Why India has produced only nine Nobel laureates

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University, has composed a unique work. A Touch Of Genius: The Wisdom of India’s Nobel Laureates (published by Aleph Books) brings together the work of all Indian winners of the Nobel Prize – Rabindranath Tagore, CV Raman, Har Gobind Khorana, Mother Teresa, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Amartya Sen, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Kailash Satyarthi and Abhijit V. Banerjee.

Given the range of their fields – from literature to activism and from economics to the sciences, this compilation includes essays, stories, poems, songs, and prayers.

In his highly readable introduction, Mukherjee raises the question: Why have there been so few Indians in the Nobel winners’ list?

This introduction will be woefully incomplete without treading on some contentious issues. One of these is the relative absence of Indians in the list of Nobel Prize winners. Only nine from a country of India’s size, population, and talent! It is undeniable that in the first half-century or so of the prize’s existence (it was instituted in 1901) this was the result of sheer prejudice, and bias towards the Western world. The most disgraceful omission was the overlooking of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize. The exclusion of Gandhi is comparable only to the exclusion of Leo Tolstoy who did not receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides Gandhi, there were other deserving Indians, especially those from the scientific community, such as J. C. Bose, S. N. Bose, and Meghnad Saha, who were ignored. These omissions are evidence of the impoverishment of the Nobel Prize and the committee’s lack of judgement, maybe even of courage. It reinforces the point made at the very beginning of this introduction that the Nobel Prize is not the sole indicator of a genius. Very aptly, [Venkatraman] Ramakrishnan has underlined that the entire system of awards and prizes, including the Nobel, ‘is beset by a kind of cronyism’.