Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Shashi Tharoor on Indian science, addresses a crib of mine
Shashi Tharoor, under-Secretary General of the United Nations and renowned author, addreses a crib of mine in a couple of articles he wrote for the Hindu newspaper. While I completely accept that recorders of history (in the west) will record their own highly western-biased versions of it (compounded by the Indian inability to record their own history), the complete disregard of facts by some of these historians has always puzzled me.
Therefore, civilization began with Greece and Rome, never mind Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley etc. Science was a product of European enlightenment in the middle ages. Rome was the greatest military power in history, never mind the Mughals, Genghiz Khan etc. The list goes on, and what's worse, this is the version of history most Indians know as well. Of course, the problem is compounded when Hindu nationalists/pseudo-Hindus make wild claims (Denmark was a Hindu kingdom called Dhenu Marg, for example) which then casts doubt on the validity of everything else.
Shashi Tharoor shows in these two (part I, part II) articles that its perfectly possible to make the point about Indian science without resorting to wild exaggeration. Tharoor also quotes from Dick Teresi's Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- from the Babylonians to the Maya, a book I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in the origins of science.
Tharoor writes -- If I were to focus on just one field in this column, it would be that of mathematics. India invented modern numerals (known to the world as "Arabic" numerals because the West got them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. ("In the history of culture," wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, "the invention of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.")
He concludes the two articles thus -- India made the highest-quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest products with skilled labour. That was, in the end, how the British defeated us.
Therefore, civilization began with Greece and Rome, never mind Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley etc. Science was a product of European enlightenment in the middle ages. Rome was the greatest military power in history, never mind the Mughals, Genghiz Khan etc. The list goes on, and what's worse, this is the version of history most Indians know as well. Of course, the problem is compounded when Hindu nationalists/pseudo-Hindus make wild claims (Denmark was a Hindu kingdom called Dhenu Marg, for example) which then casts doubt on the validity of everything else.
Shashi Tharoor shows in these two (part I, part II) articles that its perfectly possible to make the point about Indian science without resorting to wild exaggeration. Tharoor also quotes from Dick Teresi's Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- from the Babylonians to the Maya, a book I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in the origins of science.
Tharoor writes -- If I were to focus on just one field in this column, it would be that of mathematics. India invented modern numerals (known to the world as "Arabic" numerals because the West got them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. ("In the history of culture," wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, "the invention of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.")
He concludes the two articles thus -- India made the highest-quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest products with skilled labour. That was, in the end, how the British defeated us.
