The Man Who Knew Infinity, released recently, is not the first film to be made on Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and it will probably not be the last. The man has been the subject of endless fascination in India and abroad, not merely for his advanced skill in the subject but also for the brief success he enjoyed during his lifetime, a success that would not have been possible without the painstaking support of British mathematician G H Hardy.
Most accounts of Ramanujan's life focus on his partnership with Hardy. Few, if any, look beyond the professional contours of their relationship, especially the fact of Hardy's homosexuality and what role it might have played in the duo's association. In his 2007 novel, The Indian Clerk, American writer David Leavitt imagined the Hardy-Ramanujan partnership from the mentor's viewpoint and did not shy away from exploring its homoerotic subtext.
The Indian Clerk begins on that fateful day in 1913, when Hardy received a letter from Ramanujan chock-full of obscure equations and inexplicable formulas. At the time Hardy had been collaborating with John Edensor Littlewood on the Riemann Hypothesis. Ramanujan's letter shows that he had derived without assistance what the greatest mathematicians of Cambridge were working on using the zeta function.
Hardy invites Ramanujan to Cambridge and so begins an exciting chapter in the Indian's life that will, however, end in tragedy. Within months of returning to India in 1919, Ramanujan will succumb to tuberculosis. For most of the first half of The Indian Clerk, he comes across as a primordial ape bumped into an unknown culture. Weighed down by the demands of his religion that prohibited consumption of meat, he faces myriad troubles in adjusting to life in England, not least of which is the frigid climate.
He is desperate for recognition, going so far as to seek a B.A. in math at Trinity, when his talent far supersedes any such qualification. He is temperamental and has issues with women, from whom he expects a sort of benevolent servitude, which when disrupted, has him erupt in flashes of morbid anger. His declining health exacerbates his terrible loneliness - one might even say his heterosexual loneliness - which Hardy fails to glean.
The real achievement of The Indian Clerk lies in its imagining of Hardy's ruminations. Like Gustav von Aschenbach's doomed love for a teenage boy in Death in Venice, Hardy's feelings for Ramanujan aren't straightforward. He is slyly expectant of Ramanujan's impending death.
As Andrew O'Hehir expatiates in his incisive essay "Just how gay is 'Death in Venice'?" in Salon, "Aschenbach almost seems convinced he has created the boy himself, out of "austere and pure will". Perhaps he has. Here and elsewhere, Tadzio is described as a piece of classical statuary, a mythical or godlike figure who is pale and translucent, indeed almost dead. (At two different points Aschenbach imagines that Tadzio will not live long, which he finds a satisfying, even pleasant notion.)
Hardy too is possessive of Ramanujan and nearly insouciant about his ill health: "While he continued to refer to the impending trip [to India] as 'a visit,' I think I knew, even then, that he was going to die." Yet, there is a crucial difference between The Indian Clerk and Thomas Mann's novella. It is Hardy, the lover, who survives here, while the object of affection succumbs.
The book is interspersed with Hardy's lecture at Harvard in 1936 - the one he did not give, as Leavitt reminds us too often - "all the while writing equations on the board and disquisiting, with his voice, on hypergeometric series." Initially, the lectures give off homoerotic longings and heartache, but later, they make interesting reading on the First World War; how it affected England, and especially Cambridge. Even so, one such account develops into an erotic fantasy, of a wounded Hardy being tended to by handsome doctors on the battlefield. "Somehow I dreamed, even gloried in, the possibility of my own death," he says.
This quest for death (albeit erotically handled) is of a piece with the other major theme of the novel, Hardy's intense grief over the death of his Cambridge colleague and lover, R K Gaye. By turns benevolent and merciless, Gaye, a phantom charge of pure emotion, rides roughshod over Hardy's imitation of a life.
Ramanujan's approaching death, Gaye's undead spirit, the scene on the battlefield - all these point to a fascination for annihilation. Hardy's solitariness is an outcome of his being gay. He is nearly thankful for the abnormality because it suits his temperament; in fact, the absence of sexual attraction for the opposite sex has relieved him of the conventional constructs of marriage and domesticity. Death then - ritualistic, metaphorical death - is presented as a more welcoming proposition than life.
An assured triumph, The Indian Clerk presents an alternative, but no less fascinating, reading of a partnership that, in its sheer impossibility and wide-ranging scope, continues to provide fodder to storytellers.
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