Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
You're right, some Indians don't have the recognition they deserve, but if it makes you feel better, few "western" mathematicians or scientists are household names either.
Fwiw Chandra, Rao, and Bose are instantly recognizable to me. I’m not a mathematician or physicist and don’t know the other folks. That said I am very aware that Indians have made significant contributions to math, physics and I imagine other disciplines.
This is entirely the fault of the Indian Education System and Popular Media. The current generation knows almost nothing about these Indian Greats.
In order to rectify the status quo;
1) Everybody should get the monthly magazine Science Reporter published by National Institute of Science Communication and Policy Research (NIScPR), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India. which gives a overview into Indian Science - https://sciencereporter.niscpr.res.in/
2) The two-volume The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. published by Springer contains essays from many of our recent Scientists/Researchers/Engineers etc. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2
3) Books on Indian Science/Scientists by various authors are available on Amazon India and are worth getting.
Universities press in India had bought out a series of books by G Venkataraman called Vignettes in Physics it also had books on Saha, Bhabha, Bose, Chandra and Raman. https://universitiespress.com/books?id=0&sid=161
National Book Trust also has several books on Indian scientists.
What about Madhava of Sangamagrama[1], who (among other things) described various Taylor expansions for trigonometric functions (including an estimate of the error term) in the 14th century? (ie 300 years before James Gregory discovered the method for the Taylor expansion in the West).
Part of the answer is that research funding in India is predominantly from the public sector, and investments in pure science research have been low for a long time (not that applied sciences are doing much better). Thus many researchers lack the resources for experimental science whereas theoretical study is more accessible.
Ah. I was only comparing with other 'pure' disciplines like analysis and topology/geometry, but I guess these are still more strongly connected to applied things.
Chandras(h?)ekhar is already there, at least if you're the kind of nerd who knows about physics at all. Probably even more so than Ramanujan, but that could just be my science bias as a kid.
