Indian nobel laureates

Indian Nobel Laureates


The Indian Nobel saga has been iconic, where fame and glory was not so much conferred or validated by the Nobel Prize but became a footnote to the greatness of the people so honoured. Where most Nobel laureates have a limited circle of recognition in their very special fields, Indians, though few and far between, seem to have towered in their achievements…



Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)
Nobel Prize for Literature (1913)
Tagore was born and lived in Calcutta for most of his life. He was one of modern India's greatest poets and the composer of independent India's national anthem. In 1901 he founded his school, the Santiniketan, at Bolpur as a protest against the existing bad system of education. The school was a great success and gave birth to Viswabharati. He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature for his work "Gitanjali"; for the English version, published in 1912.










Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888 - 1970)
Nobel Prize for Physics (1930)
C V Raman was born on 7th Nov. 1888 in Thiruvanaikkaval, in the Trichy district of Tamil Nadu. He finished school by the age of eleven and by then he had already read the popular lectures of Tyndall, Faraday and Helmoltz. He acquired his BA degree from the Presidency College, Madras, where he carried out original research in the college laboratory, publishing the results in the philosophical magazine. Then went to Calcutta and while he was there, he made enormous contributions to vibration, sound, musical instruments, ultrasonics, diffraction, photo electricity, colloidal particles, X-ray diffraction, magnetron, dielectrics, and the celebrated "RAMAN" effect which fetched him the Noble Prize in 1930. He was the first Asian scientist to win the Nobel Prize.










Dr Hargobind Khorana
Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology (1968)
Dr Hargobind Khorana was born on 9th January 1922 at Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). Dr Khorana was responsible for producing the first man-made gene in his laboratory in the early seventies. This historic invention won him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968 sharing it with Marshall Nuremberg and Robert Holley for interpreting the genetic code and analyzing its function in protein synthesis.












Dr Subramaniam Chandrasekar
Nobel Prize for physics (1983)
Subramaniam Chandrashekhar was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, India (later part of Pakistan). He attended Presidency College from 1925 to 1930, following in the footsteps of his famous uncle, Sir C V Raman. His work spanned over the understanding of the rotation of planets, stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his theoretical work on stars and their evolution.






Mother Teresa (1910 - 1997)
Nobel Prize for peace (1979)
Born in 1910, Skoplje, Yugoslavia (then Turkey) and originally named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa dedicated her life to helping the poor, the sick, and the dying around the world, particularly those in India, working through the Missionaries Of Charity in Calcutta.


Amartya Sen
Nobel Prize for Economics (1998)
Born in 1933, Bolpur, in West Bengal, Amartya Sen is the latest in the list of Indian Nobel Laureates. He was honored with the Nobel Prize for his work in Welfare economics. When Thailand's Baht plummeted, markets from Bombay to New York were in turmoil and there was talk of worldwide depression, Sen's argument that growth should be accompanied by democratic decision-making seemed only too correct.


Other Nobel Prize Laureates related to India



Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
British writer, Rudyard Kipling wrote novels, poems and short stories -- mostly set in India and Burma (now known as Myanmar). He was the 1907 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature "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."












V S Naipaul (1932- )
British writer of Indian origin, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2001 "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."