Most people have not heard of Srinivasa Ramanujan. In India, however, and among mathematicians, his is a legendary name. Even those who cannot grasp a line of his mathematics are beguiled by his life - an East-West story of rags to intellectual riches.
Ramanujan was an impoverished, devout Brahmin clerk from Madras, self-taught in mathematics, who claimed to be inspired by a Hindu goddess. In desperation he sent some of his theorems to G.H. Hardy, an English mathematician and confirmed atheist.
So transcendently original were the formulae that Hardy yanked Ramanujan from obscurity to Trinity College, Cambridge, collaborated with him, and proved that he was a mathematical genius. In 1918, Ramanujan was elected the first Indian Fellow of the Royal Society.
But, having fallen mysteriously ill and attempted suicide, he returned to India to recuperate, still producing major theorems on his sickbed. He died tragically at the age of 32.
On his birth centenary in 1987, Channel 4 showed a fine documentary, Letters from an Indian Clerk. In the 1990s came an influential biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel, and in 2007, a stage play about Ramanujan, A Disappearing Number, was a sell-out. Now, after the success of the film A Beautiful Mind, three separate movies about him have been announced. One is based on Kanigel’s novel, while another - adapted by Stephen Fry, who became interested in Ramanujan as a Cambridge undergraduate - is based on David Leavitt’s imaginative new novel, The Indian Clerk.
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Leavitt, an American professor of literature and novelist, has done detailed research on Ramanujan, Hardy, the world of Edwardian Cambridge, homosexuality, the intellectual society known as the Apostles, Bertrand Russell’s pacifism and the home front in the First World War. He generally respects historical fact, but admits that he has invented important chunks of plot from the scantiest of evidence, or even none at all.
For example, it is known that Hardy - whose fictional confessions form the spine of the novel - was homosexual. But there were no obviously homoerotic elements in his relationship with Ramanujan, and no definite evidence (nor even much gossip) exists to prove that Hardy was sexually active - unlike other members of the Apostles, such as John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.
Nonetheless, Leavitt harps throughout on Hardy’s sexuality, inventing a subplot in which he seduces a wounded soldier, and a far-fetched encounter with a handsome London policeman who humiliates Hardy for being “queer”.
The result is a book that is not convincing overall, but is never less than engaging and intelligent. The mathematics is unobtrusively integrated and the effects of war on Cambridge and London atmospherically evoked. But Leavitt has insufficient feel for crucial nuances of the imperial relationship - he is no E.M. Forster and lacks Kanigel’s affection for south Indian culture.
How close was the real-life Hardy (who never visited India) to Ramanujan, beyond their driving obsession with mathematics? Could Hardy’s well-known reserve, verging on indifference to others, have contributed to Ramanujan’s fatal illness?
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Judging from Hardy’s real-life letters and writings, which reveal his ignorance of Ramanujan’s home culture, the two were certainly not intimate. Leavitt seems to accept this when he writes of Hardy at the very end: “He was too old to believe any longer that he had touched more than a fragment of that vast, infernal mind.” Yet within the novel he has Hardy dwell implausibly on the mores of Ramanujan’s caste-bound mother and child wife in India.
The Indian Clerk begins with a lucid quotation about immortality from Hardy’s classic book A Mathematician’s Apology, hailed by Graham Greene as “the best account of what it is like to be a creative artist”. But its fictional Hardy goes on to speak in a very different voice.
The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt
Bloomsbury, £16.99