The port of Madras carried more than 60 percent of the Madras Presidency’s imports and exports to Britain. Each year, twelve hundred ships called there, bringing in iron and steel, machinery, and railway equipment, and leaving with hides, piece goods, indigo, and raw cotton. Still, by early in the century, it was a troubled operation needing major changes. Placed in charge of the Port Trust in 1904, and as its chief engineer charged with overseeing those changes, was Sir Francis Spring.
A bald man with sleepy eyes, white mustache, and goatee, known in Madras as among the first in South India to own his own motorcar, Sir Francis was in his second career. Born in Ireland in 1849, a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, he had joined the India Government engineering service in 1870 and for more than thirty years had played a key role in the development of the South Indian Railways System, where he had, among other feats, spanned the Godavari River with a big railroad bridge. For these accomplishments, he had been named knight commander of the Indian Empire in 1911. Seven years before, he’d come to the Port Trust, and with him he’d brought S. Narayana Iyer.
Narayana Iyer was not an engineer by training; the British had set up Indian colleges to train bright clerks to administer the bureaucracy, not equip them to get along without European technical expertise. The son of a Brahmin priest, he held an M.A. from St. Joseph’s College, in Trichinopoly, where he’d stayed on to become a lecturer in mathematics. There he’d met Sir Francis. At the Port Trust, he was, as office manager and then as chief accountant, the highest-ranking Indian. Sir Francis relied on him heavily.
Narayana Iyer never succumbed to Western dress but wore the traditional dhoti and turban until his death in 1937; years later, his family would point to that as testimony to his personal strength. All during these years, winds of change from the West influenced even matters of dress. While some ridiculed Indians who adopted European trousers, coat, collared tie, and boots or shoes, more common was the attitude reflected in a Hindu editorial in the late 1890s: “There can be no doubt that boots and trousers with the European coat constitute the most convenient dress for moving about quickly. The oriental dress is suited to a life of leisure, indolence, and slow locomotion, whereas the Western costume indicates an active and self-confident life.” By the 1910s, educated, upwardly mobile Indians had gotten the message. In a formal photo taken at an Indian Mathematical Society conference in 1919, Ramachandra Rao, for example, wore Western garb, as did more than half the others. Narayana Iyer, also in the photo, sitting on the ground in the first row, in full turban and flowing robes, did not.
His family would tell of a scrupulously honest, restrained, and dignified man, not a little forbidding in aspect, who championed Indian independence—but quietly. Who, as the patriarch of a house where more than two dozen cousins, brothers, sisters, and assorted hangers-on depended on him, always helped those who came to him for money—but quietly. Who harbored a searchingly independent mind—behind outward behavior conforming in every respect to traditional Hinduism.
These two men, Sir Francis Spring and Narayana Iyer, were to play an important role in Ramanujan’s life over the coming years. But now, on March 1, 1912, three weeks after he’d applied for the job, Ramanujan knew only that he worked under them as a Class III, Grade IV clerk in the accounts section, earning thirty rupees per month.
• • •
During all this time, Janaki had been far from her husband’s side, shuttling back and forth between her parents in Rajendram and her mother-in-law’s house in Kumbakonam for “training” in the wifely arts. Now, late in 1912, past puberty and with Ramanujan in a steady job, the two finally became man and wife in something more than name.
Summer House in Triplicane was about three miles from Ramanujan’s new job at the offices of the Port Trust opposite the harbor complex north of Fort St. George. So a few months after starting the job, Ramanujan had moved much closer, joining his grandmother in a little house on Saiva Muthiah Mudali Street, off Broadway, in the district known as Georgetown. And it was there that, three years after their marriage, Janaki—along with Ramanujan’s mother, Komalatammal—joined him.
Until the visit to Madras in 1906 of the Prince of Wales, the future King George V, Georgetown was still Black Town, the original area set aside for the native, or “black,” population; the area within the Fort, set aside for Europeans, was White Town. Its teeming streets held a third of the city’s population on 9 percent of its land. Cows and bullocks, chickens and goats, roamed freely. In one street, metalworkers would squat in front of their tiny stalls, hammering out shapes, or tossing scraps of tin into little buckets to be melted. The next street would be clogged with bullocks, shouldering huge sacks of grain. Then streets of jewelry stalls, of textile shops, oilmongers, basketweavers, fruit and vegetable wholesalers … And everywhere, driving it all, was muscle power, black-haired men, shoeless and shirtless, clad only in their dhotis, ribs and muscles pushing out against glistening dark brown skin, straining as they pulled carts, or bent low under heavy loads upon their backs, or whipping their animals through the dusty streets.
On Saiva Muthiah Mudali Street, in the tiny house for which they paid three rupees per month, Ramanujan and his family were right on top of each other. Yet he and Janaki, not even a teenager yet, had little contact. They scarcely spoke. During the day, he might ask her to fetch him soap or an article of clothing. At nights, she’d recall, she mostly slept beside Komalatammal—at her mother-in-law’s insistence. They were never alone. If Komalatammal had to go to Kumbakonam, his grandmother, Rangammal, remained behind, monitoring their contact.
None of this was uncommon. Until she had children of her own, a new wife’s position in the family of her husband verged on that of a slave. She was there only to serve, to do her mother-in-law’s bidding.
Later, Ramachandra Rao would say he helped Ramanujan get “a sinecure post” at the Port Trust. And sinecure it was, though whether intended as such from the beginning or becoming that later is not clear. Still, even just putting in the hours made for a life more hectic than Ramanujan was used to. “I used to see him many times running to his office via the Beach Road,” recalled a friend from Summer House days, referring to the road that ran right up beside the Port Trust offices. “With his coat, tail and all, flying in the breeze, and his long hair coming undone, a bright namam [his trident-shaped caste mark] adorning his forehead, the young genius had no time to waste; he was always in a hurry.”
Janaki would later recall how before going to work in the morning he worked on mathematics; and how when he came home he worked on mathematics. Sometimes, he’d stay up till six the next morning, then sleep for two or three hours before heading in to work. At the office, his job probably included verifying accounts and establishing cash balances. At one point, some months after he started, he replaced another clerk, on leave for a month, as “pilotage fund clerk.” In any event, the work was hardly taxing, and soon he was being left alone to work on mathematics, being tolerated in this, if not explicitly encouraged, by both Narayana Iyer and Sir Francis.
Once, the story goes, a friend found him around the docks during working hours, prowling for packing paper on which to work calculations. Another time, Sir Francis called Narayana Iyer into his office. How, he demanded to know, sternly regarding his aide, had these pages of mathematical results gotten mixed into this important file? Was he, perhaps, using office time to dabble in mathematics? Narayana Iyer pleaded innocent, claimed the math wasn’t in his handwriting at all, that perhaps it was Ramanujan’s work. Sir Francis laughed. Of course it was Ramanujan’s work. He’d known as much all along.
Narayana Iyer, a member of the Mathematical Society and long its treasurer, was not just Ramanujan’s immediate superior, but his colleague. In the evenings, they would retire to the elder man’s house on Pycroft’s Road in Triplicane. There, they’d sit out on the porch upstairs overlooking the street, slates propped on their knees, sometimes until midnight, the interminable scraping of their slate-pencil
s often keeping others up. Sometimes, after they had gone to sleep, Ramanujan would wake and, in the feeble light of a hurricane lamp, record something that had come to him, he’d explain, in a dream.
Narayana Iyer was no mean mathematician. But in working with him he found that Ramanujan’s penchant for collapsing many steps into one left him as lost as a dazed Watson in the wake of a run of Sherlock Holmes logic. How, Narayana Iyer would ask, could he expect others to understand and accept him? “You must descend to my level of understanding and write at least ten steps between the two steps of yours.” What for? Ramanujan would ask. Wasn’t it obvious? No, Narayana Iyer would reply, it was not obvious. Patiently, he would persist, cajoling him, in the end sometimes getting him to expand a little on his thinking.
It wasn’t long before Narayana Iyer was not just a boss to Ramanujan, nor even just a colleague, but advisor, mentor, and friend. “Some people,” Janaki later recalled him saying, “look upon him [Ramanujan] as ordinary glass, but they will remain to see him soon to be a diamond.” He brought Sir Francis around to his view, too, making him Ramanujan’s champion as well.
And it was in coming to the attention of Sir Francis and to the web of contacts radiating out from him that, sometime around the middle of 1912, Ramanujan stepped into British India. He had grown up and lived almost his entire life with only the barest contact with the British. Now that was about to change.
6. THE BRITISH RAJ
West of the Madras Presidency, high in the Nilgiri Hills, was Ootacomund, known as “Ooty,” the Presidency’s summer home, where Englishmen and their families, more steeled to frigid winds blowing in off the North Sea than to the tropical heat, fled to escape the lowland summer. On the far side of the hills lay a narrow north-to-south strip of wet, rainy country, the Malabar coast, dense with tropical vegetation and rich with the pepper, nutmeg, and other spices that had drawn the eyes of Europe to India in the first place. In nearby Mysore, thick forests were home to exotic sandal and rosewood, and animals like the tiger and elephant that had so inflamed the English imagination.
A British presence in India went back to 1600, when the East India Company was formed. For two centuries Britain clashed with the French, Dutch, Portuguese, and others for control of the subcontinent and, in 1876, made India part of the empire. Now, in 1912, more than half a century had elapsed since the Sepoy Mutiny—Indian nationalists called it the First War of Independence—had last challenged British rule. The year before, King George had passed through the Gateway of India erected to his honor in Bombay, then traveled to the new capital, Delhi, to assume his throne. The very notion of India without Britain was, in the words of Lord Curzon, the viceroy, “treason to our trust.” Who could imagine that India, led by Gandhi and Nehru, would wrest independence from the Crown in 1947? And that the fair-skinned few now in power were presiding over the last days of the British Raj?
The marvel of British rule was that so few administered it. The Indian Civil Service, the legendary ICS, numbered barely a thousand men. It was India’s central nervous system, quietly controlling mechanical arms wielded by Indian clerks and British engineers, physicians, and police. The viceroy and the governors of Madras and the other presidencies were not ICS, but everyone else who mattered was. Evolving out of the East India Company’s staff of commercial agents, the ICS was in 1853 thrown open by competitive exam to Indians. But they never held more than a few dozen positions throughout the country. And their salaries were limited to two-thirds those of the British.
Only lexical accident links the ICS to the bureaucratic inefficiency and mediocrity today conjured up by “civil service.” In fact, the Indian Civil Service attracted many of Britain’s best. Its members were culled from the upper classes and intellectual elite. They were products of the finest public schools, graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. They had passed arduous examinations. In their spare time, they translated works from Sanskrit, deciphered temple inscriptions, wrote grammars, compiled dictionaries. They were men who, as one account later had it, “were fond of thinking of themselves as Plato’s ideal rulers.” Reared with patrician values, imbued with a sense of responsibility and public trust, they established a reputation for dedication and fair-mindedness.
But there was another side to them—an insufferable smugness, a towering sense of moral superiority. “The members of this service,” wrote a retired member of it about this time,
have generally shown the capacity which is awakened by responsibility in men of British race: with ample salaries they have hardly been tempted by dishonesty, and their detached impartiality has not been disturbed by the importunity of relations or friends. To the credit of their nation they have established and maintained a government, which, for its resources, is exceedingly efficient.
At the district level, the government representative was called a collector, and he wielded the power of a prince. But, as one late nineteenth-century account noted, “The collector and his English staff hardly ever know the vernacular. By the natives they are regarded with awe, not affection.” Observed another: “The collector is separated by an impassable gulf from the people of the country… . To the eyes of a native, the English official is an incomprehensible being, inaccessible, selfish, overbearing, irresistible.”
The central fact of the British presence in India, then, was distance. Prints and engravings today on view at Fort St. George in Madras show British life walled off from India, marked by a well-ordered calm reminiscent of nothing so much as an English garden. One view shows turbaned Indians surrounding a snake charmer, as an Englishman, attended by a native servant, looks on from the safe remove of a second-floor porch. In these scenes, natives work—bearing palanquins, or balancing loads atop their heads, or urging masula boats out into the angry surf. The English, invariably at their ease, stand shielded from the sun under an umbrella or, in top hat, lean languidly against a column.
An Englishman typically had his own washerman, who got four or five rupees a month, lived on his premises, and functioned as something like his private property. After long enough in India, the Englishman forgot how to so much as brush and fold his clothes. When he finally took the steamer home, he’d be taken aback as an English steward stooped to serve him tea. (Indeed, years later, asked as part of a survey what most struck them about England, students from former Asian and African colonies invariably mentioned the sight of white men doing manual labor.)
That there was an ineradicable split between Englishman and Indian the British themselves were eager to acknowledge. “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” wrote Kipling. Indians might work, even live with you in your bungalow, noted one old India hand, Herbert Compton; but in the end, “there is no assimilation between black and white. They are, and always must remain, races foreign to one another in sentiment, sympathies, feelings, and habits. Between you and a native friend there is a great gulf which no intimacy can bridge—the gulf of caste and custom. Amalgamation is utterly impossible in any but the most superficial sense, and affinity out of the question.”
It was this “great gulf” that, in the succeeding months and years, Ramanujan would, of necessity, confront. He had grown up during the reign of Queen Victoria. Coins in his pocket bore likenesses of the British sovereign; until 1902, they’d said VICTORIA EMPRESS, while after her death, they bore the profile of Edward VII, KING AND EMPEROR. In high school, Ramanujan’s scholastic prizes included an anthology of patriotic English verse, a collection of Lord Macaulay’s essays, and a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry—certainly nothing Indian. Later, while he attended Government College in Kumbakonam, the sixty thousand rupees that construction of a new student hostel required were raised in memory not of some Indian notable but of Queen Victoria.
Yet all this had left England for Ramanujan no more than symbol, image, and abstraction; English people he had scarcely known. Now, however, that was changing. His friend Narasimha had introduced him to E. B. Ross, of Madras Christian College. He had met E. W
. Middlemast of Presidency College and secured from him a recommendation. Now, at the Port Trust, he had met Sir Francis; soon he would meet Spring’s friends.
Whatever prejudices may have distorted the British view of Ramanujan did not likely extend to his intellect. Of the Indian, one English writer noted around this time, “he is cunning and contentious in argument, and his intellectual powers, when educated, are capable of considerable development… . In this respect, he puts the Englishman to shame, and were all posts in the Indian Government thrown open to examination in India, we should probably see the administration filled with Bengali Baboos and Mahratta Brahmins.”
But that’s as far as British esteem for the Indian temperament went. Herbert Compton, who had run a plantation for years, observed in a book published in 1904 that “whilst you can polish the Hindu intellect to a very high pitch, you cannot temper the Hindu character with those moral and manly qualities that are essential for the positions he seeks to fill.” A retired member of the Indian Civil Service, Sir Bampfylde Fuller, marveled at how Hindu boys could flock to classrooms and libraries, and pursue Western literature and science, yet unaccountably cling to … well, Indian ways. Indians, he said, were unduly sentimental, wildly inconsistent. “An Englishman is constantly disconcerted by the extraordinary contradictions which he observes between the words and the actions of an educated Indian, who seems untouched by inconsistencies which to him appear scandalous… . They give eager intellectual assent to [European] ideals, yet live their lives unchanged.”
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 13