Nobel laureates of India
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The Nobel Prizes, instituted in 1901, annually honour outstanding contributions to literature, world peace and various sciences. Eight Indian citizens or people of Indian origin have been honoured to date:
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[edit] Nobel Prizes
[edit] Rudyard Kipling
- Citation :
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 and the first English-language writer to receive the Prize.
[edit] Rabindranath Tagore
- Citation : "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".
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, philosopher, educationist, artist and social activist. Hailing from an affluent land-owning family of Bengal, he received traditional education in India before travelling 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, 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.[1]
In his own "non-sentimental and visionary way", Tagore participated in the Indian independence movement. In protest against the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, he resigned the knighthood that had been conferred upon him in 1915. Tagore holds the unique distinction of being the composer of the national anthems of two different countries, India and Bangladesh.
[edit] Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
- Citation : "...for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him".
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) 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. His nephew, the astrophysicist|Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 as a United States citizen.
[edit] Hargobind Khorana
- Citation : "...for their [Khorana's, Robert W. Holley's and Marshall W. Nirenberg's] interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis".
Hargobind Khorana (born 1922), a person of Indian origin, shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on genes. He had left India in 1945 and became a naturalised United States citizen in the 1970s. He contines to head a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
[edit] Mother Teresa
- Citation : None provided by the foundation on its website.
Mother Teresa (1910-1997) was born in Skopje, then a city in Turkey. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Toiling for years in the slums of Kolkata (Calcutta), her work centred on caring for the poor and suffering, among whom she herself died. "This year [1979] the world has turned its attention to the plight of children and refugees, and these are precisely the categories for whom Mother Teresa has for many years worked so selflessly."[2]
[edit] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
- Citation :
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.
[edit] V.S. Naipaul
- Citation :
A British writer, V.S. Naipul (Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul) was born in 1932 into a family of north Indian descent living in Chaguanas, close to Port of Spain, on Trinidad. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. In awarding him the Prize, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." The Nobel Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern philosopher, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony."
The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the Polish-born British author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: "Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished."
[edit] Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
[edit] Amartya Sen
- Citation: "...for his contributions to welfare economics".
Amartya Sen (born 1933) was the first Indian to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded to him in 1999 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[3]. 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.[4]
[edit] References
Note: All citations are taken from the official website of the Nobel Foundation, http://www.nobelprize.org
- ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3567535.stm
- ^ Press release, Norwegian Nobel Committee (1979).
- ^ Press Release: The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1998 (14 October 1998).
- ^ http://www.eoijakarta.or.id/Indian_noble.html
