India and the Nobel Prize

Rarely do Indians figure in the list of Nobel Prize winners, but we haven’t been entirely missing either.

As news about this year’s Nobel Prize winners comes in, it’s a good time to dwell upon the Indians who have been connected with it. But that is nothing new. Rarely do Indians figure in the list, but we haven’t been entirely missing either.

Our most famous Nobel Prize laureate is also the first to have got it. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore got the literature prize for Gitanjali, a collection of his poems. His telegram, which was read out at the Nobel Banquet, had just a hint of the lyric: ‘I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother.’

Amartya Sen, the man who won the Economics Prize in 1998, had a connection with Tagore and the Nobel. He was born in Shantiniketan, the university that Tagore founded using his prize money. Sen got the prize for opening up a new understanding of welfare economics.

Sir CV Raman happens to be the only Indian citizen to get a Nobel in science. The physics prize he got in 1930 was for the Raman effect, which threw an entirely new perspective on an important phenomenon of light called scattering.

We can also stake claim to one prize even though the recipient was not an Indian. In 1979, when the committee decided to award it to Mother Teresa for her work with the poorest of the poor, starting with the slums of Kolkata, India celebrated.

The most recent instance of an Indian getting his hands on the prize was Dr RK Pachauri in 2007. But he didn’t win it. The Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change shared the prize with Al Gore for combating climate change. Pachauri collected it on behalf of the IPCC as its chairman.

The Indian who truly deserved a Nobel Prize was Mahatma Gandhi. He was nominated five times and thrice came up in the shortlist. But never got one to lasting regret. When the Dalai Lama got a Peace Prize in 1989, the committee chairman said that this was as a tribute to Gandhi’s memory. Øyvind Tønnesson, former Nobelprize.org peace editor, writes in an article that up to 1960, the Peace Prize was awarded exclusively to Americans and Europeans, and that Gandhi probably was not given one because he didn’t fit into the usual category of prize winners. He was ‘no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses’.

Nobel PrizeRabindranath Tagore