The deepest tragedy of Ramanujan’s life and his works is not that India lacked extraordinary minds. It is that the modern world had been methodically conditioned to believe that universal genius could only be certified by specific, Western institutions.
In 1912, Srinivasa Ramanujan was employed as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, managing shipping accounts and port fees. To the colonial administration, he was a low-level government worker. But within the Indian mathematical community, his reputation was already well-established. Mathematicians like V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who founded the Indian Mathematical Society, and civil servant R. Ramachandra Rao had scrutinized his dense notebooks, recognized his exceptional ability, and secured a research stipend to support his work. Long before he and his works reached Europe, Ramanujan’s genius was already well-known having been published in journals and sustained by a network of local intellectuals who understood exactly what they were witnessing.
However, despite such a profound validation within India, his patrons understood a hard geopolitical truth about the global academic system of the early 20th century. They knew that no matter how brilliant the mathematics inscribed in those notebooks was, true intellectual legitimacy could only be conferred by the West.
History often frames Ramanujan’s eventual correspondence with G.H. Hardy in 1913 as the moment a rough, undiscovered diamond was finally found. But that narrative obscures a more sobering reality. Ramanujan did not suddenly become a mathematical genius because the University of Cambridge recognized him. Cambridge merely popularized a genius who was already fully formed.
That distinction might appear subtle, but it lays bare one of colonialism’s most enduring and invisible legacies. Colonialism was not limited to a project of political subjugation or economic extraction—it went way beyond as it sought to construct an intellectual order in which recognition itself became strictly hierarchical. The deepest tragedy of Ramanujan’s life and his works is not that India lacked extraordinary minds. It is that the modern world had been methodically conditioned to believe that universal genius could only be certified by specific, Western institutions.
This paradigm extends far beyond a single mathematician. It acts as a mirror reflecting a deeper epistemic inheritance, a framework of intellectual credibility that continues to govern the world long after the actual empires have dissolved. If political colonialism sought to govern sovereign territory, intellectual colonialism sought to govern the sovereignty of the mind.
Over the course of more than two centuries, colonial institutions successfully established an unspoken hierarchy of human knowledge. Western Europe was systematically positioned as the sole engine of universal reason, scientific inquiry, and pure philosophy. Conversely, regardless of how rigorous their own intellectual traditions were, colonized societies were increasingly categorized as mere repositories of culture, religious mysticism, and folklore. Their indigenous ideas were deemed anthropologically fascinating, but rarely accepted as foundational to human progress. Knowledge did not suddenly cease to exist outside the West but rather it simply ceased to occupy the centre of the global narrative.
This historical amnesia is precisely why contemporary discussions surrounding the recovery of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) often trigger misplaced anxiety. Critics frequently assume that elevating India’s ancient intellectual traditions is a reactionary attempt to replace empirical evidence with mythology, substituting rigorous scholarship with civilizational pride. That assumption entirely misses the intellectual mark. At its most profound, the effort to reclaim these systems is not about declaring a simplistic retrospective superiority. It is about asking a necessary question: Who historically held the power to decide whose knowledge was branded “universal,” and whose was sidelined as merely “traditional”? Acknowledging these towering achievements does not diminish the profound contributions of Greek philosophers or European Enlightenment thinkers. Human knowledge has never been the exclusive monopoly of a single civilization. It has always been a collaborative entity, travelling across continents via trade routes, conquests, and translations. The crisis only arises when intellectual exchange is forcibly replaced by intellectual hierarchy.
We see these patterns actively across various contemporaries of Ramanujan. Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted revolutionary, verifiable work in millimetre wireless communication and plant biophysics in the late-19th century, yet global textbooks spent decades canonizing Guglielmo Marconi as the singular inventor of radio. In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose conceptualized groundbreaking work in quantum statistics, but his paper acquired worldwide prominence only after he mailed it to Albert Einstein, who grasped its brilliance, translated it into German, and submitted it for publication on Bose’s behalf. Einstein’s intervention was highly collaborative, yet the episode illuminates a persistent bottleneck: ideas originating in India routinely required the stamp of established Western institutions to pass into global consciousness. This is not a story of individual malice. Hardy did not seek to diminish Ramanujan. For generations, the architecture of global academia, its dominant universities, peer-reviewed journals, and unwritten rules of prestige, has conditioned the world to assume that intellectual legitimacy flows downstream from the West to the rest.
The psychological consequence of this architecture has been profound. Over the decades, many within India internalized this exact epistemic hierarchy. Validation from foreign universities came to carry an intrinsic, outsized weight that domestic institutions struggled to command. A paper published abroad was imbued with instant authority, while identical rigor produced at home faced a struggle for basic parity. This phenomenon creates a world where certain traditions are accepted as universally relevant, while others must perpetually justify their right to be taken seriously.
Dismantling this hierarchy demands the total abandonment of the assumption that excellence possesses only one geography. A genuinely confident civilization neither romanticizes its ancient past to the point of myth, nor apologizes for it. It willingly subjects its own historical traditions to the harshest critical scrutiny, but it absolutely refuses to discard them merely because they matured outside European institutions. It welcomes the entirety of global scholarship without surrendering its own intellectual agency.
As India navigates the 21st century with aspirations to become a developed nation, it must recognise that national strength cannot rest solely on economic growth or technological infrastructure. Nations are ultimately anchored by civilizational confidence, the unshakeable confidence required to participate in global dialogues not as perpetual consumers of knowledge, but as foundational creators. Ramanujan solved equations that the most rigorously trained mathematical minds of his era struggled to comprehend. Nonetheless, the most enduring question his life leaves us is a civilizational reckoning. Why did one of the greatest minds in history have to cross an ocean and wait for Cambridge before the world believed what his notebooks already proved?
More urgently, have we truly dismantled the invisible hierarchies that made such external permission necessary in the first place? How we choose to answer that question will determine whether the next generation of Indian thinkers will still need to ask the world for permission to be recognized for what they have already achieved.
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Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.
