Nobel laureates of India

The following list includes Nobel laureates of Indian origin.

The Nobel Prize is a prominent annual prize, awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economics.

Indian citizen laureates

The following are Nobel laureates who were Indian citizens at the time they were awarded the prize.^[1]

Year	Laureates	Subject	Notes
1913	Rabindranath Tagore[2]	Literature	First non-European laureate. As a British Indian subject, knighted in 1913 (renounced in 1919 in protest over the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre).
1930	C. V. Raman[3]	Physics	Knighted (as a British Indian subject) in 1929.
1979	Mother Teresa[4]	Peace	An ethnic Kosovar Albanian from the region of Yugoslavia now in the Republic of Macedonia; became a naturalised Indian citizen in 1948.
1998	Amartya Sen[5]	Economics
2014	Kailash Satyarthi[6]	Peace	face of the Indian movement Bachpan Bachao Andolan against child labour since the 1990s

Rabindranath Tagore

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

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and otherworldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.He wrote the Indian national anthem "Jana Gana Mana" and composed the anthem music as well and later another work of his "Amar Sonar Bangla" was adopted as the national anthem of Bangladesh. This makes Rabindranath Tagore the only Poet to have composed the National Anthems of two nations. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literatuorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European and first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He did so as an Indian subject of the British Empire.

C. V. Raman

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for the effect named after him." from Kolkata^[7]

Sir C.V.Raman (7 November 1888 - 21 November 1970) was born at Thiruvanaikaval, near Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1930. He had been knighted 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,

Mother Teresa

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 1979 in recognition of her "work in bringing help to suffering humanity."^[8]

Mother Teresa (born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxiu; lived 26 August 1910 - 5 September 1997) was born in Skopje, then a city in Ottoman Empire.She was a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin and Indian citizenship.^[9] 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.

Nationals of Independent India have received one Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel, namely,

Amartya Sen

Awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 1998 "for his contributions to welfare economics."^[10]

Amartya Sen (born 3 November 1933, Kolkata) 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.^[11] 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.

Kailash Satyarthi

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 jointly with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Kailash Satyarthi (born 11 January 1954) is an Indian children's rights activist and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He has been active in the Indian movement against child labour since the 1990s. His organization, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has freed over 80,000 children from various forms of servitude and helped in successful re-integration, rehabilitation and education. He has completed his engineering from Samrat Ashok Technological Institute (SATI), Vidisha (M.P.) in 1974.

Laureates of Indian birth and origin who were erstwhile Indian citizens

The following are Nobel laureates of Indian birth and origin who subsequently took foreign citizenship; however, they are still often included in lists of Indian Nobel laureates

Year	Laureates	Subject	Notes
1968	Har Gobind Khorana[12]	Medicine	Acquired U.S. citizenship in 1966.
1983	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar[13]	Physics	Acquired U.S citizenship in 1953. Nephew of C.V. Raman, the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.
2009	Venkatraman Ramakrishnan	Chemistry	Dual British and U.S citizen.

Hargobind Khorana

Shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1968 for his '"interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis"'.^[14]

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 1966. 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. A British Indian subject from his birth until 1947, he remained an Indian citizen until he became a naturalised U.S. citizen in 1953.

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: 9 August 1911, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Died: 21 August 1995, Chicago, IL, USA Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

He determined that star cluster dynamics were similar in nature to the Brownian motion of particles suspended in liquids. From this research he estimated the time it would take for the clusters to have attained the present state of motion. After many years of work, he published a definitive work, The principles of Stellar Dynamics ( 1942). This pattern of working on a particular subject until publishing a definitive work and moving on to another subject became the hallmark of Chandrashekhar's career. In his famous presentation to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1933, he had stopped short of talking about a complete gravitational collapse of high mass stars, but such a possibility had already occurred to him. To understand this possibility he concentrated his studies on the general theory of relativity and relativistic astrophysics. This work lead to his monumental publication of The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes in 1983.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Citation: "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"^[15]

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry as a US Citizen.^[16]

Laureates with Indian connections

The following are Nobel laureates with Indian connections - those of Indian birth or descent or those who were resident in India when they were awarded the prize.

Year	Laureates	Subject	Notes
1902	Ronald Ross	Medicine	Indian-born; British citizen
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Literature	Indian-born; British citizen
1989	14th Dalai Lama	Peace	Tibetan religious leader; in exile in India since 1959.
2001	V. S. Naipaul	Literature	Trinidadian-born person of Indian origin; British citizen

Ronald Ross

Ronald Ross, born in Almora, Uttarakhand, 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.

Mahatma Gandhi

The Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize in 1937–39, 1947 and a few days before he was assassinated in January 1948.^[17] Later members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee expressed regret that he was not given the prize.^[18] Geir Lundestad, Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee in 2006 said, "The greatest omission in our 106 year history is undoubtedly that Mahatma Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace prize. Gandhi could do without the Nobel Peace prize. Whether Nobel committee can do without Gandhi is the question".^[19] In 1948, the year of Gandhi's death, the Nobel Committee declined to award a prize on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate" that year. It is generally considered today that this refers to Gandhi, and that he would have received the prize had he lived.^[18][20]

See also

• List of Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates by country

References

Nobel Prizes Prizes Chemistry Economics1 Literature Peace Physics Physiology or Medicine Laureates by subject Chemistry Economics Literature Peace Physics Physiology or Medicine by criterion Black Chinese Christians Country Female Indian Japanese Jewish Muslim University affiliation by year By year Committees and organisations Nobel Foundation Nobel Committees Chemistry Economics Physics Physiology or Medicine Norwegian Nobel Committee Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet Related topics Controversies Other prizes Alfred Nobel 1 Nobel Memorial Prize (not one of the original Nobel Prizes).

Nobel laureates of India Literature Rabindranath Tagore (1913) Physics C. V. Raman (1930) Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1983) Peace Mother Teresa (1979) Kailash Satyarthi (2014) Chemistry Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (2009) Physiology or Medicine Har Gobind Khorana (1968) Economic Sciences Amartya Sen (1998)