I remember the inexplicable lump in my throat as I stood near the thinnai of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s home on the opposite end of the road leading from the imposing Sarangapani Temple in Kumbakonam. From the book I had already read on him ( The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel), I knew Ramanujan sat here poring over numbers. When he ran out of space on his slate, he would impatiently scribble on the floor around him.
So, ever since the promos on a movie on the mathematician came out, I couldn’t wait to watch it. So first day first show it is, and we settle down in our seats with anticipation. When the camera moves down the corridors of the temple with its beautiful carved rock pillars and then shows Ramanujan’s home — just two-and-a-half-rooms, a tiny kitchen and the now-famous little sit-out in front, the warm feeling returns. Here was a young man from a small, small town in Tamil Nadu who wowed the math scholars of the world and became a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Director Gnana Rajasekaran has done singular service by making a movie on Ramanujan, as the latter remains not-so-well-known in our history. Rajasekaran has already made a name with his movies on Bharathiar and Periyar, and this is his third biopic. Through it, one revisits Ramanujan’s school, the temples he sat in, the roads he walked on barefoot. It is important documentation. It shows the chronological events in the life of Ramanujan: how he always scored a hundred in Math, how he failed every other subject, his despair at not being able to pass the crucial exam that would give him a B.A., his desperation for a job and, of course, his famous notebooks that went on to become the Ramanujan Notebooks published in five volumes, containing thousands of his theorems. And, it shows his relationship with his mother Komalavalli, and wife Janaki, played by Suhasini and Bhama respectively. It is great fun watching them in their madisaar, making bakshanams !
Rajasekaran recreates Ramanujan’s personality through little details — his being a staunch vegetarian, his unshakeable belief in goddess Namagiri, his hunt for scraps of paper to jot down his mathematical theorems...
There are endearing glimpses of the man who was known to be quiet, under-confident and hopelessly out of his depth when it came to anything other than numbers.
Students and those interested in mathematics and history must watch this movie. In fact, a school in the city has booked the entire hall for its students to watch it.
The Movie
Abhinay Vaddi as Ramanujan is disappointingly underwhelming, while Bhama as Janakiammal is pleasant to watch. Suhasini playing the formidable Komalavalli and Nizhalgal Ravi as Ramanujan’s father do justice to their pivotal roles. But many of the others seem like caricatures. The movie could have been so much better edited. There are scenes in it that do nothing to the narrative. It is torturous to hear the Tamil dialogues of the English characters. All the English characters in the movie, except perhaps Hardy, look like they are in a bad play. Even if they have been made to mouth Tamil dialogues, it could have been done more naturally. The delivery is awful.
And somehow at the end of it all, the angst of Ramanujan, the fact that he remained a misfit all his life despite his genius, and the enormity of his contribution to the world of mathematics don’t come through.
Having said that, it is difficult to make mathematics the protagonist in a movie, and expect people to watch it. But as it is a true life story, a little afterword about what happened to Ramanujan’s work after his death, and to Janakiammal would have been nice.
