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The Ashkenazim of India



By Sadanand Dhume

October 20, 2011, 2:59 pm





Over at The American, Lazar Berman has a fascinating story about the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, a subject that has also been written about by AEI’s Charles Murray. In passing, Berman mentions how, relative to its population of 1.1 billion people, India has produced few Nobelists—between six and eight depending on how you count.



In itself, this is hardly surprising for a poor country yet to achieve universal literacy. Drill down further, however, and you come upon an obscure factoid mentioned by the historian Patrick French in his book India: A Portrait. Three of the four Indians or persons of Indian origin who have won a science Nobel come from a community said to number under 2 million people—Brahmins from Tamil Nadu. They include C. V. Raman (physics, 1930), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar (physics, 1983), and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (chemistry, 2009). The odd man out: Punjab-born Hargobind Khorana, who won a Nobel for medicine in 1968. The tiny Tamil Brahmin community also accounts for Viswanathan Anand, India’s only world chess champion, and the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.



Needless to say, there are perfectly reasonable non-genetic explanations that can explain this peculiar preponderance. For one, Brahmin priests have a tradition of literacy that goes back to antiquity. For much of recorded history, they more or less monopolized traditional education, which gave them, and their descendants, a big leg up when Indians took to modern education under the British. But this still doesn’t explain why only Tamil Brahmins, and not their Bengali, Maharashtrian, or Uttar Pradesh counterparts, stand out in this manner.



In India, public discussion of this subject is more or less verboten. Caste is a touchy subject, and any such debate would likely devolve quickly into an exercise in caste chauvinism and name calling. Nonetheless, maybe it’s time for scientists to study the over-achieving Tamil Brahmin community with a view towards determining how much of its success in math, music, and science can be credited to nurture and how much to nature. Until then, it’s intriguing to think of Tamil Brahmins as the Ashkenazim of India.



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