The Man Who Knew Infinity Read online

  All his life, for festivals, or devotions, or just to pass the time, with his family or by himself, Ramanujan came to the temple. He’d grown up virtually in its shadow. Stepping out of his little house, he had but to turn his head to see, at the head of the street, close enough that he could make out the larger figures, the great gopuram. Indeed, the very street on which he lived bore the temple’s name. It was Sarangapani Sannidhi Street; sannidhi meant entrance or procession way.

  There was no special premium on silence within the temple; it was natural for Ramanujan to strike up conversations there. But the prevailing feeling was that of quiet and calm, a stone oasis of serenity, while outside all India clamored with boisterous life.

  Here, to the sheltered columned coolness, Ramanujan would come. Here, away from the family, protected from the high hot sun outside, he would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day, his notebook, with its pages of mathematical scrawl, tucked beneath his arm, the stone slabs of the floor around him blanketed with equations inscribed in chalk.

  More than a dozen major temples studded the town and nearby villages, some devoted to Lord Siva, some to Lord Vishnu. Each had its prominent gopurams, its columned halls, its dark inner sanctums, its tanks, or large, ritual purifying pools. The town fairly exuded spirituality. That once every twelve years the great Mahammakham tank received water from the Ganges—from which geography books showed it hopelessly remote—was, in Kumbakonam, a truth stated not with apology to secular sensibilities, or qualifiers like “tradition has it,” or “according to legend,” but simply, baldly, as fact.

  It was a world in which the spiritual, the mystical, and the metaphysical weren’t consigned to the fringes of life, but lay near its center. Ramanujan had but to step outside his house, wander along the street, or loll about the temple, to find someone eager to listen to a monologue on the traits of this or that deity, or the mystic qualities of the number 7, or man’s duties as set forth in the Bhagavad-Gita.

  Not that practical matters were dismissed in the high-caste Brahmin world in which Ramanujan grew up; money, comfort, and security had their place. But so did Vishnu and his incarnations, and what they meant, and how they might be propitiated, and upcoming festivals, and the proper form for devotions. These were not mere distractions or diversions from the business of everyday life. They were integral to it, as central to most South Indians as afternoon tea and cricket were to upper-class Englishmen, or free enterprise and their automobiles to Americans.

  Years later, after he was dead, some of his Western friends who thought they knew him would say that Ramanujan was not really religious, that his mind was indistinguishable from any brilliant Westerner’s, that he was a Hindu only by mechanical observance, or for form’s sake alone.

  They were wrong.

  All the years he was growing up, he lived the life of a traditional Hindu Brahmin. He wore the kutumi, the topknot. His forehead was shaved. He was rigidly vegetarian. He frequented local temples. He participated in ceremonies and rituals at home. He traveled all over South India for pilgrimages. He regularly invoked the name of his family deity, the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal, and based his actions on what he took to be her wishes. He attributed to the gods his ability to navigate through the shoals of mathematical texts written in foreign languages. He could recite from the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other Hindu scriptures. He had a penchant for interpreting dreams, a taste for occult phenomena, and a mystical bent upon which his Indian friends unfailingly commented.

  Once a year during the years he was growing up in Kumbakonam, he would set out along the road heading east past the railroad station. Outside of town, the mud houses with their thatched roofs hugging the side of the road thinned out. He could see bullocks tied to stakes beside the road, goats wandering in and out of houses, little roadside shrines, trails leading off the road and into the flat, green countryside. About four miles from Kumbakonam, he’d reach a broad looping curve in the road where the town of Thirunageswaram began, and where the ancient Uppiliapan Koil temple stood. Here Ramanujan came every year, at the time of the full moon, in the month of Sravana (around August) to renew his sacred thread.

  When he was five years old, participating in a time-honored ceremony of fire and chanting that typically lasted four days, Ramanujan had been invested with the sacred thread—three intertwined strands of cotton thread draped across the bare chest, from the left shoulder diagonally down to the right hip, like a bandolier. The upanayanam ceremony solemnized his “twice-born” status as a Brahmin; the first birth, said the ancient lawgiver Manu, is from the mother, the second from the taking of the sacred thread. Thenceforth, he could read the sacred Vedas and perform the rites of his caste. And each year during Sravanam, midst food offerings and sacred fires and worship, he renewed it in the company of other Brahmins at the Uppiliapan temple.

  One time, a friend recalled later, he and Ramanujan walked through the moonlight the six miles to the nearby town of Nachiarkovil, site of a Vishnu temple, to witness a religious festival. All the while, Ramanujan recited passages from the Vedas and the Shastras, ancient Sanskrit tomes, and gave running commentaries on their meaning.

  Another time, when he was twenty-one, he showed up at the house of a teacher, got drawn into conversation, and soon was expatiating on the ties he saw between God, zero, and infinity—keeping everyone spellbound till two in the morning. It was that way often for Ramanujan. Losing himself in philosophical and mystical monologues, he’d make bizarre, fanciful leaps of the imagination that his friends did not understand but found fascinating anyway. So absorbed would they become that later all they could recall was the penetrating set of his eyes.

  “Immensely devout,” R. Radhakrishna Iyer, a classmate of his, would later term him. “A true mystic … intensely religious,” recalled R. Srinivasan, a former professor of mathematics. Toward the end of his life, influenced by the West, Ramanujan may have edged toward more secular, narrowly rational values. But that came much later. And growing up midst the dense and ubiquitous spirituality of South India, he could scarcely have come away untouched by it—even if only in rebellion.

  Ramanujan never did rebel. He did not deny the unseen realm of spirit, nor even hold it at arm’s length; rather, he embraced it. His was not a life set in tension with the South India from which he came, but rather one resonating to its rhythms.

  • • •

  South India was a world apart. All across India’s northern plains, the centuries had brought invasion, war, turmoil, and change. Around 1500 B.C. light-skinned Aryans swept in through mountain passes from the north. For eight centuries, Buddhism competed with traditional Brahminism, before at last being overpowered by it. Beginning in the tenth century, it was the Muslims who invaded, ultimately establishing their own Moghul Empire. One empire gave way to another, the races mingled, religions competed, men fought.

  And yet by all this, the South remained largely untouched, safe behind its shield of mountains, rivers, and miles.

  North of what would become the modern city of Bombay, stretching across the western edge of the subcontinent at roughly the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, loomed the Vindhya mountains, a broken chain of rugged hills rising as high as three thousand feet and reaching inland almost seven hundred miles. At their base lay further obstacles to movement south into the tapering Indian peninsula—the Narbada and Tapti rivers, flowing west into the Arabian Sea, and the Mahanadi River, flowing into the Bay of Bengal on the east. These, together with sheer distance, exhausted most invaders before they reached very far south.

  Thus, spared both the fury of the North and the fresh cultural winds forever sweeping through it, the South remained a place unto itself, remarkably “pure.” No part of India was more homogenous. Racially, the South was populated mostly by indigenous Dravidian peoples with black, often curly hair, broad noses, and skin almost as dark as native Africans; even the Brahmins, thought to be derived from Aryan stock, were not so light-skinned as those seen up North. L
inguistically, North and South were divided, too. Tamil and the other Dravidian languages bore few ties to Hindi and the other Sanskrit-based languages of the North. Religiously, the South was more purely Hindu than any other part of India; nine in ten of those in Ramanujan’s Tanjore District, for example, were Hindu, only about 5 percent Muslim. So special and distinct was the South in the minds of its inhabitants that in writing overseas they were apt to make “South India” part of the return address. On the political map, no such place existed; yet it expressed a profound cultural truth.

  In South India an undiluted spirituality had had a chance to blossom. If the North was like Europe during the Enlightenment, the South was, religiously, still rooted in the Middle Ages. If Bombay was known for commerce, and Calcutta for politics, Madras was the most singlemindedly religious. It was a place where there was less, as it were, to distract you—just rice fields, temples, and hidden gods.

  Here, in this setting, with the secular world held at bay, within a traditional culture always willing to see mystical and magical forces at work, Ramanujan’s belief in the unseen workings of gods and goddesses, his supreme comfort with a mental universe tied together by invisible threads, came as naturally as breath itself.

  • • •

  All through South India, every village of a few dozen huts had a shrine to Mariamma or Iyenar, Seliamma or Angalamma—gods and goddesses whose origins went back to the very dawn of agricultural communities. These deities represented powers which villagers hoped to propitiate, like smallpox, cholera, and cattle plague. Most were reckoned as female. A few were recent, incorporating the spirits of murder victims or women who had died in childbirth. In 1904, some boys thought they heard trumpets coming from an anthill, and soon the deity of the anthill was attracting thousands of people from nearby villages, who would lie “prostrate on their faces, rapt in adoration.”

  Grama devata, or village gods, these deities were called, and they had virtually nothing to do with the formal Brahminic Hinduism a student of comparative religion might learn about in college. The villagers might give lip service to Vishnu and Siva, the two pillars of orthodox worship. But at time of pestilence or famine, they were apt to turn back to their little shrines—perhaps a brick building three or four feet high, or a small enclosure with a few rude stones in the middle—where guardianship of their village lay.

  Mere idol worship? No more than a primitive, aboriginal animism? So some critics of Hinduism argued. And to the extent that these Dravidian gods were part of Hinduism, one could argue, the critics weren’t far off.

  But the Hinduism of which Kumbakonam was such a stronghold, and in which Ramanujan was steeped, was a world apart from all this. In Tanjore District, one English observer would note, “Brahminical Hinduism is here a living reality and not the neglected cult, shouldered out by the worship of aboriginal godlings, demons and devils which it so often is in other districts.”

  The great temples of the South fairly shouted out the difference. Temples in Kumbakonam, in Kanchipuram, in Tanjore, Madurai, and Rameswaram, were, as one authority put it, as superior to more famous ones in the North, say, “as Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s are to the other churches of London.” One at Rameswaram, to which Ramanujan and his father, mother, and baby brother went on a pilgrimage in 1901, built over a hundred-year span during the seventeenth century on an island off the coast opposite Ceylon, was 1000 feet long and 650 feet across, built with gopurams 100 feet high on each face, with almost 4000 feet of corridors rich in extravagantly sculpted detail.

  A Western observer to such a temple might still be brought up short by the bewildering variety of deities he’d find there—sculpted figures, statues large and small, in wood and stone, sometimes garlanded with flowers, even dressed in rude clothing. But in mainstream Hinduism, these could all be seen as part of a grand edifice of belief vastly more sophisticated than the religion of the villages.

  The three chief deities in the Hindu pantheon, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, were traditionally represented as, respectively, the universe’s creative, destructive, and preserving forces. In practice, however, Brahma, once having fashioned the world, was seen as cold and aloof, and tended to be ignored. So the two great branches of Brahminic Hinduism became Shaivism and Vaishnavism.

  Shaivism had a kind of demonic streak, a fierceness, a malignity, a raw sexual energy embodied in the stylized phallic symbol known as a lingam that was the centerpiece of every Shaivite temple. Think of sweeping change, of cataclysmic destruction, and you invoked Lord Siva.

  Vaishnavism, befitting its identification with the conserving god Vishnu, had more placid connotations. One contemporary English account likened it to the Spirit of Man—a distinctly gentler idea. Figuring largely in Vaishnavism were Rama and Krishna, heroes of Indian legend, and two of the incarnations, or avatars, in which Vishnu appears.

  In Hindu lore, each of the three primal gods appeared in many forms. Siva could be Parmeswara. Vishnu could be Narasimha or Venkatarama. They had consorts and relatives, each of whom themselves had, over the centuries, become the objects of worship, the centers of their own cults. Vishnu, for example, was worshipped in the form of his consort Lakshmi, and as the monkey god, Hanuman. Each was endowed with distinct personalities; each gained its own adherents.

  Some worshippers, certainly, construed those stone figures literally, viewed them as gods, pure and simple, in a way not so different from the grama devata worship of the villages. Indeed, one history of South India spoke of a “fusion of village deities and Vedic Brahminical deities” going back to around the beginning of the Christian era that had brought a comingling of different forms of worship.

  But sophisticated Hindus, at least, understood that these stone “deities” merely represented forms or facets of a single godhead; in contemplating them, you were reawakened to the Oneness of all things. For those whose worship remained primitive, meanwhile, the garish stone figures could be seen as hooks by which to snare the spiritually unsophisticated and direct them toward something higher and finer.

  The genius of Hinduism, then, was that it left room for everyone. It was a profoundly tolerant religion. It denied no other faiths. It set out no single path. It prescribed no one canon of worship and belief. It embraced everything and everyone. Whatever your personality there was a god or goddess, an incarnation, a figure, a deity, with which to identify, from which to draw comfort, to rouse you to a higher or deeper spirituality. There were gods for every purpose, to suit any frame of mind, any mood, any psyche, any stage or station of life. In taking on different forms, God became formless; in different names, nameless.

  Among the thousands of deities, most South Indian families tended to invest special powers in a particular one—which became as much part of the family’s heritage as stories passed down through the generations, or its treasured jewelry. This kula devata became the focal point of the family’s supplications in time of trouble, much as some Roman Catholics invoke a particular patron saint. Things would go wrong, and you’d propitiate your family deity before you would any other. In South India, many a well-traveled Brahmin with wide knowledge of the world—perhaps a scholar, a professional, fluent in English, well-read in Sanskrit, who could intelligently discuss Indian nationalism, Tamil poetry, or mathematics—routinely and ardently prayed before the shrine of his family deity.

  In Ramanujan’s family, the family deity was the goddess Namagiri, consort of the lion-god Narasimha. Her shrine at Namakkal was about a hundred miles from Kumbakonam, about three-quarters of the way to Erode, near where Komalatammal’s family came from. It was Namagiri whose name was always on his mother’s lips, who was the object of those first devotions, whose assumed views on matters great and small were taken with the utmost seriousness.

  It had been Namagiri to whom Ramanujan’s mother and father, childless for some years after they married, had prayed for a child. Ramanujan’s maternal grandmother, Rangammal, was a devotee of Namagiri and was said to enter a trance to speak to
her. One time, a vision of Namagiri warned her of a bizarre murder plot involving teachers at the local school. Another time, many years earlier, before Ramanujan’s birth, Namagiri revealed to her that the goddess would one day speak through her daughter’s son. Ramanujan grew up hearing this story. And he, too, would utter Namagiri’s name all his life, invoke her blessings, seek her counsel. It was goddess Namagiri, he would tell friends, to whom he owed his mathematical gifts. Namagiri would write the equations on his tongue. Namagiri would bestow mathematical insights in his dreams.

  So he told his friends. Did he believe it?

  His grandmother did, and so did his mother. Her son’s birth, after long prayer to Namagiri, had only intensified her devotion, made her more fervent in her belief. That’s how Komalatammal was: Why, she had practically willed herself a child. The whole force of her personality, her ferocious will, surged through all she did.

  Ramanujan absorbed that from her; she never had to teach it to him, because it was imprinted in the example of her life. He learned from her to heed the voice within himself and to exert the will to act on it. His father was mired in the day-to-day, a slave to its routines, preoccupied with rupees and annas; he would want Ramanujan married off, bringing money into the family, well settled. But Komalatammal gave herself over to deeper forces, dwelt in a rich, inner world—and pulled Ramanujan into it with her.

  So that when a powerful new influence on Ramanujan’s young life came along, he had his mother’s sanction to embrace it, to give his life over to it, to follow it with abandon.