Tag: The man who knew infinity

Songs of sixpence has been tagged by Mampi. The tag asks me to quote sentences numbering six, seven and eight from page 123 of the book nearest at hand. In my case, the book in question happens to be The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Now before you jump to conclusions and accuse me of engaging in an exercise in narcissism by reading a biography of my namesake, let me make it clear that the book has come into my temporary possession absolutely by chance, thanks to a friend of mine who fell for the charms of Nalini Chettur, the keeper of Giggles, ‘the biggest little bookshop’, in Chennai. This friend already has several books piled up waiting to be read, so he passed it on to me, mistakenly thinking that I possibly had more time at my disposal. I say ‘mistakenly’, because I have my own pile of unread books. Nevertheless, I gave The Man Who Knew Infinity top priority because it has to be returned, and allowed it to jump the queue of books begging for my attention. To my delight however, I believe I do not have much cause to complain and might even want to hug my friend for his act of generosity. Having traversed about three-fifths of it, I find the book quite engaging. Anyway, here goes:

He devotedly studied his Wisden, the cricket annual crammed with bowling averages, test-match results, and other arcania of the game. In 1910, the minutes of a Cambridge club would alliteratively cite his command of “the University Constitution, the methods of Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” As a young Fellow of Trinity College, he’d play a bastardized form of it in his rooms, with walking stick and tennis ball.

The lines are from the fourth chapter, and as you have probably guessed already, describe Godfrey Harold Hardy, the celebrated Cambridge mathematician who was responsible for dragging Ramanujan out from near oblivion as a lowly clerk in the Madras Port Trust and into the hallowed portals at Cambridge. The book is as rich in biographical detail of Hardy as it is of Ramanujan. As is evident from the lines above, Hardy was a great cricket enthusiast. In fact, he was very much unlike the picture that one may carry of a mathematician: he was extremely good-looking, an excellent speaker and a fine writer. Nonetheless, to partly justify the slightly stereotyped perceptions of a mathematician, he had his share of eccentricities. He was known to refrain from shaking hands and to walk down the street face down, without exchanging greetings with acquaintances among passers-by. For a flavour of the man, I take the liberty of quoting some more lines from the book:

In The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring, a Sherlock Holmes mystery written half a century after the death of Arthur Conan Doyle, the characters include Ramanujan and Hardy. In it, author Randall Collins pictures Hardy as a sort of White Rabbit hopping around the Fellows Garden at Trinity in white flannels and cap, cricket bat in hand, frantically searching for his cricket gloves, crying, “There’s a match due to begin, and I can’t find them. I’m late! I’m late!” In a prefatory note, Collins abjures all claims to historical accuracy. But in Hardy, he’s close to the mark.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is written by an American, Robert Kanigel, and he writes about the considerable difficulty of having to straddle two worlds very different from his own – those of South India and Cambridge - in researching the book. Indeed, his description of life in (South) India when he is discussing Ramanujan’s early days, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (his denigrating description of sambar as ‘a thick lentil soup stocked with potatoes’ still rankles!) Yet, in tackling two highly complex personalities of the twentieth century along with their daunting mathematics, one must accept that overall, he has done more than a decent job. After this, I am more eager than ever to lay my hands on David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk.

In those days there was no coffee!

Take the exclamation mark at the end away and you have the title of a book. Yes indeed. In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History is the delightful title of a book by A.R. Venkatachalapathy (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008), a bilingual author prolific in both Tamil and English.

In Those Days There Was No Coffee is a collection of nine essays that explore life in the Tamil-speaking parts of early 20th century Madras Presidency. The title is slightly deceptive, for only one of the nine essays is on coffee. Arguing that history is not a straightforward reading of the archives, Venkatachalapathy asserts that a careful study of popular literature can provide a nuanced understanding of the past and offer valuable perspectives denied by the archives. Using coffee as the object of the title essay, the author uncovers references to the drink in Tamil newspapers, journals, short stories and autobiographies of the colonial period to purvey rich insights into cultural values and perceptions of the early 20th century, accompanied by a superb exposition on how these were influenced by the coffee-drinking habit. The perspective that unfolds in such an unusual reading of history is likely to pose something of a surprise to any Tamil worth their salt who has grown up with the ubiquitous aroma of filter coffee wafting through the house thrice a day. Admittedly, in my own case, I was well into my twenties before I could even begin to conceive of a past when coffee, the common man’s elixir, was unknown and people drank something else.

Venkatachalapathy captures the tension and ambivalence of early 20th century society when coffee was seeping into popular Tamil middle class consciousness, conferring status and sophistication on the drinker. However, conservative elements inveighed against what they termed an ‘evil influence of modernity’ and ‘a copy-cat imitation of the West’. The contention was partly over the supplanting of the traditional morning drink neeragaram (the word is a combination of the Sanskritic words, neer and aahaar) by an alien, coffee. To quote the author, ‘Made by fermenting water drained after cooking rice, and adding water and salt to taste, neeragaram's demise was lamented by many intellectuals - a sign of their cultural anxiety.’ My grandmother confirms that in her younger days children and elders alike woke up to a breakfast drink of neeragaram, and that in the countryside this could be prepared even out of raagi, kombu, cholam (maize) and other traditional grains. She adds however, that in her time the rice was dehusked at home using the olakai or the traditional metal-bottomed long wooden pestle. As a result, it would not be dehusked completely and would possess considerable nutritive value, quite unlike the rice of the present day, which is polished clean by the comprehensive mechanised dehusking of the rice mill.

The public denouncement of coffee went to extremes that may sound at once ridiculous and amusing to us at this point in time, a hundred years later. One writer reviled the drink, calling it even more addictive than arrack, and went on to regret, ‘In those days people lived a hundred years [by drinking neeragaram]; nowadays times have changed. Even the women who work the fields demand coffee. There is not a single household without a coffee drinker’. Another critic complained, using the language of modern medicine, that ‘with the increase in coffee-drinking in our country, infant mortality, diabetes, constipation and other lowly diseases have begun to afflict our brothers and sisters’!

The attack on coffee extended also to women, by women. Thus, the Stri Dharma, published by the Women's India Association wailed:

Alas! This damned thing has got hold of women! Two cups of coffee have become the order of the day...This habit has taken over even aged women. These old women who were adept in home remedies now rush to the doctor, making a beeline to the hospital for the slightest headache.

The railing against coffee and women spilled over to the realm of the political. A highly sexist letter to Gandhi, apparently in the wake of the Non-Cooperation Movement, went thus:

The greatest obstacle in the way of success to our [non-cooperation] movement in Madras are our women. Some of them are very reactionary, and a very large number of the high class Brahmin ladies have become addicted to many of the Western vices. They drink coffee not less than three times a day, and consider it very fashionable to drink more.

These vituperative attacks on coffee, by their very vehemence, suggest that the anti-coffee brigade was fighting a losing battle. Very much so. For coffee gradually moved on from being a mere refreshment to become an integral part of cultural consciousness relating to notions of refinement and hospitality. Writers began to use coffee as a metaphor. For instance, the short stories of Pudumaippithan, the celebrated Tamil short story writer, are littered with references to the drink. In fact, one of his stories, Kadavulum Kandasamy Pillaiyum (God and Kandasamy Pillai), considered a classic, has Lord Shiva descending to the earth to meet the central character, Kandasamy Pillai, in Madras, whereupon 'the latter instinctively leads him to a nearby coffee hotel'. Here the following conversation ensues:

As God sipped the coffee, a divine demeanour of having drunk soma suffused His face.
"This is my divine handiwork", said God.
"This is not Your handiwork, but the hotelier's. Mixing chicory with coffee is his handiwork. Show your mettle when you pay the bill", whispered Kandasamy Pillai into His ears, content that he had sorted out the issue of paying for the coffee.
"Chicory...what's that?" God looked up quizzingly.
"Chicory powder resembles coffee, but is not coffee - like those who defraud people in the name of God", replied Kandasamy Pillai.

Coffee came to be closely associated with the upper caste, predominantly Brahmin, middle class. Its growing popularity led to the setting up of 'Brahmin coffee hotels' or 'coffee clubs', which served only coffee (in addition to snacks) and no other drink, in urban clusters. The coffee hotels, like coffee itself, also found their way into popular literature as we have seen in the excerpt from Pudumaippithan’s story. However, they came to be targetted - with success - by the Self-Respect or anti-Brahmin movement, which excoriated the obnoxious practice of keeping some seats out of bounds to all except Brahmins.

Coffee’s dominance among the Tamil middle class contrasts sharply with the universal popularity of tea elsewhere in India. In Tamil Nadu, tea is seen as a working class drink and a cultural 'other' of coffee. This perception has even entered the popular idiom so that somebody with a touch of the loony about them may be described as ‘a chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel’!

Some of the other essays in the book are delightful as well. One of them is on the introduction of cartoons in Tamil newspapers, an influence carried over from the English Punch, which spawned an entire genre of Indian journals ambitiously named after the original as The Delhi Punch, The Punjab Punch, Urdu Punch, Gujarati Punch and so on. Among Tamil newspaper publications of the time, it was in the weekly, India, that cartoons were first introduced by its editor, the celebrated Subramania Bharati.

Another essay that stands out is Excising the Self: Writing Autobiography in Colonial Tamilnadu. Venkatachalapathy persuasively argues that autobiography as a literary phenomenon met with the popular approval of the Tamil audience only by the 1930s but was quickly appropriated by writers to provide a historical account of social transformation rather than scrutinise their own lives. This was an indigenisation of the western literary genre, which in its original form served as an expression of individuality and a narrative medium for reflection and self-realisation. The early autobiographies wove their themes around contrasting pictures of ‘those days’ and ‘these days’, producing a romantic narrative of a pristine past, whose order and social harmony was gradually chipped away by the rapid social and technological change permeating society in the wake of the colonial encounter.

In Those Days… offers a splendid peep into the life of the middle class citizenry of the colonial period, painting an evocative picture by drawing from popular literary sources of the time. In brilliantly capturing the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from its unconventional sources, it shows that history is not the exclusive domain of the pedantic and the obscure. The lay person with an inquisitive mind may not only stake claim to it but also revel in the delight of its more accessible forms.