The Un-Disappeared Orientalist Gaze
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 30 Aug 2010
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service
It is no wonder that Complicité’s A Disappearing Number, a play loosely based on Hardy’s admiration for Ramanujan, has won several awards in the West and continues to run to packed houses in the West End of London. It was recently brought to Mumbai and Hyderabad through the good offices of the British Council and Prithvi Theatre. Its excellent stagecraft provides a magical evening during which the mysteries of life and death intertwine with the mysteries of mathematics, the queen of sciences, made even more heady with dashes of bharatanatyam, a glimpse into the incomprehensible beliefs of a strict South-Indian Brahmin, and videography of old Madras, while flight numbers and telephone numbers reel relentlessly in the background.
Ramanujan’s life was enclosed within the theory of numbers, not only loved by pure mathematicians for its sheer beauty, as believed by Hardy, who lived within the privileged cloisters of Cambridge, but as the recently-held International Congress of Mathematicians proclaimed in Hyderabad, it is intimately involved in several practical applications, and even in elucidating the very nature of the Universe. It was quite in the fitness of things, therefore, that the assembled mathematicians of the world should view this post-modern theatrical reprise of the un-understood tragic life of a genius, lost as soon as it was found.
And yet, the light shone on Ramanujan continues to strengthen the Orientalist two-hundred year old Western engagement with India, worshipping its presumed mystic qualities, which the modern ‘man’ can never fully comprehend, just as he cannot comprehend infinity, while the disconnect between the Enlightenment-produced culture of the West and the ancient pagan world of India is re-emphasized by odd bits of dance, music, and chanting thrown in for good effect. Incidentally, it is this awe-filled but distanced view of the East which the West persists in maintaining that in a practical sense fills the coffers of diverse god-men who provide therapy with magic.
The theatrical production’s own magic will continue to work in the West, but no popular peep into this man’s life, whether on the stage or within the covers of a book, raises questions of immediate interest to Indians. We are in the midst of demanding that Education should be a fundamental Right, and yet this genius was a self-taught man, and his memory raises the urgent question whether received colonial schooling helps or extinguishes creativity in young minds. No biography of his adequately explores how any chance of marital happiness he ever had was destroyed by his obsessively possessive mother, an authoritarian remnant of Indian cultural life that bedevils families even today, sometimes leading to the extremes of dowry deaths or domestic violence on young brides. The largest unexplored question is the crippling impact of poverty on Ramanujan’s life, a reminder of mythic grandeur that the continued neglect of the masses of India is a crime against its people and against its Creator. Ramanujan’s attempt at suicide in England should not be trivialized as another incomprehensible act of a mystic Hindu but seen clearly as the result of the deep alienation he felt there as a colonial – a social distancing which sometimes produces today the astonishing phenomena of homegrown terrorists on Western soil.
Ramanujan has left us not only many mathematical conjectures to be solved, but vital social questions which the world in its willful ignorance refuses to view.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Aug 2010.
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