List of Indian Nobel laureates

First instituted in 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a total of 989 individuals (930 men and 59 women) and 30 organizations as of 2022.[1] Among the recipients, 12 are Indians of which 5 are Indian citizens and 7 are of Indian ancestry or residency. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian citizen to be awarded and also first Asian to be awarded in 1913. Mother Teresa is the only woman among the list of recipients.[2] Sri Aurobindo, the Indian poet, philosopher, nationalist and developer of Integral yoga, was nominated unsuccessfully for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.[3][4]

The Nobel Prize

On 1 December 1999, the Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed that Mahatma Gandhi was nominated unsuccessfully for the Peace Prize five times (from 1937 to 1939, in 1947 and a few days before he was assassinated in January 1948).[5] In 2006, Geir Lundestad, the Secretary of Norwegian Nobel Committee, cited it as "the greatest omission in our 106-year history".[6][7][8]

Laureates

Two (Tagore and Raman) of the Nobel laureates are citizens of British India at the time they were awarded. Three (Teresa, Sen, and Satyarthi) of the Nobel laureates are citizens of India and four (Khorana, Chandrasekhar, Ramakrishnan, and Banerjee) were Indian by birth but subsequently non-citizens of India. One (Naipaul) is a Trinidad and Tobago born British Nobel laureate of Indian origin.

YearImageLaureateBornDiedFieldCitation
Citizens of British India
1913 Rabindranath Tagore (Khulna district, Bengal, now Bangladesh)7 May 1861
Kolkata, Bengal, now West Bengal
7 August 1941
Kolkata, Bengal, now West Bengal
Literature"because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."[9]
1930 Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (Thanjavur district, Madras, now Tamil Nadu)7 November 1888
Tiruchirapalli, Madras, now Tamil Nadu
21 November 1970
Bangalore, Karnataka
Physics"for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."[10]
Citizens of India
1979 Teresa Bojaxhiu, M.C. (Ottoman, now North Macedonia)26 August 1910
Skopje, Ottoman, now North Macedonia
5 September 1997
Kolkata, West Bengal
Peace"for her work for bringing help to suffering humanity."[11]
1998 Amartya Sen (Dhaka district, Bengal, now Bangladesh)3 November 1933
Santiniketan, Bolpur, Bengal, now West Bengal
Economics"for his contributions to welfare economics."[12]
2014 Kailash Satyarthi (Vidisha district, Madhya Pradesh)11 January 1954
Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh
Peace"for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education."[13]
(awarded together with Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai)
Diaspora[a]
1968 Har Gobind Khorana (Multan district, Punjab, now Pakistan's Punjab)9 January 1922
Raipur, Punjab, now Pakistan's Punjab
9 November 2011
Concord, Massachusetts, United States
Physiology or Medicine"for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis."[14]
(awarded together with American biochemists Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley)
1983 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Thanjavur district, Madras, now Tamil Nadu)19 October 1910
Lahore, Punjab, now Pakistan's Punjab
21 August 1995
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Physics"for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars."[15]
(awarded together with American astrophysicist William Alfred Fowler)
2001 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (Gorakhpur district, United Province, now Uttar Pradesh)17 August 1932, Chaguanas Borough Corporation, Trinidad and Tobago11 August 2018, London, United KingdomLiterature
2009 Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan (Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu)1 April 1952
Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu
Chemistry"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."[16]
(awarded together with American biochemist Thomas A. Steitz and Israeli crystallographer Ada Yonath)
2019 Abhijit Banerjee (Hooghly district, West Bengal)21 February 1961
Mumbai, Maharashtra
Economics"for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty"
(awarded together with his wife Esther Duflo and American economist Michael Kremer)
Expatriates
1902 Ronald Ross13 May 1857
Almora, Uttarakhand
16 September 1932
London, United Kingdom
Physiology or Medicine"for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it."[17]
1907 Joseph Rudyard Kipling30 December 1865
Malabar Hill, South Mumbai, Maharashtra
18 January 1936
London, United Kingdom
Literature"in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."[18]

Nominees

ImageLaureateBornDiedYears NominatedCitationNominator(s)
Peace
Nicholas Roerich19 October 1874 in Saint Petersburg, Russia13 December 1947 in Naggar, Himachal Pradesh, India1929"for his dedication to the cause of preserving art and architecture during times of war."[19]Georges Chklaver[b]
(1897–1970)
  Switzerland
1933Mikhail von Taube[c]
(1869–1961)
 Russia
1935Henry Pratt Fairchild
(1880–1956)
 United States
Sol Bloom
(1870–1949)
 United States
Annie Wood Besant1 October 1847 in Clapham, England, United Kingdom20 September 1933 in Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India1931"for having been actively involved in educational and humanitarian work in India, establishing the Indian Home Rule League and for her efforts to solve the Indian "problem", thereby securing world peace by uniting East and West."[20]Peter Freeman
(1888–1956)
 United Kingdom
Raja Mahendra Pratap1 December 1886 in Mursan, Uttar Pradesh, India29 April 1979 in Madras, Tamil Nadu, India1932"for travelling around the world to create awareness about the situation in Afghanistan and India."[21]Nils August Nilsson
(1860–1940)
 Sweden
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi2 October 1869
Porbandar, Gujarat
30 January 1948
New Delhi, Delhi
1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, 1948[22]
Physics
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman7 November 1888
Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu
21 November 1970
Bangalore, Karnataka
1929, 1930"for his work in the field of light scattering and the discovery of a modified scattering called Raman effect."[23]
Meghnad Saha6 October 1893
Dhaka, Bangladesh
16 February 1956
New Delhi
1930, 1937, 1939, 1940, 1951, 1955"for developing the Saha ionization equation, used to describe chemical and physical conditions in stars."[24]
Arthur Edwin Kennelly*17 December 1861
Colaba, Mumbai, Maharashtra
18 June 1939
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
1935"for his contributions to the theory of electrical transmission and to the development of international electrical standards."[25]
Homi Jehangir Bhabha30 October 1909
Mumbai, Maharashtra
24 January 1966
Mont Blanc, Alps, France
1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956"for his discovery of the cascade process of cosmic radiation and Bhabha Scattering in quantum electrodynamics."[26]Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963)
Satyendra Nath Bose1 January 1894
Kolkata, West Bengal
4 February 1974
Kolkata, West Bengal
1956, 1959, 1962, 1968, 1969"for developing the foundation for Bose statistics and the theory of the Bose condensate in quantum mechanics."[27]
Robert Hanbury Brown*31 August 1916
Aruvankadu, Tamil Nadu
16 January 2002
Andover, Hampshire, United Kingdom
1965, 1966"for developing the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect leading to the creation of intensity interferometers."[28][29]
Richard Quinn Twiss*24 August 1920
Shimla, Himachal Pradesh
20 May 2005
Sydney, Australia
Chemistry
Roger John Williams*14 August 1893
Ooty, Tamil Nadu
20 February 1988
Austin, Texas, United States
1960"for his work on vitamins, particularly on discovering and isolating vitamin B6, lipoic acid, and avidin."[30]
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran8 October 1922
Ernakulam, Kerala
7 April 2001
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
1964"for developing the Ramachandran plot for understanding peptide structure."[31]Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888–1970)
Thiruvengadam Rajendram Seshadri3 February 1900
Kulithalai, Tamil Nadu
27 September 1975
New Delhi
1966, 1968"for his research on oxygen heterocyclic compounds."[32]
  • N. Subba Rao (?)
  • B. Jain (?)
Literature
Joseph Rudyard Kipling*30 December 1865
Malabar Hill, South Mumbai, Maharashtra
18 January 1936
London, United Kingdom
1903, 1904, 1905,
1907
[33]
Rabindranath Tagore7 May 1861
Kolkata, West Bengal
7 August 1941
Kolkata, West Bengal
1913[34]Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944)
Rabindranath Datta1 October 1883
Kolkata, West Bengal
6 July 1917
Kolkata, West Bengal
1916[35]
  • Mano Gangedy (?)
  • Raya Yatindra Chondhury (?)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan5 September 1888
Thiruttani, Tamil Nadu
17 April 1975
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
1933, 1934, 1935,
1936, 1937, 1952,
1956, 1957, 1958,
1960, 1961, 1962,
1963
[36]
James Cousins*22 July 1873
Belfast, Northern Ireland
20 February 1956
Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh
1935[37]Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)
Hari Mohan Banerjee1936[38]Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar (1875–1950)
Bensadhar Majumdar1937, 1939[39]
  • Sen Satyendranath (1909–?)
  • Mukundadeb Chatterjee (?)
Mohammad Hosain Khan
(probably Mohammad Habib (1895–1971))
1938[40]Per Hallström (1866–1960)
Sanjib Chaudhuri1938, 1939[41]
Sri Aurobindo Ghose15 August 1872
Kolkata, West Bengal
5 December 1950
Pondicherry, Union Territory of Puducherry
1943[42]Francis Younghusband (1863–1942)
Sachidananda Routray13 May 1916
Gurujang, Odisha
21 August 2004
Cuttack, Odisha
1959[43]Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968)
Lawrence Durrell*27 February 1912
Jalandhar, Punjab
7 November 1990
Sommières, Gard, France
1961, 1962, 1963,
1964, 1965, 1966,
1967, 1969, 1971
[44]
Gopal Singh29 November 1917
Panaji, Goa
8 August 1990
Panaji, Goa
1965[45]
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay27 July 1898
Labhpur, West Bengal
14 September 1971
Kolkata, West Bengal
1971[46]Krishna Kripalani (1907–1992)
Indira Devi Dhanrajgir17 August 1930
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
1973[47]Krishna Srinivas
(1913–2007)
 India
Pratap Narayan Tandon1973[48]Brij Behari Nayak (?)
 India

See also

Notes

References