Nobel laureates of India

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Laureates

British India

Rabindranath Tagore

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."^[1]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a poet, philosopher, educationist, artist and social activist. Hailing from an affluent land-owning family from Bengal, he received traditional education in India before traveling to England for further study. He abandoned his formal education and returned home, founding a school, Santiniketan, where children received an education in consonance with Tagore's own ideas of communion with nature and emphasis on literature and the arts.

In time, Tagore's works, written originally in Bengali, were translated into English; the Geetanjali ("Tribute in verse"), a compendium of verses, named 'Song Offerings' in English was widely acclaimed for its literary genius. In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first person of non-Western heritage to be awarded a Nobel Prize.^[2]

In protest against the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, he resigned the knighthood that had been conferred upon him in 1913. Tagore holds the unique distinction of being the composer of the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh. He was the first non-European and first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

C.V. Raman

C.V.Raman was born at Thiruvanaikaval, near Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1930 "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."^[3]

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1930. He had been knighted only the year before and worked extensively on acoustics and light. He was also deeply interested in the physiology of the human eye. A traditionally-dressed man, he headed an institute that is today named after him: the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore.

Citizens of India

Mother Teresa

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 1979 in recognition of her "work in bringing help to suffering humanity."^[4]

Mother Teresa's real name was Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxiu (1910–1997) was born in Skopje, then a city in Ottoman Empire. She was a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin and Indian citizenship^[5]. She founded the international order of "The Missionaries of Charity", whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. For years in the slums of Kolkata (Calcutta), her work centred on caring for the poor and suffering, among whom she herself died.

Amartya Sen

Awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 1998 "for his contributions to welfare economics."^[6]

Amartya Sen (born 1933) was the first Indian to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded to him in 1998 for his work on welfare economics. He has made several key contributions to research in this field, such as to the axiomatic theory of social choice; the definitions of welfare and poverty indexes; and the empirical studies of famine. All are linked by his interest in distributional issues and particularly in those most impoverished.^[7] Whereas Kenneth Arrow's "impossibility theorem" suggested that it was not possible to aggregate individual choices into a satisfactory choice for society as a whole, Sen showed that societies could find ways to alleviate such a poor outcome.

Foreign citizens of Indian origin

Hargobind Khorana

Shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1968 for his '"interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis"'.^[8]

Hargobind Khorana (1922-2011), a person of Indian origin, shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg. He had left India in 1945 and became a naturalised United States citizen in the 1970s. He continued to head a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, until his death in 2011.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, Punjab, British India in a Tamil family. His paternal uncle was the Indian physicist and Nobel laureate C. V. Raman.

Chandrasekhar shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 1983 '"for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars."'

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 with William Alfred Fowler. Born: 19 October 1910, Lahore, British Raj (now in Pakistan) Died: 21 August 1995, Chicago, IL, USA Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Citation : '"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"' [1]

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is now a US Citizen.^[9]

Foreign citizens born in India

Ronald Ross

Ronald Ross, born in Almora, India, in 1857 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria.

He received many honours in addition to the Nobel Prize, and was given Honorary Membership of learned societies of most countries of Europe, and of many other continents. He got an honorary M.D. degree in Stockholm in 1910 at the centenary celebration of the Caroline Institute. Whilst his vivacity and single-minded search for truth caused friction with some people, he enjoyed a vast circle of friends in Europe, Asia and America who respected him for his personality as well as for his genius.

Rudyard Kipling

Citation : "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author"

Rudyard Kipling, born in Mumbai, 1865 (then Bombay in British India), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. He remains the youngest ever recipient of the Literature Nobel Prize and the first English-language writer to receive the Prize. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly. Kipling was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works, in particular Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888), collections of short stories with roughly and affectionately drawn soldier portraits. His Barrack Room Ballads (1892) were written for, as much as about, the common soldier. In 1894 appeared his Jungle Book, which became a children's classic all over the world. Kim (1901), the story of Kimball O'Hara and his adventures in the Himalayas, is perhaps his most felicitous work. Other works include The Second Jungle Book (1895), The Seven Seas (1896), Captains Courageous (1897), The Day's Work (1898), Stalky and Co. (1899), Just So Stories (1902), Trafficks and Discoveries (1904), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits and Credits (1926), Thy Servant a Dog (1930), and Limits and Renewals (1932),better be better than worst (1933). During the First World War Kipling wrote some propaganda books. His collected poems appeared in 1933.

See also

• List of Nobel laureates
• Nobel Prize Laureates by Country

References