Indian Nobel Prize Winners

Indian Nobel Prize Winners

Rabindranath Tagore was the only Indian Nobel literature laureate. In 1913, In his acceptance speech, he said, "I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother."

Sir C.V. Raman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his work in the field of light scattering. This effect is now named after him — the Raman scattering. In his speech, he said he was inspired by the "wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea", during a voyage to Europe in 1921.

Hargobind Khorana  (far right) shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968, with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley by showing the the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids. In his speech, he thanked " a very large number of devoted colleagues, chemists and biochemists" .

S. Chandrasekhar, along with William A. Fowler won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for their mathematical theory of black holes. The Chandrasekhar limit is named after him. In his speech, he quoted Tagore's Gitanjali and said, "May I, on behalf of my wife and myself, express our immense gratitude to the Nobel Foundation for this noble reception in this noble city?"

Again a first and only, Amartya Sen won The Prize in Economics in 1998. In his speech, which he began with a "silly thought", he said, "economists too can learn from the kind of open minded reasoning employed by Tagore and Chandrasekhar".

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace prize in 1979. In a lecture played on the day of the ceremony, she said, "We must give each other until it hurts. It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbour."

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". In his speech, he thanked "the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants".

Kailash Satyarthi who won the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 at his Bachpan Bachao Aandolan office soon after announcement of the prize, in New Delhi. An avid follower of Gandhian philosophy, he vowed that "the fight would continue".