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Sunday Reading
New Delhi, 16 June 2010
Scientific Heritage
NO LONGER VICTIM OF
NEGLECT
By Suraj Saraf
Showcasing India’s
scientific heritage usually remains neglected in the welter of politics.
Fortunately, not any more. Strenuous efforts are afoot to develop India into a
knowledge nation. And one such measure has been to open a science and
technology gallery at the National Science Centre in the Capital city of Delhi.
As pointed out by Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen
scientific heritage of India had been a victim of an all-round neglect “and
distortion of Indian history and undermining of scientific objectivity by
sectarian traditionalists (including the Hindutva movement) and the rootlessness
and historical innocence of the obdurate modernist.”
Indeed, the tradition of science and mathematics in India tends to
receive a fairly raw deal from both sides of the divide--from sectarian
traditionalists and rootless modernists. And this was underlined at the opening
of the new gallery, which needs to be publicized and high quality publications are
needed to be brought out to create an understanding and pride in our heritage
among children.
Other than the gallery, a high-level committee has been constituted
comprising experts from the National Centre of Science Museum and other
departments under the Union Culture Ministry to do more research in scientific
and technological heritage of the country and disseminate that information
among the public.
“The new gallery points out the fact that since the dawn of
history, India
and indeed different civilizations had contributed immensely to different
branches of science and technology, often through interactive contacts across
cultures separated by large distances,” noted the Museum Director General G.S.
Rautela.
Right from the Harappan period to the early historic period
copper-bronze technology had flourished in the Indian sub-continent. Underlining
the development of science in ancient India, Prof. Sen had said “Our
unwillingness to remain satisfied with ongoing understanding and knowledge can
be very important for the motivation behind the development of science.
Arguments and skepticism are central to two-way relation between science and
society.
“We can’t live without the past, even though we cannot live
within it, either. When history is distorted for one purpose or another, it
requires correction……. I was dismayed by the fact that intellectual link
between the strong heritage of skepticism and heterodoxy in India on one
side and scientific pursuit and creativity on the other, had received so little
attention,” he lamented.
Examining these issues, Prof Sen opined that cultivation of
doubts and sharpening of questions lie at the root of most scientific
inquiries. “India
had a truly exceptional heritage at being doubtful and skeptical. However, this
legacy had tended to be fairly comprehensively neglected by modernists, who had
attributed the origin of Indian skepticism to the West, particularly British
influence.”
Using the example of Vedas, Prof. Sen said Rig Veda had
raised central doubts about the religious account of the world, for example “that
of Creation.” These fundamental doubts about the creative power and even the
omniscience of any god-like figure would occur in Indian critical debates again
and again. In fact, Sanskrit had a long volume of agnostic or atheistic
writings than any other classical language. Doubt sometime takes the form of
agnosticism, sometimes that of atheism. Buddhism that originated here and that
was its principal religion for thousands of years is the only world religion in
which the morality of behaviour did not involve god in any way.
He referred to the ‘Lokayukta’ philosophy of skeptical
materialism, which flourished from the first millennium B.C. and Kaurava’s
arguments against Krishna’s advice in
Mahabharata to illustrate how atheism and materialism continued to attract
adherent and advocates over many centuries.
An understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly
important for appreciating its reach and range in the country’s intellectual
and diverse history. Referring to the constructive role of science in the
development of skepticism in society, Prof Sen said that economic problems were
central to the maladies of famine and chronic hunger, relentless poverty and
persistent inequality, among other issues.
While the dismal nature of economies was certainly not in
dispute, what about its claim to science, he asked. In fact, no economist could be unaware of the
skepticism that was widely shared about the economists’ ability to carry out
objective investigations and to make reliable predictions. “There is even some
mistrust of the very idea of social science. We must make room for the inherent
ambiguity for many economic and social concepts such as poverty, inequality,
class or community.”
Supporting Prof. Sen in the oldest doubt concept in Rig Veda
about the Creation hymn, renowned Indologist A.L. Basham in his “The Wonder
That Was India” had underscored, “Hymn of Creation is one of the oldest
surviving records of philosophical doubts in the history of the world.. It marks the development of a high stage of
abstract thinking, and it is the work of a very great poet, whose evocation of
the mysterious chaos before creation, and of mighty ineffable forces working in
the depths of the primitive void, reminds us the cosmic fantasies of William
Blake.”
Basham also underlines other aspects of Indian scientific
heritage. He makes particular mention of the country’s achievements in
mathematics much more so invention of decimal system of numerals saying, “The
debt of the western world to India in this respect cannot be over-estimated.
Most of the discoveries and inventions of which Europe is so proud would have
been impossible without a developed system of mathematics, and this in turn
would have been impossible if Europe would have been shackled by the unwieldy
system of Roman numerals. The unknown man who devised the new (decimal) system
was, from the world’s point of view, after the Buddha, the most important son
of India. His achievement, though easily taken for granted, was the work of an
analytical mind of the first order, and he deserved much more honour than he
has received so far.
“Medieval Indian mathematicians, such as Brahma Gutpa (7th
century), Mahavira (9th century) and Bhaskara (12th
century), made several discoveries which in Europe were not known until the
Renaissance or later ….. the mathematical implications of zero and infinity,
never more than vaguely realized by classical authorities, were fully
understood in India.”
In the positive sciences of the ancient Hindus, Sir
Brajendra Nath underpins: “The Hindus, no less than the Greeks have shared in
the work of constructing scientific concepts and methods in the investigation
of physical phenomena, as well as building up a body of positive knowledge
which has been applied to industrial technique; and Hindu scientific ideas and
methodology (e.g. inductive method or method of allergic analysis) have deeply been
the curse of natural philosophy in Asia --- in the east as well as in the west
--- in China and Japan, as well as in the Saracen Empire. Fortunately, the
Sanskrit philosophic-scientific terminology, however difficult from its
technical character, is exceedingly precise, consistent and expressive”. No
wonder that Prof. Sen is so emphatic that sans highlighting its scientific
heritage, Indian history is being subjected to distortion.--INFA
(Copyright, India News and Feature
Alliance)
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