couple of Indian friends to visit a woman who,
appropriately enough, has learnt to cook Indian-style. Hardy, the narrator,
seems to remember, every now and then, in the midst of his reminiscences about
Trinity, that there was this young Indian genius who lived there for five
years, and provides the reader with a snippet of, for all outward appearances,
banal incident involving Ramanujan: he (Hardy) might have seen Ramanujan on the
streets of Cambridge talking with other Indian students; or he might have
noticed Ramanujan coming in the opposite direction and the two might have waved
at each other. This is because, you suspect, Hardy, for the most part, remains
a slightly bemused onlooker with regard to Ramanujan’s life. He, an
ill-at-ease-atheist, is sceptical of Ramanujan’s claim that an Indian goddess
visits him in his dreams and reveals mathematical formulae. When Hardy arranges
for Ramanujan to come to Trinity, Ramanujan is initially reluctant—or says he
is reluctant—to cross the seas because he is not sure whether the Goddess would
deign to visit him if he were away from India. The matter is resolved after
Ramanujan spends an entire day in the Goddess’s temple and she visits him in
his dreams that night to assure that she would not desert him even if he
crosses the sea. Hardy’s response to the resolution of Ramanujan’s dilemma and
the manner in which it is resolved is: ‘very convenient’. Ramanujan’s ‘arranged
marriage’ to a nine-year-old girl (he was 21 at the time, although the girl
continued to live with her parents until she was 15) is dismissed as one of
those things Hindus do. When Ramanujan is in England, he is, insofar as Hardy
can make out, concerned—in the same way you would get concerned if caught short
with an unseasonal downpour—that his wife, Janki, does not write to him even
though he has been writing to her once a month. (Janki, who was 20 when
Ramanujan died in 1920, survived her famous husband by 74 years, leading a life
of quiet anonymity.) It is suggested,
later in the novel, that Janki and Ramnujan’s mother did not get on, and the
mother intercepted his letters to Janki. All of this is recounted without any
comment by the narrator who obviously considers himself ill equipped to fathom
a culture and religion that are alien to him and the intrigues of Indian
families. The result is: Ramanujan does not really come alive to the reader. He
comes up with complex mathematical formulae and theorems; he performs amazing
feats of mental arithmetic (earning the sobriquet ‘the Hindu Calculator’); he
boils rasam; and speaks in excessively formal and stultified English: he
eats, breathes and lives, but where is the life in him? When Alice Neville, the wife of Cambridge
mathematician, Eric Neville, who was tasked with the responsibility of bringing
Ramanujan to England and at whose house Ramanujan stayed for the first few
weeks after his arrival, develops a crush on Ramanujan (another occasion in the
novel, as acknowledged by the author at the end, where a poetic license is
taken; while Alice Neville did exist, there is no evidence that she fell in
love with Ramanujan), it is described entirely from the point of view of Alice;
the reader knows nothing of what Ramanujan feels about it. For the most part
Ramanujan is a passive recipient of whatever the fate dishes out to him. And
what the fate has in store for Ramanujan is not very nice. He becomes ill with
mysterious illness in his third year in Cambridge. Hardy arranges for him to be
seen by a number of specialists. No one can really reach to the bottom of what
is wrong with Ramanujan, although several diagnoses are bandied about.
Tuberculosis seems to find favour with most specialists although they all agree
that Ramanujan is showing none of the characteristic signs of the disease.
Nevertheless he is wheeled out to different sanatoria which seem to have in
common desolate atmosphere and esoteric medical practices. Hardy visits the
whippet thin Ramanujan in a particularly vicious sanatorium in Wales. Here, for
the only time in the novel, Hardy’s taciturn prose steps up to the task of
conveying the pathos of Ramanujan’s life; the only time Ramanujan—miserable and
depressed—comes alive.
The Indian Clerk is a slightly misleading title. The novel is
more about Hardy than about Ramanujan; and, when you finish reading the novel,
it is Hardy, and not Ramanujan, who lingers in your mind. I do not know whether
it is intentional. If it is, one wonders why. Maybe Leavitt was more at ease imagining
the world of Hardy, the atheist English mathematician (also a competent
writer), who, although from a different era, still came from a culture and held
beliefs that were Western. Either that, or Leavitt, during his extensive
research (catalogued at the end of the novel), realised that apart from his
prodigious mathematical gifts, there wasn’t a great deal of interest happening
in Ramanujan’s life. (I find this difficult to believe.) That Ramanujan left
little by way of personal memoirs probably did not help. However, you feel that
Leavitt made Hardy the protagonist of The Indian Clerk, rather
than Ramanujan who was the Indian clerk, because Leavitt, an American
writer in the 21st century, found the task of putting himself in the
mind of a late nineteenth century Indian almost too daunting.
The Indian Clerk is a work of great depth. Leavitt’s prose
achieves the seemingly impossible effect of appearing dense and lucid at the
same time. It is a beautifully written, wonderfully underplayed novel of great merit,
a worthy addition to what D.J. Taylor, in his review in the Guardian, described
as an increasingly popular genre of fiction involving real life historical
figures.
