Ramanujan: in other worlds

The Indian Clerk By David Leavitt,
Bloomsbury, Rs 495

There is a beautiful symmetry in David Leavitt’s new novel. It is quite like the artistry of the graphs and proofs that make up the life’s work of the mathematical geniuses that are The Indian Clerk’s central characters. Set in Cambridge (specifically Trinity College) and London around the period of the First World War, The Indian Clerk takes off from the famous lecture series delivered at Harvard University in 1936 by the British mathematician and Cambridge don, G.H. Hardy. The book then travels back in time to describe the germination of his association with the untutored mathematical prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan. This is an association he refers to as “the one romantic incident in my life”.

The scope of the novel is vast — it is at once a provocative exploration of forbidden sexuality and a compelling enquiry into the manner in which we drive, and are driven by, faith and our belief in the unknowable. It is moreover a sensitive portrayal of the too-fallible humanity that underlies genius. “Zero and infinity. The things we can never know because they are unknowable and the things we can never know because there are too many of them... From this coupling a life is born”: this realization lies at the heart of The Indian Clerk, which captures a society in a state of “chronic war” and the lives of powerful intellectuals whose pacifism or contribution to the war effort has affected the course of history. Leavitt’s research is painstaking, and contains snippets of British history, ranging from Bertrand Russell’s furious anti-war campaign to even the creation of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh out of the image of a rescued bear cub at the London Zoo. Famous personalities such as John Maynard Keynes, D.H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein make cameo appearances as members of “The Apostles”, the Cambridge secret society of intellectuals whose “fey rituals” and “private language” of erotic thrill reflect the sexual confusion of its members. For the society’s great secret and its lie is: “most of these men will marry in the end”.

The narrative plays with different voices, each speaking through a silence that pervades the novel. The voice of Hardy tells Ramanujan’s story, while an omniscient narrator meanders through the novel, constructing the narratives of the other characters, while also putting words to Hardy’s thoughts in the form of the lecture he would have liked to give at Harvard. The entire novel is structured, in fact, on the lecture he did not give: a lecture where he might have revealed his vulnerability — his loneliness and guilt at having, as he feels, shirked responsibility for the people whose lives he helped shape. The omniscient narrator, writing in the third person present, purports to fill in the spaces left out by Hardy’s narrative and in doing so, gives the story an immediacy that allows readers to engage more intimately with the characters of the novel.

Ramanujan himself is the most disturbing ‘silence’ in The Indian Clerk. He is talked about, but his own responses are recorded only on very few occasions. Leavitt locates his separateness from British culture, expressed most notably in his strictly vegetarian diet (his horror on discovering that his glass of Ovaltine contained egg powder and the perceived pollution to his mother’s rigid brand of Brahminism, for example), his ill-fitting Western attire (especially the closed shoes that pinch his feet), and his decorous style of communication in English. The novel dwells also on his appropriation of British culture (his gradual settling into Western customs such as tucking into bed as opposed to sleeping on the floor, his enjoyment of the English musical) and on the people who encourage and help him in this practice. But there is a very conscious silencing of his voice that is juxtaposed with the constant desire of all the major characters to articulate Ramanujan’s five years spent in England. The trope of the romanticized East is used deliberately, to underline the prevalent notions toward the colonized ‘Other’. So Hardy admits to his knowledge of India being derived from a school pageant of the “Indian bazaar” — “a paste and coloured-paper facsimile of the exotic east”.

In his conception of Ramanujan, Leavitt makes no attempt to demystify the legend of the temperamental genius. Ramanujan remains elusive, unsolved, a sum total of the perceptions of the characters who come into contact with him. All of them, in their own way, try to ‘rescue’ him — from penury in his homeland, where his talent was unrecognized, or from an unfamiliar English culture and weather that thwarts his distinctive style of work and living. The Indian Clerk, then, is also a story of their combined guilt, in what they perceive (Hardy in particular) to be their inadvertent way of pushing him to his untimely death. The nature of his brilliance is also left undeveloped, solely attributed to the goddess Namagiri who apparently put astounding mathematical ideas into Ramanujan’s head while he slept. While it is interesting to see how religion and science conjoin in Ramanujan’s mathematics, surely there was more to his genius than divine inspiration?

There are more than a few typographical errors, and a serious factual blunder when the author refers to Dickens’s Miss Havisham from Great Expectations as Miss Haversham. The novel gets grounded in its lassitude in several places. Leavitt falls into the trap of having his extensive research get in the way of his fictional rendering. The most poignant moments of The Indian Clerk are those in which Leavitt chooses to free himself from the burden of historical accuracy. Hardy’s relationship with the young soldier, Thayer, is one such moment. It is subdued and sensitively narrated, his longing for the young man challenging his repressed homosexuality. His guilt plays out in the spectre of his lover, Russell Gaye, who reappears at points in the novel and acts as his conscience, admonishing him for the selfish pursuit of his ambitions at the cost of his relationships. But like the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis whose impenetrability binds Hardy to his Indian prodigy, it is the unspoken, the hinted at, that confounds yet entices the reader into the world of The Indian Clerk.