His wife Janakiammal had the most valid justification for matricide when she found all those letters her mother hid in the shelves, don't you think? Why didn't the mother just throw them away / destroy them? Why didn't Janakiammal mail them herself?
As an aside, do you know who played her mother and father? It wasn't obvious in IMDB nor Wikipedia.
I wanted to kill the mother myself. What a selfish beyotch.
shareAnyone know if that really happened in real life?
I imagine it was just for the movie, but trust me when I say that quite a few Indian mother in laws are that evil.
No, it didn't happen, and neither did the assault by the British soldier, all this stuff was made up to create phony drama, as if there wasn't already sufficient drama in the tragic life of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
shareRobert Kanigel describes this in the biography which has been the basis for this movie. P. 274: "Finally, of course, her letters to Ramanujan were intercepted, as his were to her." P. 272: "Ramanujan got no letters from Janaki not because she didn't write them but because his mother intercepted them". Ramanujan himself wrote to Hardy that he received only a few formal letters from his wife.
Kanigel cites several sources that indian child wives more often than not had a truly dire life, and the only possible protection from a tyrannic mother-in-law could come from their husband. Of course the romance aspect in the movie is total nonsense considering that his wife was 14 years old when he left India.
OTOH one thing Ramanujan's mother gets a lot of blame for by people who knew her is that she "apparently kept them from sleeping together as husband and wife" during the time before Ramanujan left India. Ramanujan was 21 years old when they married, and she was 9 years old. Obviously there are some aspects of Indian culture which are plain despicable from a western point of view, and it is hard to judge the actions of individuals without an in-depths knowledge of the circumstances. Kanigel makes it quite clear that in lots of aspects Ramanujan's mother treated his wife like dirt, so maybe she acted out of jealousy when preventing intercourse.
so maybe she acted out of jealousy when preventing intercourse.
You simply make things up as you go. If you ever bother to look inside the book I quoted, the author states on p. 274: "Those close to Janaki, however, suggested some of the basis for her resentment. While Ramanujan remained in India, Komalatammal apparently kept them from sleeping together as husband and wife.“
The book is a very detailed, serious, well-researched biography. So as long as there is no better source claiming the opposite, it appears that the people close to Ramanujan’s family considered it as unusual and strange that intercourse was prohibited by Ramanujan’s mother.
Also I do not know whether this is about intercourse when his wife was 9 years old, but I would consider intercourse of a 13 or 14 years old with a person which is 12 years older as absolutely appalling too.
From the The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History p. 61:
In 1891 the Indian "Age of Consent Act raised the age of consent for penetrative sexual intercourse from ten to telve for both married and unmarried girls.[…] In practice, however, enforcement of the act was virtually impossible […] The scope of the act was limited even further when [..] the government ordered that only Indian magistrates, not the police, were to investigate subjects."
At the time, Western societies practiced child marriage as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
United Kingdom:
"The English common law had traditionally set the age of consent within the range of 10 to 12, but in 1875 the age was raised to 13."
"A wide variety of reform groups held protest meetings and marched together to Hyde Park demanding that the age of consent be raised. The government was forced to propose the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent to 16 and clamped down on prostitution."
United States:
"In the United States, as late as the 1880s most States set the minimum age at 10–12 (in Delaware it was 7 in 1895)."
"The campaign was successful, with almost all states raising the minimum age to 16–18 years by 1920."
The mother was played by Arundhati Nag, a pretty well known face in Bollywood films. I'm not sure I saw a father.
As for why the wife didn't mail the letters herself, well in India, especially among the Tamil Brahmin community (who are basically like the highest class of Brahmins, who themselves were at the top of the class chain above the royalty), girls going out alone in public and interacting with strange males was forbidden, even during the 80s in most rural areas... you can only imagine what it was like during the 1920s.