A drama to miss all drama

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s story is a fascinating one: a 10 year old Brahmin boy from a poor family in a small town in Tamil Nadu becomes interested in mathematics circa 1900 by way of a book on higher math which someone gifted him almost as an afterthought. Tinkering in his free time, alone, he develops a considerable mastery of the subject and begins to make what he thinks are significant new breakthroughs. Uncertain of the value of his work, he send his theorems to several math professors of whom most ignore him. But one actually does read the theorems – a miracle since the cover letter starts with the words describing their author as an Indian clerk at the Madras Port Trust – and is sufficiently impressed to invite the boy to study in Cambridge. After some struggle, the boy – now a young man – makes the heroic decision to travel over the polluting sea to a foreign, cold, dark land where he will find it difficult to maintain strict observance of the dietary rules of his caste. But before he leaves, his mother, to bind him to India, arranges for a suitable wife for him. The wife is suitable in all ways except one – the bride is six. He leaves, he studies in Cambridge, he makes important contributions to mathematics, he is granted advanced degrees and inducted into the Royal Society, he becomes ill, returns to India and dies at the age of 32.

This story teams with dramatic possibilities: a new world grows out of a book and swallows up a small boy’s life; a small town conservative Brahmin boy from Tamil Nadu travels to cold, modern, western England all by himself, worried about his identity, his religion, his caste; he leaves behind a 6 year old bride: both he and she will live the next decade in expectation of their union’s eventual consummation (which perhaps never happens since he returns gravely ill); aged 22, in Cambridge, the boy enters formal schooling for the first time in his life and discovers that, like all minds of the self-taught, his is also a hodgepodge of the brilliantly innovative and the utterly wrong; he is a genius colonial in colonial England: black, but brilliant, the left loves him, the right says he is a charlatan, a fake; everyone seems to lay a claim on him: Indians want him for India, Brits for Britain, Brahmins for the caste system, mathematicians for mathematics; as a mathematician he breaks new, revolutionary ground, while in his private life he remains a stodgily conservative slave to an ancient, irrational religion; finally, there is his work, unique and strange, in many ways paradoxical, in itself fascinating if only explained well. There are a legion of dramas here -- too many for a short radio play, in fact; each could be riveting in its own right.

Yet, the BBC play A Disappearing Number, based on the stage play by the theatre company Complicite, fails to find any of them. Like all stories about genius written by people who don’t quite understand the subject, its presentation of mathematics is trivial; there is none of the personal drama of Ramanujan’s life showing that the authors have not understood it; instead of Ramanujan's otherworldly love story, there is a hackneyed love story of modern Euro-Indians, too emotionally overcharged and too full of screaming to be interesting, interspersed by bizarre encounters with Indian BT telephone operators whose significance lies in their being based in Bangalore. (Perhaps outsourcing is the only thing the authors of the play know about India). What any of it has to do with either Ramanujan or mathematics is not clear. That it is lousy and a waste of time is clear within the first five minutes; actually, three, when the narrator who opens the play says “actually I am an actor playing a mathematician”. You don’t say.

The BBC website says the play won an award. Really? I can't imagine why.

The BBC website's blurb for the play says: "An award-winning production exploring our relentless compulsion to understand, and which is a provocative meditation on the beauty of mathematics and the nature of creativity." The empty pretentiousness of it should be sufficient clue for anyone to stay away.

Post scriptum

Perhaps India is like China and Japan: that those who know them well don´t usually speak or write English well -- English or any Western language; and those who do speak it, usually do not know the country well. The result is that books about these countries are usually crap. India's situation may be worse than either China's or Japan's: there is less money in Indology to afford real talent but a greater number of would be specialists -- people with distant relatives there, or who have been once and maybe spent a week in an ashram, or a month in Goa. This is true about the English speaking Indians in India, too: upper class Punjabis don´t go to Tanjavur, they go to London. I once tried to tell one about the marvelus cholas of Tanjavur: she grimaced.

Post srciptum 2

The following week there was a play on Spinoza. It was quite adequate in presenting the issues of Portuguese conversos rejudaising in Amsterdam. Somehow, the BBC seems better on 16th century Jewish Amsterdam than it is on early 20th century Anglo-Indian matters. Somehow, this strikes me as odd.

The philosophical bits in the Spinoza play, on the other hand, were just as bad as the mathematical bits had been in the Ramanujan play. The BBC should either stop this line of pursuit altogether or hire writers with the necessary background/intellectual wherewithal. The series is an intellectual embarrassment: being half-stupid (i.e. trying to say something intelligent and failing at it) is worse than being stupid (not even knowing that one could try).