The article ‘Rediscovering Indian civilisation’ by Hobson and Malhotra makes the point that if the East today cannot deny it has been transformed in many ways by the West, similarly, the modern identity of the West owes much to essential contributions from the East, including a good dose of mathematics. In fact, the development of the West cannot be authentically or realistically described without reference to significant contributions from the East.

This is not a radically new proposition since it has been made already quite brilliantly in respect of China by Joseph Needham (which the authors acknowledge), and by Donald Lach in his three volumes on Asia in the Making of Europe published more than 30 years ago to which the authors do not refer. 

The strength of the present article lies in the important additional information, polemically posed, that it brings into circulation concerning the Indian contribution to the making of Europe. Here too, some of the developments described (for example, wootz, textiles) have been common knowledge with the widespread dissemination of the work of Dharampal and several others, some of it available, in fact, already in the 1970s when people like myself did our doctoral work. So what is it that the writers are saying that is new? And is it significant enough to warrant publication?

I can say immediately that in its present form the article is an important contribution to the re-writing of the history of the globe which has become all the more necessary (and inevitable) in view of the reordering of the global economy. The data relied upon is well established in the literature and I find no major errors. In fact, there is far greater data available on the subject than the authors, perhaps due to the demands of brevity, can purvey. There is admittedly a gross mismatch between the emerging futures of the countries of India and China as they return centre-stage (with their 2 billion+ populations) and the globe’s continued reliance on a parochial or Eurocentric understanding of what happened in history. At some point of time, with the new power play, the politics of knowledge is bound to reflect the shift. Much of present history writing will have to be cast aside, as, for example, the recent researches in the Cheng-Ho voyages have devalued the significance of the Vasco-da-Gama epoch reducing it to a small side-show.

The authors should have been sterner with the continued myth-making habits of Western historians, which appear to be quite ingrained. For example, after the research work available, to continue to insist that Western science and technology or ‘progress’ followed an autochthonous, self-contained, self-driven, path to the present or that the West has always been an ‘active’ civilisation in contrast to a ‘passive’ East, is only to display a deficient or wholly parochial education. A good part of the present article has therefore had to be expended on excoriating what Marx said about Oriental Despotism or analysing why Westerners were wrong in their analysis of capitalist institutions in the societies they came to impose themselves. I am surprised that so much bad history and bad sociology is still in circulation and still appearing respectable. (But then, one recalls that even in modern science, older scientists including Einstein, resisted the transition to a post-Newtonian paradigm for a very long time even with the better theory staring them in the face.) 

On the other hand, I myself have, like many others, severe apprehensions about the fact and idea of “modernity” which the authors appear to celebrate and place somewhere at the peak of civilisational achievement. This is another form of parochialism. The last thing I would like to see is success in doing the things that the planet could do without, especially when we talk of scientific and technological “advances” that continue to undermine the ecological security of the planet, or economic growth that is completely unsustainable.

One terrible error I have noticed: banias have been described as banians. The plural of banya or bania is banias. Banians (the word actually used) is an Indian word for an undergarment worn under one’s shirt! This part of the article would have Indians in stitches.