Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary. Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A. Rankin. American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society, Providence. 1995.
This is a wonderfully welcome book. The worldwide public has been fortunate to have a variety of biographies of the Indian mathematical genius, Ramanujan.
Most recently, Robert Kanigel published The Man Who Knew Infinity for a broad audience.
Before this, S. R. Ranganathan had published Ramanujan, The Man and the Mathematician. And, of course, there
are the wonderful accounts of Ramanujan's life in G. H. Hardy's Ramanujan, and in Ramanujan's Collected Papers.
However each biography always carries with it some of the views of the author. This is perhaps most strikingly in evidence in the following account that Hardy (taken from page 4 of Ramanujan) provides of
Ramanujan's religious views:
Now the two memoirs of Ramanujan printed in the Papers (and both written by men who, in their different ways, knew him very well) contradict one another flatly about his religion. Seshu Aiyar and Ramanchandra Rao say:
"Ramanujan had definite religious views. He had a special veneration for the Namakkal goddess... He believed in the existence of a Supreme Being and in the attainment of Godhead by men... He had settled convictions about the problem of life and after..."; while I say... his religion was a matter of observance and not of intellectual conviction, and I remember well his telling me (much to my surprise) that all religions seemed to him
more or less equally true...? Which of us is right? For my part I have no doubt at all; I am quite certain that I am. Classical scholars have, I believe, a general principle, difficilior lectio potior, " the more difficult reading is to be preferred" in textual criticism. If the Archbishop of Canterbury tells one man that he (the Archbishop) believes in God, and another that he does not, then it is probably the second assertion which is true, since otherwise it is very
difficult to understand why he should have made it, while there are many excellent reasons for his making the first whether it be true or false. Similarly, if a strict Brahmin like Ramanujan told me, as he certainly did, that he had no definite beliefs, then it is 100 to 1 that he meant what he said.This was no sufficient reason why Ramanujan should outrage the feelings of his parents or his Indian friends. He was not a reasoned infidel, but an "agnostic" in its strict sense, who saw no particular good, and no particular harm, in Hinduism or in any other religion. Hinduism is, far
more, for example, than Christianity, a religion of observance, in which belief counts for extremely little in any case, and if Ramanujan's friends assumed that he accepted the conventional doctrines of such a religion,
and he did not disillusion them, he was practising a quite harmless, and probably necessary, economy of truth.?
To paraphrase what I said in The Hindu (21 December 1987, page 8), the day before the Ramanujan centenary:Hardy believed that Ramanujan was more or less a Western European agnostic. I doubt it. In my dealings with academic Indians, I have found them quite polite. If you contradict their beliefs, I have found few, if any, who would bluntly remark:That's the stupidest remark I've heard! They are more likely to smile and keep their own opinions. I believe that is related to Ramanujan's response to Hardy. Hardy was Ramanujan's great benefactor and was also a man who referred to God as his personal enemy. If you were Ramanujan and you were speaking about religion with Hardy, what could you say that both would be an honest statement consistent with your religious beliefs and would not antagonize your great friend? What could be a better statement than ?... all religions seem... more or less equally true??This statement reflects the great tolerance of Hinduism, and (to paraphrase again):... if Ramanujan's friend (Hardy) assumed that he accepted the conventional doctrines of (agnosticism), and he did not disillusion (him), he was practising a quite harmless, and probably necessary, economy of truth.
According to Kanigel, Ramanujan chose the path of least resistance, giving GK Hardy the idea that he was an agnostic. This is based on Kanigel's observations, that Indian academics are circumspect and given to keeping their beliefs to themselves. Well that is true not just for Indian academics but the Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, Germans, and well nigh everybody in the field of mathematics. They are rarely polemicists, trying to cleave the world like their sociological brethren do. They are not fire and brimstone like Edward Said or like Oriana Fallaci.
My interpretation:
It is more likely that Ramanujan did have strong ideas about religion but he was far too interested in the validation of his work, and chose a pragmatic silence in regards to his religion and avoided a potential minefield with a non-committal statement like 'all religions are equal", which makes him in my eyes, an agnostic. His belief in mathematical proof overrode the proof needed for the existence of God. This should be obvious by the fact that he wrote letters to GK Hardy asking him if his solutions were exemplary. The darker interpretation is, and there is always one, is that he was one of the very few Indians in Cambridge with very little knowledge of how secular an institution this was, specially when the occupying power has slogans like GK Chesterton's, "If God calls you to be a missionary, don't stoop to be a king."
