Nobel laureates of India

Nobel Prizes

Citizens of India and Indian Origin

Rabindranath Tagore

Main article: Rabindranath Tagore

First non European1913 as well as first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

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 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.^[1]

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.

C. V. Raman

Main article: Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Nobel award in 1930 in Physics for proving change in wavelength of light when travels through any object.

Citation : "...for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him".

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.

Amartya Sen

Main article: 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 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.^[2] 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 born in India

Ronald Ross

Main article: 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

Main article: 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.

Foreign born Indian Citizens

Mother Teresa

Main article: Mother Teresa

Citation : "Humanitarian work."

Mother Teresa (1910–1997) was born in Skopje, then a city in Ottoman Empire. She is of Albanian origin. 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."[3]

Indian born Foreign Citizens

Mohammad Abdus Salam

Main article: Abdus_Salam

Citation : "...for his work on the electroweak unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces".

Mohammad Abdus Salam was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1979. He was born in 1926, in Jhang, Punjab, British Raj (now Pakistan). He founded the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Triste, Italy. The work for which he won the Nobel Prize was carried out at ICTP.

Hargobind Khorana

Main article: 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 (1922-2011), 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 continues to head a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Main article: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Citation :"for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars" Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. 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

Main article: 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.^[3]

Foreign Citizens of Indian Origin

V.S. Naipaul

Main article: V.S. Naipaul

Citation : "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2001.

References

Note: All citations are taken from the official website of the Nobel Foundation, http://www.nobelprize.org

1. ^ BBC NEWS | South Asia | Bengali poet's Nobel medal stolen
2. ^ Press Release: The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1998 (14 October 1998).
3. ^ http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=09100741-the-nobel-prize-chemistry-is-going-ramakrishnan-steitz-yonath

See also

• List of Nobel laureates
• Nobel Prize Laureates by Country
• Evolution of Nobel Prizes by country