The Man Who Knew Infinity

Cast: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise

Rated: 7/10

Srinivasa Ramanujan was just 32 when he fell tragically to tuberculosis, after a rigour-filled, prolonged ship journey back from England to Madras as the first native royal fellow at an ivy league college of Imperial Britain.

The ultimate Mathematics wizard, a genius of prime numbers, an original thinking mind quite away from the perceived hub of all knowledge, a man who knew infinity as a gift of God himself, Ramanujan took on everything — be it the mathematical stereotype, the racist and highly prejudiced Faculty at Trinity College of London, or the perception that Indian “natives” were a mindless tribe of idiocy meant only to serve their White masters. But, in the hope of getting published more formally than on the temple floors back home, Ramanujan took on all this and much more in a painful journey against all odds. A vegetarian in England was hopelessness personified; a brown man even more so; to top it, a challenger of mathematical theory considered the domain of the imperial Whites, it was a huge, debilitating endeavour which got him at last.

Dev Patel excellently captures all this pain, this trauma and this fatal persistence of “proof” of the genius of Ramanujan with a seasoned dose of histrionics which virtually merge into the character to lend weight to this gripping biopic.

Where the film goes wrong is in its prime subject — the Maths. In building up the genius, the director sidesteps his genius — the adding up of numbers. There is very little of the subject on the blackboard. No equations solved, or explained or even pondered upon for long.

Maybe, playing to the gallery for the good of the film took a toll on algebraic jargon but there should have been a little more of a subject that consumed the subject of this film — Ramanujan himself.

Besides Dev Patel’s wizardry on the screen and the tantalising, on-edge relationship he shares with his atheist and often rough mentor Professor Hardy (played brilliantly by Jeremy Irons), the film also lives through the very Indian relationship he has with his wife, and the politics that his mother plays with the two of them.

It is an arresting saga of a lightening, unexplained genius whose mastery of numbers even he thought was a celestial gift. It makes you applaud an Indian achiever, it makes you cry over his plight, it makes you angry about the way Indians, howsoever more intelligent and arrived than the sahebs, are treated. But finally, it makes you salute the man who knew infinity — and ask God why he had short-shrifted the number of years he bestowed on this unprecedented genius in the league of Newton and Einstein.

A moving, meaningful and powerful biopic, this one has its maths right in many ways and wrong in some. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 01 May, 2016