| Leavitt stumbled across the story of the unlikely friendship between an Indian filing clerk and an Oxford don when he was researching a book on another mathematician, Turing. The writer spent several months doing his research, trying to understand how someone as "foreign" to the England of that era as Ramanujan would have been accepted and finally respected. |
| It shows in his novel, as Hardy finds the first of Ramanujan's letters on his desk: "And then ... lumbering and outsize and none too clean, like an immigrant just stepped off the boat after a very long third-class journey "" there is the letter... Nine dense pages of mathematics accompany the letter. Sitting down again, Hardy looks them over. At first glance, the complex array of numbers, letters, and symbols suggests a passing familiarity with, if not a fluency in, the language of his discipline. Yet how strangely the Indian uses that language! What he is reading, Hardy thinks, is the equivalent of English spoken by a foreigner who has taught the tongue to himself." |
| Reading the novel, I was conscious of feeling like an eavesdropper, as though Leavitt had shown me a different Ramanujan. "How cold and lonely he must have felt in England!" my teacher at school had exclaimed when she told us the story of the genius mathematician, and for years, my interest in him was coloured by an equal, if anxious, interest in his diet as a vegetarian in a then-predominantly carnivorous country. |
| Leavitt has a sense for the nuances of Ramanujan's India; he speaks in an interview of noticing how Indians in hotels often prefer to keep the doors of their rooms open, to create a communal rather than private space. But what he returns to the Indian reader, more than Kanigel did in his life of Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity, is the sense of how alien, how truly foreign a man like Ramanujan would have seemed in the England of those days. As I set down The Indian Clerk, I was thinking in marginally politically incorrect terms: why is it that some of the most interesting subjects and themes of Indian origin are written about more often by writers who are not, strictly speaking, from this country? |
| Before I expand this argument, a quick caveat: this is not to suggest that only Indian authors should be allowed to write about the great Orient, or conversely to berate Indian authors for not exploring the Oriental scene with greater zeal. |
| However, David Leavitt's novel aside, a dozen or so recently published works did make me wonder whether we're missing the bus as authors and publishers. I'll name just two recent books to make my point. John Zubrzycki's The Last Nizam came out of that reporter's long association with India, his deep knowledge of the country "" and his willingness to track Mukarram Jah from Hyderabad to the sheep stations of Australia to Turkey. This is not to take credit away from Zubrzycki, whose book I enjoyed considerably: but I'm surprised in retrospect that no Indian journalist or writer seems to have thought of doing a book on the last Nizam prior to Zubrzycki. |
| Both Chitrita Banerji's recently published Eating India and Lizzie Cunningham's earlier Curry were classic examples of books that turned on a simple, but irresistible, idea. Banerji's food odyssey seeks to introduce the cuisines of all of India, from Amritsar to Bangalore, to a Western audience familiar chiefly with Chicken Tikka Masala and naan. Cunningham's brilliantly researched book came about in part because she wanted to read a book on the history of curry, and couldn't find one "" so she wrote it herself. |
| Over the last few months, certain trends seemed to emerge. There are far more well-read Indians with impeccable academic credentials who want to write yet another book about Nehru, Gandhi, Partition, 1857 and Kashmir. There are relatively few who exhibit the same fascination for, say, the life of equally passionate but less well-known figures in the National Movement, or for smaller and less often written about historical events. Countless chefs and food experts want to write regional cookbooks "" some of them excellent projects and urgently needed "" but few are curious about, say, the history of a single spice, or a quirky look at food. I find it hard to find interesting, mainstream novels or non-fiction about the life of, say, the greatest miniature painter in Akbar's time, or that of a minor saint or soldier in Aurangzeb's time. |
| This is a broad generalisation, but it's as though as writers we stick to the broad highway that is visible before us, not exploring the interesting detours to right or left. Perhaps in the next decade, we'll finally take those blinkers off. The author is Chief Editor, EastWest and Westland Books. The views expressed here are personal |
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