The Indian Clerk was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The novel tells the story of one of the most remarkable intellectual partnerships of the twentieth century: the collaboration between G.H. Hardy, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematical genius from Madras who sent Hardy a letter in 1913 containing formulas of extraordinary originality.
Leavitt reconstructs this story with meticulous historical research and novelistic imagination. Hardy’s world — Cambridge before and during World War I, with its all-male colleges, its closeted homosexuality, its mathematical rivalries, and its engagement with the Bertrand Russell pacifism controversy — is rendered with detailed specificity. Ramanujan’s arrival in this world — a Hindu vegetarian Brahmin in frozen, meat-eating, class-bound England — creates a collision of cultures that the novel explores with sensitivity and wit.
The mathematical content is genuinely present: Leavitt takes the reader inside the experience of mathematical discovery, making the beauty of number theory accessible without condescension. Hardy’s famous claim that mathematics is the “young man’s game” and his atheism coexist with Ramanujan’s religious devotion and intuitive method in ways that challenge both men’s assumptions.
Hardy’s homosexuality — a constant in his life but one he never publicly acknowledged — provides an emotional undercurrent. His relationship with Ramanujan is not sexual but intensely intimate: a meeting of minds that Hardy, who distrusted emotional attachments, found both exhilarating and threatening.
Collecting The Indian Clerk
First edition (Bloomsbury, New York, 2007): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good/very good: $5–$15