Thinkers Timeline

Savitribai Phule (1831-1897) was an Indian teacher, poet, and social reformer who is widely recognised as the first female teacher of India and one of the founders of girls' education in the country. She was born in Naigaon, a small village in what is now the state of Maharashtra. Her family were farmers from the Mali caste — a community that faced social restrictions in the caste system but was not among the most oppressed. She was married at the age of nine to Jyotirao Phule, who was thirteen. This was normal for the time, when child marriage was widespread. What happened next was not normal. Jyotirao recognised that his young wife was intelligent and deserved an education, which was denied to almost all women and all lower-caste people in the India of that period. He began teaching her at home. She was a quick student. Within a few years she was literate in Marathi and beginning to read English. In 1848, when Savitribai was seventeen and Jyotirao was twenty-one, they opened a school for girls in Pune. This was an extraordinary act. Girls of any caste were not supposed to be educated. Lower-caste children were particularly forbidden from learning. Savitribai was the first woman in India to teach in a formal school. On her way to teach each day, people threw stones and cow dung at her. She reportedly carried a second sari so she could change when she arrived at school. The couple later opened schools for Dalit children (the community then called untouchables), a well for drinking water open to all castes at a time when lower-caste people were denied clean water, and a home for pregnant women who had been abandoned. Savitribai wrote poetry in Marathi. Her collections Kavya Phule (Poetry's Flowers, 1854) and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (1891) are considered among the earliest examples of modern Marathi poetry. She adopted the son of a widow she had helped and raised him as her own. After Jyotirao's death in 1890, she continued their work alone. She died in 1897 while caring for patients during a plague epidemic in Pune; she caught the disease from a boy whose life she had tried to save.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was an Indian poet, philosopher, and educator from Bengal, a region now divided between India and Bangladesh. He was born into a wealthy and intellectually active family in Kolkata and grew up surrounded by art, music, literature, and philosophical discussion. He began writing poetry as a child and became one of the most celebrated writers in the Bengali language, producing poetry, short stories, novels, plays, songs, and essays throughout his long life. In 1913 he became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also composed the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, the only person to have composed the national anthem of two countries. But he was not only a writer. He founded an experimental school at Santiniketan in 1901 that was built on his philosophy of education: learning through nature, creativity, and joy rather than through rigid discipline and examination. He was deeply engaged with political questions including Indian independence, but he was also a sharp critic of nationalism, which he saw as a dangerous force. He travelled widely across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and believed deeply in the possibility of genuine dialogue between cultures.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician born in 1887 in Erode, a small town in Tamil Nadu. His family was poor but educated. His father was a clerk and his mother was a devout Hindu. From a young age, he loved numbers. By the age of twelve, he was working through advanced mathematics books on his own. He had very little formal mathematical training. He failed his college exams because he spent all his time on mathematics and neglected other subjects. He lost his scholarship. He worked as a clerk in Madras and did mathematics in every spare moment. He filled notebooks with thousands of results, many of which were new and surprising. In 1913, he wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at Cambridge University in England. The letter contained strange and beautiful formulas. Hardy was amazed. He invited Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914. The two men worked together for five years. Ramanujan produced brilliant results on number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Life in England was hard. The climate was cold. The food was wrong for his vegetarian diet. He became very ill, possibly with tuberculosis or a parasitic infection. He returned to India in 1919 and died in 1920, aged only 32. His notebooks are still being studied today.

B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and philosopher. His full name was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He was born into a Dalit family, the community then called Untouchables, who occupied the lowest position in India's caste hierarchy and were subjected to severe discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Despite the enormous obstacles placed in front of him by the caste system, Ambedkar became one of the most educated people in India of his generation, earning doctorates from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics. He spent his life fighting against caste as a system of oppression and arguing for the full rights and dignity of Dalit people. He was the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, which he designed to protect the rights of all citizens and to prohibit caste discrimination. In the last year of his life, he converted to Buddhism along with hundreds of thousands of his followers, an act he understood as both a spiritual choice and a rejection of the Hindu caste system. He died in 1956, just weeks after completing his final manuscript.

Ravi Shankar was an Indian musician. He played the sitar, a long-necked string instrument from northern India. He is the most famous Indian classical musician of the 20th century. He was born in 1920 in the city of Varanasi (also called Banaras), in northern India. He came from a Bengali Brahmin family. His father was a lawyer and scholar who left the family when Ravi was young. His older brother Uday Shankar was a famous dancer who toured the world with an Indian dance company. As a boy, Ravi joined his brother's troupe. He travelled across Europe and America as a young dancer and musician. He met many Western artists in this period. At 18, he made a serious decision. He left his brother's company and went to study music seriously with a great teacher named Allauddin Khan in central India. He spent seven years in Khan's home, training intensively in the strict Indian classical tradition. This kind of long apprenticeship was traditional. The teacher was almost a parent. Ravi later married Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, who was also a brilliant musician. From the 1950s onwards, his career grew rapidly. He performed across India, then in Europe and America. In the 1960s he became famous in the West, partly because of his friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles. He continued performing into his nineties. He had a complex personal life, with several partners and four children, including the musicians Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. He died in San Diego in 2012, aged 92.

Amartya Sen (born 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. He was born in West Bengal, India, and grew up during a period of great upheaval: as a child he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which around three million people died of hunger. This experience shaped his life's work. He studied economics in India and then at Cambridge University in England, where he later became a professor. He has also taught at Harvard University in the United States, where he has spent much of his career. In 1998 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty, and inequality. He is best known outside economics for two connected contributions: the capabilities approach, a new way of measuring human development and wellbeing, and his analysis of famine, which showed that famines are not caused by a shortage of food but by political failures that leave some people unable to afford the food that exists. He has also written important books on democracy, justice, identity, and the relationship between freedom and development.

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (1941-2010) was an Indian-American management scholar whose ideas about corporate strategy, core competence, and the business opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid transformed how companies and development thinkers approached both strategy and poverty. He was born in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, the son of a judge and a civil servant. He studied physics at Loyola College, Madras, and worked for four years in an Indian branch of Union Carbide, the American chemical company, before entering the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In 1972 he travelled to the United States for doctoral work at Harvard Business School, completing his thesis in 1975. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1977 and remained there for the rest of his career. His 1990 Harvard Business Review article with Gary Hamel, The Core Competence of the Corporation, became one of the most-cited business articles ever written and reshaped strategic thinking through the 1990s. His later work took him in a different direction. His 2002 article and 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid argued that the world's poorest four billion people represented not only a moral claim on international attention but also a significant market that could be served profitably if products and business models were designed appropriately. The book reached business schools, development agencies, and corporations. He continued publishing influential work until his death, wrote regularly for Indian newspapers on the country's development, and mentored a generation of scholars and practitioners. He died in San Diego in 2010 at the age of sixty-eight.