Roddam Narasimha of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru has written an editorial for the CURRENT SCIENCE journal, February 2015. It is about the special session on indian science in the indian science congress held in jan 2015.
The end of the editorial is worth reminiscing and I hope the the govt, universities and traditional scholars will work to unearth past published literature to general use, and encourage more students to study the same. Our forefathers had expertly led a blended life combining spiritual, religious and mundane scientific domains with perfect balance. Our astronomers had no difficulty in accepting rahu/ketu and numerical solutions for eclipses, as the domains are different.
"To make that happen is a responsibility that scientists here must accept, working in close collaboration with friendly outsiders. Our youth are hungry for a sensible knowledge of our past, but are denied an opportunity to acquire it by a marvellous educational system that shuns history in science curricula, and by the paucity of attractive but reliable accounts of the fascinating history of Indic ideas. Our academies, universities, museums and other institutions need to make such a project a national mission. Anything less would be irrational blindness to a unique legacy."
Excerpts:
The 102nd Indian Science Congress, meeting at Mumbai during 3–7 January 2015, was dominated by loud national debate about the history of science in India, a subject that does not normally figure on the Congress programme.
The centre of the controversy was a symposium on ‘Ancient science through Sanskrit’, organized for the Congress essentially by a group of Sanskrit scholars and academics. Surely it is appropriate for the Congress to debate the subject, especially as there are such polarized views on it.
Now the debates surrounding the Congress generated three specific controversies.
The first concerned ancient Indian aviation technology.
The work seems traceable to an original dictated by a self-taught, impoverished but serious Sanskrit scholar in Karnataka sometime during 1900–1922, and could not have been Vedic by any criterion. This effort at creating a false history of Indic science is a spectacularly bad example of the absurd lengths to which attempts at glorification of our past can go.
But the other two controversies were of the opposite kind.
One concerned the ‘theorem of Pythagoras’ (5th century BCE), although there is no record of even a statement of the theorem by Pythagoras. An explicit statement of the theorem does however appear in Baudhayana’s Sulva Sutra (a manual of the ritual geometry needed in the construction of Vedic fire altars), asserting the equivalent theorem that the square of the diagonal of a rectangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. The date of the work lies roughly between the 5th and 8th century BCE. Thus Baudhayana’s assertion of one of the hoary results in geometry is the earliest available record in the world, and predates Pythagoras.
The third controversy concerns plastic surgery, which seems to have been driven in several parts of the world by the need to repair broken noses (apparently an ancient and common punishment worldwide), cleft lips, etc. Suśruta consolidated Indic ayurvedic
knowledge in an encyclopaedic and foundational text called the Suśruta Samhita. This included the practice of plastic surgery, in which India clearly remained well ahead of the rest of the world. Thus the first major rhinoplasty in modern West was performed as late as 1815 by a British surgeon who had served in India for 20 years, and was triggered by British press reports about how Maratha soldiers who had lost their noses in the Anglo-Mysore wars were surgically set right in Pune. There was no European competition to so-called ‘Indian Nose’, so Indic claims on plastic surgery seem to be on solid ground.
Regarding the scientific temper issue, even a cursory examination of classical Indic philosophy and scientific thinking shows that a strong rationalistic streak has been present, side by side with mythology of some kind, for almost as many millennia as our civilization has flourished.
Finally, a few words about Indic mathematics, which I consider has not yet gained the global or domestic recognition it deserves. Apart from the well-known numeral system, and the algorithmic/computational revolution it sparked, the number of advances made in India long before they were (re-)discovered in Europe keeps increasing as we learn more of our own history. Look at these examples: a large part of algebra, first solutions to linear and quadratic indeterminate equations (Aryabhata, Brahmagupta); the binomial theorem, the combinatorial formula and Pascal’s triangle (Pingala 3rd century); second-order interpolation formulas and the Newton–Raphson method (Brahmagupta), the Fibonacci numbers (Virahanka 700 CE, Hemachandra ~1150 CE); the basics of differentials, maxima of functions, mean value theorem, etc. (Bhaskara ~12th century, Munjala ~ 800 CE); infinite series, and a precursor of what later came to be known as calculus and analysis (Madhava 14th century): so the list goes on. These contributions are not just ‘little’ mathematics, and the ‘big picture’ of their collective influence on the world was succinctly and accurately summarized by Hermann Weyl when he wrote (Preface to The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics, 1928):
‘Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the Greek view and followed a course which seems to have originated in India and which has been transmitted, with additions, to us by the Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as logically prior to the concepts of geometry.’
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0471.pdf
The end of the editorial is worth reminiscing and I hope the the govt, universities and traditional scholars will work to unearth past published literature to general use, and encourage more students to study the same. Our forefathers had expertly led a blended life combining spiritual, religious and mundane scientific domains with perfect balance. Our astronomers had no difficulty in accepting rahu/ketu and numerical solutions for eclipses, as the domains are different.
"To make that happen is a responsibility that scientists here must accept, working in close collaboration with friendly outsiders. Our youth are hungry for a sensible knowledge of our past, but are denied an opportunity to acquire it by a marvellous educational system that shuns history in science curricula, and by the paucity of attractive but reliable accounts of the fascinating history of Indic ideas. Our academies, universities, museums and other institutions need to make such a project a national mission. Anything less would be irrational blindness to a unique legacy."
Excerpts:
The 102nd Indian Science Congress, meeting at Mumbai during 3–7 January 2015, was dominated by loud national debate about the history of science in India, a subject that does not normally figure on the Congress programme.
The centre of the controversy was a symposium on ‘Ancient science through Sanskrit’, organized for the Congress essentially by a group of Sanskrit scholars and academics. Surely it is appropriate for the Congress to debate the subject, especially as there are such polarized views on it.
Now the debates surrounding the Congress generated three specific controversies.
The first concerned ancient Indian aviation technology.
The work seems traceable to an original dictated by a self-taught, impoverished but serious Sanskrit scholar in Karnataka sometime during 1900–1922, and could not have been Vedic by any criterion. This effort at creating a false history of Indic science is a spectacularly bad example of the absurd lengths to which attempts at glorification of our past can go.
But the other two controversies were of the opposite kind.
One concerned the ‘theorem of Pythagoras’ (5th century BCE), although there is no record of even a statement of the theorem by Pythagoras. An explicit statement of the theorem does however appear in Baudhayana’s Sulva Sutra (a manual of the ritual geometry needed in the construction of Vedic fire altars), asserting the equivalent theorem that the square of the diagonal of a rectangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. The date of the work lies roughly between the 5th and 8th century BCE. Thus Baudhayana’s assertion of one of the hoary results in geometry is the earliest available record in the world, and predates Pythagoras.
The third controversy concerns plastic surgery, which seems to have been driven in several parts of the world by the need to repair broken noses (apparently an ancient and common punishment worldwide), cleft lips, etc. Suśruta consolidated Indic ayurvedic
knowledge in an encyclopaedic and foundational text called the Suśruta Samhita. This included the practice of plastic surgery, in which India clearly remained well ahead of the rest of the world. Thus the first major rhinoplasty in modern West was performed as late as 1815 by a British surgeon who had served in India for 20 years, and was triggered by British press reports about how Maratha soldiers who had lost their noses in the Anglo-Mysore wars were surgically set right in Pune. There was no European competition to so-called ‘Indian Nose’, so Indic claims on plastic surgery seem to be on solid ground.
Regarding the scientific temper issue, even a cursory examination of classical Indic philosophy and scientific thinking shows that a strong rationalistic streak has been present, side by side with mythology of some kind, for almost as many millennia as our civilization has flourished.
Finally, a few words about Indic mathematics, which I consider has not yet gained the global or domestic recognition it deserves. Apart from the well-known numeral system, and the algorithmic/computational revolution it sparked, the number of advances made in India long before they were (re-)discovered in Europe keeps increasing as we learn more of our own history. Look at these examples: a large part of algebra, first solutions to linear and quadratic indeterminate equations (Aryabhata, Brahmagupta); the binomial theorem, the combinatorial formula and Pascal’s triangle (Pingala 3rd century); second-order interpolation formulas and the Newton–Raphson method (Brahmagupta), the Fibonacci numbers (Virahanka 700 CE, Hemachandra ~1150 CE); the basics of differentials, maxima of functions, mean value theorem, etc. (Bhaskara ~12th century, Munjala ~ 800 CE); infinite series, and a precursor of what later came to be known as calculus and analysis (Madhava 14th century): so the list goes on. These contributions are not just ‘little’ mathematics, and the ‘big picture’ of their collective influence on the world was succinctly and accurately summarized by Hermann Weyl when he wrote (Preface to The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics, 1928):
‘Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the Greek view and followed a course which seems to have originated in India and which has been transmitted, with additions, to us by the Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as logically prior to the concepts of geometry.’
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0471.pdf
Last edited:
