A complex equation

Playing Shakuntala Devi, says Vidya Balan, was about understanding the nuances of her multifaceted personality

- PRIYANKA BHADANI

Unlike everyone around her who has memories of meeting mathematician Shakuntala Devi when she visited their school or at one of her talks, filmmaker Anu Menon does not have any such recollection. An engineering graduate, Menon had not even read any of her books. But knowledge about Devi, she says, is like one of those old Hindi songs “that you just know”. After directing the critically acclaimed Waiting (2015) and co-directing the first season of Four More Shots Please! (2019), Menon was looking for the story of a woman in maths “because we rarely tell such stories”. The first name that came up was that of Devi. The fact that the mathematician’s daughter, Anupama Banerji, lived in London, where Menon is based, helped. The film Shakuntala Devi premieres on Amazon Prime Video on July 31.

Devi, a math wizard known as the “human computer”, simplified complex mathematical equations for countless students. Her name was included in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1982 for multiplying two 13-digit numbers in just 28 seconds. In the 1970s, Devi’s husband, Paritosh Banerji, an IAS officer, came out as gay. It inspired her to write a book on homosexuality called The World of Homosexuals—an empathetic “inquiry into the lives of a minority of her fellow humans who have lived half-hiding throughout their lives”.

“We had so much information that we had to figure out what was actually going into the film,” says Menon, who did interviews lasting several hours with Banerji. “We got an intimate peep into everything there was to [know about] Shakuntala Devi. We matched [our research] with what Anupama provided us—her memories, anecdotes, and a wealth of photographs.”