The colonising spirit of the British elite and the aspirational spirit of the Indian wealthy have linked a Cambridge-educated computing pioneer and an Indian software magnate.
The sprawling bungalow in Coonoor in the Nilgiri hills now owned by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani was once occupied by the grandfather of Alan Turing, the British mathematician, computer visionary and WWII code-breaker. Turing’s tragic suicide at the age of 41 cut short a fascinating life marked by inquiry, mathematics, social adjustment, an obsession with machines, and homosexuality. Turing has been portrayed in the movie The Imitation Game by heart-throb Benedict Cumberbatch. The Imitation Game opens in India on January 16.
Turing headed a team that cracked complex and seemingly impenetrable communication ciphers used by the Germany military. His efforts contributed to the Allied victory over the Nazis, but Turing was arrested and persecuted by the same government when his sexuality was revealed. He killed himself in 1954.
Loyal servants of the British Raj
The Imitation Game is based on Andrews Hodges’s acclaimed biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Hodges’s exhaustive account of Turing’s life, written in 1983, opens with the observation that Turing was “a son of the British Empire”. The Cambridge don’s grandfather, John Robert Turing, had an ancestor who had made a fortune in India in the late eighteenth century.
John Robert Turing sired ten children, of whom son Arthur died in the North-West Frontier Province in 1899 while serving in the Indian Army. His daughter, Sybil "became a Deaconess and took the Gospel to the obstinate subjects of the Raj”, Hodges writes.
A scholar-administrator
Alan Turing’s father, Julius, served the Raj the longest. Julius studied literature and history at the Corpus Christi college in Oxford and ranked seventh in the Indian Civil Service examination in 1896. His subjects were “various branches of the Indian law, the Tamil language and the history of British India”.
Julius Turing was posted in the Madras Presidency in 1896. He served in the Bellary, Kurnool and Vishakhapatnam districts. During a voyage home in 1907, he met his future wife, Ethel Stoney, who was also “the product of generations of empire builders”, Hodges writes. Stoney’s father, Edward Waller Stoney had “amassed a considerable fortune” while being posted in India as chief engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway. He was responsible for the construction of the Tungabhadra Bridge, and possessed the patent for Stoney’s Silent Punkah-Wheel, which eliminated the squeaky noise usually associated with the hand-operated wind generator.
Edward’s son Richard was also an engineer in India. A daughter, Evelyn, married one Major Kirwan of the Indian Army. Ethel Stoney was born in Podanur in Coimbatore in 1881, and spent some years in Coonoor. She met Julius Turing while returning to England on a ship in 1907. The couple went back to India the following year, where their first son, John, was born in the Stoney bungalow in Coonoor.
Travels around India
Julius Turing’s travels took him all over India, including to Chatrapur in Odisha. It was here that Alan Turing was conceived. “At this obscure imperial station, a port on the east coast, the first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart,” Hodges writes.
Alan was born in London on June 23, 1912. As a child, he “never saw the kind Indian servants, nor the bright colours of the east”, Hodges says, since he was brought up in England. But the empire shaped and scarred his childhood and early adolescence. His parents left him and John in the care of various foster families after they returned to India.
Julius Turing resigned from the ICS in 1926 after being denied a promotion to the Chief Secretary post of the Madras Government. His prodigious but emotionally troubled son continued the family tradition of scientific study and invention in later year. Alan Turing’s maternal grandfather’s home in Coonoor was bought a few years ago by Nilekani, in one of those coincidences that makes no sense and perfect sense.
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The sprawling bungalow in Coonoor in the Nilgiri hills now owned by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani was once occupied by the grandfather of Alan Turing, the British mathematician, computer visionary and WWII code-breaker. Turing’s tragic suicide at the age of 41 cut short a fascinating life marked by inquiry, mathematics, social adjustment, an obsession with machines, and homosexuality. Turing has been portrayed in the movie The Imitation Game by heart-throb Benedict Cumberbatch. The Imitation Game opens in India on January 16.
Turing headed a team that cracked complex and seemingly impenetrable communication ciphers used by the Germany military. His efforts contributed to the Allied victory over the Nazis, but Turing was arrested and persecuted by the same government when his sexuality was revealed. He killed himself in 1954.
Loyal servants of the British Raj
The Imitation Game is based on Andrews Hodges’s acclaimed biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Hodges’s exhaustive account of Turing’s life, written in 1983, opens with the observation that Turing was “a son of the British Empire”. The Cambridge don’s grandfather, John Robert Turing, had an ancestor who had made a fortune in India in the late eighteenth century.
John Robert Turing sired ten children, of whom son Arthur died in the North-West Frontier Province in 1899 while serving in the Indian Army. His daughter, Sybil "became a Deaconess and took the Gospel to the obstinate subjects of the Raj”, Hodges writes.
A scholar-administrator
Alan Turing’s father, Julius, served the Raj the longest. Julius studied literature and history at the Corpus Christi college in Oxford and ranked seventh in the Indian Civil Service examination in 1896. His subjects were “various branches of the Indian law, the Tamil language and the history of British India”.
Julius Turing was posted in the Madras Presidency in 1896. He served in the Bellary, Kurnool and Vishakhapatnam districts. During a voyage home in 1907, he met his future wife, Ethel Stoney, who was also “the product of generations of empire builders”, Hodges writes. Stoney’s father, Edward Waller Stoney had “amassed a considerable fortune” while being posted in India as chief engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway. He was responsible for the construction of the Tungabhadra Bridge, and possessed the patent for Stoney’s Silent Punkah-Wheel, which eliminated the squeaky noise usually associated with the hand-operated wind generator.
Edward’s son Richard was also an engineer in India. A daughter, Evelyn, married one Major Kirwan of the Indian Army. Ethel Stoney was born in Podanur in Coimbatore in 1881, and spent some years in Coonoor. She met Julius Turing while returning to England on a ship in 1907. The couple went back to India the following year, where their first son, John, was born in the Stoney bungalow in Coonoor.
Travels around India
Julius Turing’s travels took him all over India, including to Chatrapur in Odisha. It was here that Alan Turing was conceived. “At this obscure imperial station, a port on the east coast, the first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart,” Hodges writes.
Alan was born in London on June 23, 1912. As a child, he “never saw the kind Indian servants, nor the bright colours of the east”, Hodges says, since he was brought up in England. But the empire shaped and scarred his childhood and early adolescence. His parents left him and John in the care of various foster families after they returned to India.
Julius Turing resigned from the ICS in 1926 after being denied a promotion to the Chief Secretary post of the Madras Government. His prodigious but emotionally troubled son continued the family tradition of scientific study and invention in later year. Alan Turing’s maternal grandfather’s home in Coonoor was bought a few years ago by Nilekani, in one of those coincidences that makes no sense and perfect sense.