When a soft-spoken Bengali writer named Rabindranath Tagore accepted the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his poetry collection, Gitanjali, it was the first time that a non-European had cracked Alfred Nobel’s posthumous, eponymous prize for literary achievement. Tagore was given the award “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse.” For a brief moment, it felt as if Tagore would pave the way for the recognition of the Indian subcontinent’s vast intellectual heft.
But fast-forward to over a century later, and the gaps are glaring. South Asia is home to millennia of scientific, mathematical, and literary insights. But it’s produced fewer than 24 Nobel laureates in 124 years across six categories. Despite scientific luminaries, C.V. Raman, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Abdus Salam’s prizes in physics remain some of the few. No South Asian has won a Nobel for literature since Tagore. After this year’s winners, we’re forced to ask: why aren’t South Asians, a quarter of the world’s population, winning our fair share of the prizes?