Some days ago, a Union minister spoke about our ancient knowledge of gravity before Newton came into the scene. As usual, this elicited laughs and criticism from some quarters in the media and the public.
One is free to like or dislike the person saying this, but why do we continue to feed our proclivity to look down upon anything indigenous and glorify all things ‘western’? In general, those called intellectuals tend to believe and propound things attributed to Caucasian, English speaking sources but outrightly reject talk of our own heritage and knowledge in Sanskrit and other native languages.
This reminded me of a lecture delivered in a premier institute in Dehradun by a scientist who had won the highest civilian award of the nation. During his talk he gave a presentation about all the western scientists and their contribution to science. Though he also mentioned CV Raman and Ramanujan he said that talk of scientific activity in India thousands of years ago was all humbug as they were doing nothing more than mixing colours.
I felt like asking him where the zero was invented and whether any of his scientific work would have been possible without the humble zero. But, I had work to do which was more important than debating with a scientist who by being so rigid had negated one of the basic principles of science- an open mind.
Anyway, after the Union minister’s speech there were media reports ridiculing his assertion with further dissection and rejection of such facts on the social media. It seems people are either eager to reject facts just because they are native and not originally in English or accept the same without ascertaining why they are true.
Among one of the illogical arguments going on in the social media, a senior journalist friend quoted the Siddhant Shiromani treatise along with the verse which puts forth the theory of gravity. However, given the general proclivity to reject such knowledge because it is native, one thought it better to cite what a noted American historian had to say about the Indian civilisation. Will Durant, an American historian, writer and philosopher, wrote The Story of Civilization in 11 volumes in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant. In the part I of this series- Our Oriental Heritage published in 1954, he begins the chapter The Foundations of India by stating, “Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India.” He goes on to write, “The greatest of Hindu astronomers and mathematicians, Aryabhatta, discussed in verse such poetic subjects as quadratic equations, sines and the value of pi; he explained eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, announced the sphericity of the earth and its diurnal revolution on its axis, and wrote, in daring anticipation of Renaisssance science: ‘The sphere of the stars is stationary, and the earth, by its revolution, produces the daily rising and setting of planets and stars’. His most famous successor, Brahmagupta, systematised the astronomic knowledge of India, but obstructed its development by rejecting Aryabhatta’s theory of the revolution of the earth.
These men and their followers adapted to Hindu usage the Babylonian division of the skies into zodiacal constellations; they made a calendar of twelve months, each of thirty days, each of thirty hours,inserting an intercalary month every five years; they calculated with remarkable accuracy the diameter of the moon, the eclipses of the moon and the sun, the position of the poles, and the position and motion of the major stars. They expounded the theory, though not the law, of gravity when they wrote in the Siddhantas: ‘The earth, owning to its force of gravity, draws all things to itself.’ To make these complex calculations the Hindus developed a system of mathematics superior, in everything except geometry, to that of the Greeks.
Among the most vital parts of our Oriental heritage are the ‘Arabic’ numerals and the decimal system, both of which came to us, through the Arabs from India.
The miscalled ‘Arabic’ numerals are found on the Rock Edicts of Ashoka (256 BC), a thousand years before their occurrence in Arabic literature. The oldest known use of the zero in Asia or Europe is in an Arabic document dated 873 AD, three years sooner than its first known appearance in India; but by general consent the Arabs borrowed this too from India, and the most modest and most valuable of all numerals is one of the subtle gifts of India to mankind,” writes Durant.
About Aryabhatt, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara, he states that these men created the conception of a negative quantity, without which algebra would have been impossible. They formulated rules for finding permutations and combinations, and solved in the eighth century AD, indeterminate equations of the second degree that were unknown to Europe until the days of Euler a thousand years later. He writes, “Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika philosophy, held that the world was composed of atoms as many in kind as the various elements.” Durant goes on, “Something has been said about the chemical excellence of cast iron in ancient India, and about the high industrial development of Gupta times, when India was looked to, even by Imperial Rome, as the most skilled of nations in such chemical industries as dyeing, tanning, soap-making, glass and cement.
As early as the second century BC Nagarjuna devoted an entire volume to mercury. By the sixth century the Hindus were far ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry; they were masters in calcinations, distillation, sublimation, streaming, fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of anesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic salts, compounds and alloys. The tempering of steel was brought in ancient India to a perfection unknown in Europe till our own times; King Porus is said to have selected, as a specially valuable gift for Alexander, not gold or silver, but thirty pounds of steel.
The Moslems (sic) took much of this Hindu chemical science and industry to the Near East and Europe; the secret of manufacturing ‘Damascus’ blades, for example, was taken by the Arabs from the Persians, and by the Persians from India.” One can go on and on about the achievements of ancient India in the field of medicine, various sciences, arts and religion as stated by Durant and other historians too, apart from being recorded in our own ancient books.
But even that would not suffice to convince generations of people schooled into denigrating the wealth of our own civilisation. While we talk so authoritatively on various subjects, most of us suffer from profound ignorance when it comes to our actual history and roots.
We may achieve some progress in some fields but without factual knowledge about our own history and identity, we will remain open to being influenced exploitatively by others- nations, politicians and other entities with ulterior motives.
