The Indian Clerk: A review

"Ramanujan says nothing. Instead he rests his head against the pillow and turns, once again, to look at the river. And Hardy wonders: from his starting place, from the pial at twilight, could he have traveled further."

The eponymous 'Indian Clerk' in Leavitt's novel is Ramanujan, but 'The Cambridge Don' would perhaps have been a more apt title for the book, as the book is much more about Hardy. Ramanujan remains a cipher throughout the book: his inner thoughts are never presented by the author. It is Hardy we get to know really well.

However, in another sense, The Indian Clerk is very much about Ramanujan, in showing how even the most brilliant among us are ultimately dependent on the systems and institutions that govern our lives. It takes the First World War to bring out the full capriciousness and cruelty of the British institutions. Hardy is careful not to make his pacifism too overt during the War, for fear of losing his fellowship. Many see him as a coward, and he watches Russell and Eric Neville lose their fellowships at Cambridge for their pacifism. Russell can afford to, but Neville is a lesser talent, mathematically and otherwise, and is soon forgotten. Their tragedy is of course nothing compared to the tragedy of the men dying at the front. Hardy befriends one of them, called Thayer, and has a short homosexual affair with him. However, he is always embarrassed by his sexuality, as well as Thayer's social class, and can never bring himself to treat Thayer as an equal. As someone from a family of schoolteachers who moved up by navigating the system, he does not have the same insouciance towards it as his peers Russell and Littlewood have. As Hardy muses as he watches his dying mother's ravings:

"She speaks of school. And why not? All her life she has spent in schools. Both she and his father. From Ramanujan's perspective, there must be little difference between him and Littlewood, him and Russell. All are children of affluence to him. And how can he be expected to recognize what separates Hardy from the others? For Littlewood comes from a Cambridge family; Russell is an aristocrat. Whereas Hardy is merely the child of teachers...Hardy is dependent on Trinity, just as his father was dependent on Cranleigh, his mother on the Training College, his sister on St. Catherine's. The only difference is one of prestige. Without the support of munificent institutions, all of them would be lost."

Of course no one knows the cruelty of institutions better than Ramanujan. Ramanujan's story is often told as one of 'genius will out', but that is a fallacy: essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ramanujan's genius for all practical purposes does not exist till he gets the seal of approval from Hardy, who in turn got his seal from Cambridge. No one sees it better than Ramanujan, who, even after building his reputation, wants the B.A. he was never granted by the education system in India. He hopes one of his papers will win him the Smith's Prize, a prize for undergraduates. This irritates Hardy, because Ramanujan's work is far above the prize. But the reality is that he doesn't have the Smith's Prize: he wants the prizes, else he is not a genius, not even to himself.

Hardy takes a long time to realize this. Their relationship for a long time is one of mutual incomprehension. Hardy has a strong perception of himself as an underdog. He identifies with other underdogs, he likes to 'save' them, the way he saved himself with his own brilliance. But his self-absorption, combined with an acute sense of his own status in the class hierarchy, does not make him a very good savior. It takes him a long time to understand Ramanujan's demons are much more severe than his own: his lack of formal achievements and medals, his difficulties and inadequate appreciation of formal proofs in mathematics, a sense of wasted years, his distance from his family, his constant sense of being an outsider, or even his Hinduism that forces him to a vegetarian diet difficult to maintain in wartime Britain. Ultimately Hardy and Ramanujan manage to form some sort of personal bond beyond the professional relationship they had, and Hardy helps him achieve a part of his hopes (against strong racist opposition from Trinity). But the war ends soon after, and Ramanujan wants to go back to India.

The novel is about a lot of other things besides Hardy's relationship with Ramanujan: the troubled life of John Littlewood, the Cambridge Apostles, Russell's activism during wartime, Hardy's atheism, his relationship with his sister, and a (probably fictitious) unrequited love Alice, Eric Neville's wife, has for Ramanujan. I was dissatisfied with his potrayal of Hardy's atheism: it seemed too formulaic. Also, Leavitt seems to make Hardy colder than he perhaps actually was. Anyone who has read 'A Mathematician's Apology' cannot help feeling a certain affection for Hardy's love of mathematics. This love does not come across in his potrayal by Leavitt.

But ultimately the book is not about mathematics. It is about a certain period in English life, when the political and social hypocrisies of the empire were unraveled by an inglorious war. It is also about how the systems and institutions of the time did not treat its greatest minds very differently from how they treated the callow youngsters sent to the front. In this aim it succeeds marvelously.

"And the amazing thing was that they never let him [Thayer] go. They would break him, and send him home for repair, and break him again. In much the same way, I realized later, we broke Ramanujan, and patched him together again, and broke him again, until we had squeezed all the use we could out of him. Until he could manage no more.

Only then did we let him go home."

The Path of Khan

"At the height of the British Empire, the chess loving Indian servant, Sultan Khan, arrived in the imperial capital as part of the feudal retinue of Sir Umar, his high caste master. While Sir Umar deliberated in the rarefied atmosphere of London conferences, with British panjandra, on the future of the Raj, his retainer started to take on the British élite at chess. Sweeping all before him, the Indian genius entered the international arena where, playing top board for the British Empire team, he defeated grandmasters, such as Rubinstein. Tartakower also succumbed to the Indian sage, and then came Sultan Khan's greatest triumph - a win against Capablanca. Then, as suddenly and mysteriously as he had arrived, Sultan Khan departed for India and was never heard from again - though rumours did emerge from Kashmir in 1951 that an Indian village chessplayer, when shown the games from the world title match of that year, had opined: 'these are two very weak players!'"

-R.N. Coles (The Best Games of Mir Sultan Khan (An Indian Mystic Challenges the West)

Anand's ascent reminded me of the strange and Ramanujanesque story of Mir Sultan Khan, for no reason really, except that he too was from the Subcontinent. Technically, I believe, Sultan Khan was India's first chess grandmaster (sorry, Vishy), though he died in Pakistan, and he was certainly the first Asian grandmaster.

Sultan Khan was a servant to Umer Hayat Khan, a minor raja from somewhere in Punjab. He is said to be illiterate (though there is some controversy regarding this), but his unique talent in chess was noticed by the raja, who brought him to England.

Sultan Khan won the British chess championship in 1929, 1932 and 1933, and also represented England at the Chess Olympiads all over Europe. His most famous game is the one in which he defeated Capablanca, perhaps the greatest chess player of this century.

But unlike Capablanca, whose only duty as 'ambassador-at-large' for Cuba was to play chess, Sultan Khan had a day job. It was in the service of Hayat Khan, thereby making the maharaja the only man in history to have the British chess champion serve him chicken biryani. Well, not the only. In the words of the American chess grandmaster Reuben Fine:

"When we were ushered in we were greeted by the maharajah with the remark, 'It is an honor for you to be here; ordinarily I converse only with my greyhounds.' Sultan Khan, our real entree to his presence, was treated as a servant and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on at table by a grandmaster."

It is not known what Sultan's feelings were about the situation. In fact, the most troubling aspect of telling his story is that his own perspective is entirely missing.

He was ranked world #6 in 1933, his game was improving daily, and even greater things seemed to be in store for him, when King Khan decided to move back to India, and took his server with him. The grandmaster disappeared from the world of chess.

The British had predictably romanticized Sultan in the meantime, and reporters kept searching for him decades after his disappearance. The British Chess Magazine reported in the 1950s that he now made a living as an opera singer in Durban, and was believed. Hell, a guy who could win the British chess title while waiting tables for a maharaja could certainly be an opera singer in South Africa.

The truth was in some ways more interesting. Sometime in the early 1960s, the chess writer R.N. Coles painstakingly traced Sultan Khan to his village in the Sargodha district of Punjab(Pakistan), where he found him sitting under a banyan tree smoking a hookah. Sultan challenged Coles to a game of blindfold chess, which the writer 'wisely declined'.

Sultan Khan is believed to have died in 1966, at the age of 61.

Sultan's most famous game, against Capablanca, described by Chessgames as The Wrath of Khan, is online. I was interested enough by Sultan to go through the game, and if you like chess, you won't regret it. It is clear that his victory against Capablanca was no fluke. Capablanca seems to dominate initially, but Sultan, by forcing a clever exchange of his queen with Capablanca's two rooks around the 20th move, kills off all his momentum. After that it is Sultan all the way, and Capablanca's solo queen keeps trying quite helplessly to break into Sultan's defences. Capablanca is so distracted by this that he lets Sultan create a passed pawn, and that proves to be his undoing.

Disclaimer: This is just my interpretation of the game between Sultan Khan and Capablanca. I am a very indifferent, and needless to say, amateur chess player, so I may be entirely wrong.

Sources:
1. wikipedia
2. The Edinburgh University Chess Club Website
3. Chessgames
4. classicalgames.com
5. chesshistory.com

One need not be a chamber to be haunted

He was an old, half-crazed peasant who begged for a living during the day and played funny tricks on his benefactors at night. Draping a white sheet on a ladder he would walk about with it, to the terror of the villagers. Sometimes he covered his face with soot and, peeping through windows, called out the occupants in a nasal voice. During the day he was a picture of humble obsequiousness. At night he transformed himself into a malicious imp- so clever that though many suspected him, no one ever caught him. When he lay dying he confessed everything and with his death the village was rid of its ghosts.

-Saratchandra(Srikanta*)

Class conflict with a supernatural twist. Clark Kent and Superman in rural Bengal: the possibilities are endless. I wish Saratchandra had pursued this story, but he lets it drop.

How did he pick him victims? Was his sadism random or did he have a method? Did he only torment those who tormented him, or did he pick up cudgels for others. I wonder if he planned his deathbed admission all his life, his only moment of glory and sweet revenge. If he had accidentally died without telling the village he was the ghost, he might actually have come back as a ghost to let them know.

*from Aruna Chakravarty's translation

Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain.

-Philip K. Dick (The Man Who Japed)

Really, when you think about it.

darkness at noon.

Started Koestler's Darkness at Noon yesterday evening. Yeah, its my old problem. Reading too many books together at the same time. But its interesting to read it side by side with Gorky Park. Both deal with the Soviet Union, but their heroes(or rather protagonists, as Rubashov, of Darkness, is not exactly heroic) cannot be more different. Arkady Renko is the man who refused to sell his soul. He is not burning with hatred for communism; he is probably too old and tired, and past all that. But he cannot take all that party and revolution and workers' paradise talk seriously. Its a farce to him. So he simply avoids anything to do with the party as far as possible, and sticks to his job as detective. That is a realistic potrayal of the closest one could come to dissidence in Soviet Russia.

Rubashov of Darkness at Noon is almost comical in comparison, with his faith in the future and how the Party will take the world to a new paradise.

When the novel starts he is locked up in a cell waiting for interrogation. He is finally caught in the net in one of the purges under No.1 (Stalin, I guess). So he broods intermittently over his past and over a toothache(Koestler very effectively uses the toothache as a symbol for his discomfort over things Rubashov did for the party in the past). And all through his brooding, he wonders about - and this is the theme of the book - whether the ends justify the means. This is supposedly the central problem in the book. But I think the way problems should be defined, it is a very badly defined problem.

For one, the ends, the way Rubashov describes them, are laughable. He believes that the revolution is 'with' the forces of history, and it will create a completely just society and a paradise on earth for the masses. Now, such ends- okay, this sounds a little too scientific- are not quantifiable at all! How do you measure the justness of a society? How do you know when you have reached a completely just one? Anyone who believes such ends is simply deluding himself, cos he himself will not know even if he has reached those ends. And even if he does, how will he prove it to others? Darkness is a good book if you want a peek into the mind of a failed Communist, but as a general book raising question of ends vs means, I think it fails.

To define a good 'ends vs means' problem, we need a situation where the ends can clearly be seen, be measured, to be good. Then we can think about the means. A science fiction work may define the problem more clearly.

Suppose you have a planet where people exist with two kinds of mutations. Some have one heart, some have two. Now, the people with one heart can live easily with one, but the people with two hearts, their bodies are used to twice the pumping since birth, can only survive if they have two hearts. Suppose a 100 people on this planet(all with one heart) are about to die of heart failure. Should you round up 50 2-hearted people (at random) and use their hearts for transplant, and save 50 lives on balance?

Ok, all that was a little creepy. But it attacks the means vs ends question with more clarity, cos at least you know the ends are measurably better. Not some vague workers' paradise in the future.

You can solve a tough problem, but what you can never solve is a badly defined problem. That is what I don't like about Darkness at Noon. It would have been fine if Koestler had stuck to depicting communism and why he hated it. But to set it up as an example where the means failed to justify the ends seemed taking it a little too far.

Gorky Park

Reading Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. Had tried to read it when I was at Rourkela...couldn't finish it. Well, I was a kid then; this time, I think I will. Its a little ho-hum as a murder mystery. First thing, you do not even know the identity of the three people who were killed(they are discovered in Gorky Park, their faces carved off, their digits chopped off, so there is no identity), so you can't hatch conspiracy theories of your own. Second Renko(the hero) is so convinced that the KGB did it(who else?) , that you believe him, and so there is no mystery at all!

But the description of life in the USSR is v v good. There is one scene I loved, where Renko is at a party, and the hosts show him their new washing machine, 'top of the line' - one they waited 10 months for, where they could have got another model in 3 months, cos they wanted the best. Then they try to give Renko a demo and the machine breaks down. They almost bring the machine to pieces trying to fix it, but no, it doesn't work. Then as good hosts they ask Renko not to tell Natasha, who just got a new piece for herself. Unfortunately Natasha finds a loose knob from the machine lying around, and so they have to confess that the washer 'isn't quite working'. Natsha is not bothered:

' "That's all right. We can still show it to people." She seemed genuinely content.'

Touche!

To sundays

Had a pleasantly slow start today. Got up and out of bed at 10:00am, went downtown for my weekly supplies- bean cans and the rest(my love of rajma is really standing me in v good stead here) , then just strolled into the Borders book shop. after a long time. An hour's window shopping there, which was good fun. Read through portions of 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'. Have to read that one from beginning to end sometime.

Slj is reading 'A bend in the river' by Naipaul. Was discussing Naipaul with her over the phone today, and I think I will go to the library today to get some of his books.

First time I tried to read Naipaul was at REC, and it did not work out too well. I just couldn't stand all the anti-India talk. I could stand it a lot better in Pune. He was a pleasant antidote to the sugary Darlymple. Read Darlymple and Naipaul on India, and you will think they are talking about entirely different countries. India is the elephant and these two guys are the blind men of the parable.

I am not surprised Darlymple is excited by India, because he is a historian, and that is something Naipaul definitely is not. He does not even try. He just gets off the bus, catalogues all the things that don't work, and takes the next bus to another new place. He has no patience for any sort of historical diagnosis of how things came to be that way. So if there is a chance things will change in the future, he never has a clue. That is why many of his 70s and 80s books on India seem so dated now. But still he is a good read, for his sharp eye and acerbic tongue, and his eye for flaws. I doubt he is ever happy with his wife's cooking. She must either be putting too much salt all the time, or too little.