This paper first sketches the broad contours of India’s scientific and technical capacities prior to the arrival of the colonialists. It discusses the philosophies of science within the framework of the intellectual traditions of the time. It examines how the ideas in circulation were fairly elaborate, detailed, intellectually satisfying and above all practical in their approaches to the primary issues of an economy based on permanence and non-negotiable quests for meaning in life. Looked at another way, technical solutions appeared to be designed explicitly to flow with the natural cycle. The paper further discusses how these scientific and technical traditions enabled a vast degree of dynamism of which there is considerable evidence even today. In fact, had it not been for the disruptive, rude, intentional disruption that commenced circa 1750, Indian society was perhaps well on its way to a development scenario that sustainability theorists today promote as necessary for a planet increasingly disabled by the crisis of climate change.

One of the major issues raised in the note that was circulated on this international conference concerns the causes that gave rise to the different trajectories which European and Asian societies followed especially from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The query that is raised is this: Why did Europe embark on the course it did and why didn’t countries like India and China also follow a similar trajectory?

This is a question that is repeatedly raised in various fora. The answers have been prolific but have not shed any great illumination on the subject. At the most one could say they have generated some income for academic scholars and for printers. The question raised, in my view, is methodologically unsound for reasons that are generally subsumed under what is known as the “fire argument.” Now what does the fire argument say?

Briefly, it proposes that when a fire breaks out – say in a building or a forest – one can fairly reasonably investigate the causes of the fire and isolate such causes even if some are proximate and others less so and at least one can develop a cogent theory, even if it may ultimately not be the actual truth: for example, somebody lit a cigarette or the gas cylinder burst or a hostile neighbour tried to get even and so on.

If, however, a fire does not take place, then one does not normally go around enumerating the reasons for the non-occurrence since the reasons in that event could be infinite and could also all be true. The spurious nature of the query is one issue. There is another: in what sense can one assess by straitjacketing several profoundly complex societies with diverse preoccupations within the parameters of one development model when one knows that the very word “development” was first used in its present meaning only around 1950 and the word “scientist” first appeared in circulation in 1833 and became well-established only in the twentieth century? Is it necessary to subject the histories of non-Western societies to what appears to be a second inquisition, viz., why did they not conduct themselves or reorganize themselves like the Europeans did?

Today, with the planet grappling for a way out of a major environmental crisis caused principally by the ill-effects associated with the scientific and industrial “revolution,” would it be sound to even place a nation “in which a fire took place” as the “end of history” model which others ought to have also followed in their trajectories, but failed? Can one, in other words, flunk an examination without even having sat for it?

Furthermore, the discussion on these issues has remained largely Eurocentric and has been mostly led and dominated by European scholars though it is has also drawn academics from outside Europe to put in their own hypothesis. I have, therefore, tried to take a different angle in this presentation and to persuade you to look at the matter in a different way in order to avoid the methodological fault.

The problem with most of the words that we use nowadays in these discussions – “traditional,” “early modern,” “modern,” etc., is that these are all loaded terms or what you may do today call, “branded” labels. I have tried to side-step them by using the word “post-modern” not to be used in the way the term is used by academics, but merely to argue that we should go beyond these categories altogether. All human history cannot be squeezed into neat Eurocentric boxes like primitive, ancient, dark ages, medieval, modern, etc. These are not universal or inevitable categories.

Take for example the calculus: it appears in the 16^th century in Europe as part of the Newtonian “revolution” but as Prof. C.K. Raju has shown, it was perfected in India from the 5^th to the 15^th century.¹ Or take the example of moveable type which was invented and already in use in Korea 200 years before Gutenburg. How do we place the so-called “Copernican revolution” in the history of world science when we know that the heliocentric hypothesis was already proposed by Aryabhata several centuries earlier and that the flat earth theory had been discussed by Lalla, Bhaskara and others and rejected much before the Europeans came to propose them as new and revolutionary hypotheses? Now I am not saying that these classifications of traditional or modern may not be useful as analytical tools, but we will make grave errors by giving them unwarranted ontological status.

The problem with dealing with this period (500-800) is that almost all its events continue to be seen within the “discovery” framework associated with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco-da-Gama. I am not denying that the Europeans are entitled to a European perspective on their events. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events. For example, how do we evaluate the voyages of Cheng Ho in 1422 and how do we assess the Indian Ocean trade in the fifteenth (and earlier) centuries compared to which the trade inaugurated by Vasco-da-Gama was in fact insignificant?

The discovery framework has to be displaced by a different framework that looks at Indian society from the 15^th-18^th century as a functioning society operating within its own terms of reference, its own preoccupations. This necessarily means a more comprehensive understanding of its various features than we have today and which would include the technical capacity of the society, its knowledge base, its readiness and capacity to response to market demands and several other related features which would include systems of medicine and education, theories of language and aesthetics, etc.

Nowadays we talk glibly of the “knowledge economy” even when we know that none of the societies under discussion functioned without knowledge and without technical capacity over several hundreds of years. They were true “knowledge economies,” not pre-knowledge economies.

I would therefore like to spend time in this presentation on demonstrating the remarkable complexity of this society and to show that it would indeed be difficult, indeed foolhardy, to compare it with activities including technical developments that followed some other chronology – if they indeed did –elsewhere.

I will discuss (briefly) mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, industry, etc., within the context of a society that had evolved competent, in most cases, optimal solutions to problems it faced and then show how all these features indicated this society could not be labelled as unmistakeably “traditional” or “early modern” or even “modern” because none of these categories would be able to describe it in all its complexity in those three centuries. The traditionalist might argue that the tradition was modern since it has not been jettisoned in modern times; the early modern might argue that some of these ideas were nothing but prototypes of modern ideas. So where does that lead us except to caution us that looking at non-European societies through the frame work of Europe’s experience would do great violence to our understanding of this societal or civilisational experience.

I have already made a reference to the calculus. Prof. Raju has shown that much of the basic algorithms that began to be understood in Europe only in the 16^th century were already mastered by the Indians over the ten centuries prior. In India, the precise trigonometric values provided by the calculus were required for an agriculture dependent on accurately predicting the monsoon and also for navigation. Prof. Raju has pointed out that the very term “algorithm” is sourced to Al Khawarizmi who translated the basic mathematical texts from India into Arabic, from where they were translated into Latin and Greek.

But besides obvious competence displayed in inventing the calculus, there are other fairly impressive but little known skills that passed from India to Europe within the same period. The work of Donald Lach, “Asia in the Making of Europe” is often referred to in the discussions on this theme. But even Lach is not comprehensive enough since he could not conceivably access all available sources. Certainly he had no access to the materials painstakingly accumulated by Dharampal.²

One of the most outstanding of these, for example, is the medical skill of plastic surgeons. The art of plastic surgery was a routine medical procedure in the Pune region and fairly detailed reports of the operations were noted by British surgeons before they were copied, adopted and adapted in Europe. The transmission of knowledge is very clearly documented and is without any doubt whatsoever. The art of plastic surgery developed in India due to a peculiar social custom. Men found guilty of marital infidelity were subject to the punishment of having their nose cut off. Indian surgeons met the resultant demand for rehabilitation by developing the skill of rhinoplasty which when literally translated means “the art of reconstructing noses.”³

Besides the skill of plastic surgery, Dharampal has shown that the understanding and practice of inoculation against small pox was also well established in India before the technique associated with Jenner (vaccination) was first invented and then imported to displace it.

However, let us take the case of biodiversity: one example here alone will suffice and it deals with biodiversity in rice. Adivasis and peasant farmers were admittedly responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of 300,000 varieties of rice. This is a phenomenal figure and does indicate a very high level of understanding of seed selection and breeding techniques. I confirmed on a visit to IRRI several decades ago that 72,000 rice accessions in their possession were collected from India. There are likewise several thousand of these varieties at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack. The late Dr. R.H. Richharia maintained 19,000 varieties in situ at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute at Jabalpur in MP.

The art of breeding rice varieties is a dynamic process. Dr. Richharia – himself a leading rice breeder – found he had to revise his opinion about adivasis’ knowledge of science when he tried out certain seeds which he got from these farmers but which he was unable to reproduce. He discovered that these were male sterile lines. He had no idea of how the adivasis had come to know about the existence of these varieties (which modern breeders are still struggling with) but they knew what these varieties were meant for and how they ought to be used in their rice fields to create new varieties. None of the so called “saline” varieties of rice were created by modern science; they were bred by farmers in coastal belts. In fact, the International Rice Research Institute has produced after 50 years of research only two major successes, IR8 and IR36. This can be compared with the hundreds of varieties generated by India’s peasant and tribal communities, and they served hundreds of different uses.

The ability to work with seeds was matched by other competencies. There are several reports of agricultural specialists – from Alexander Walker to Albert Howard – who came to teach Indian farmers how to do agriculture but retired after conceding that they had very little to teach and mostly to learn. Dharampal’s Chingleput data taken from British records indicates that output of field crops in that region was higher than that associated with the best of the so-called green revolution practices used today.

Large-scale, meticulously planned irrigation systems not only enabled people to transport and store water in very large quantities (examples: Rajasthan, Pune) but the system of tank irrigation (for example, in Karnataka) was so well designed that when engineers proposed to increase the number of tanks they found there were no more locations available since the existing ones had adequate arrangements to collect all the rainfall that fell on the ground in the areas. Indian water harvesting systems were designed to deal with the monsoon, that is, to collect rain where it fell, precisely like the Mumbai housewife who finds she must collect as much water from her tap within an hour every morning when the public water supply starts and then shuts. Modern irrigation systems built on the technology of dams are never sustainable, since they dam the run off instead of harvesting it. In fact, the forests that harvest and store the water are slaughtered and drowned in dam reservoirs. Since catchment areas are denuded, the life of the dam is considerably reduced. In the tank system, the silt accumulated in tanks was removed and used to fertilise agricultural lands.

There are many other indicators which I will not discuss in too much detail but those working in botany and plants know that Garcia de Orta faithfully recorded local knowledge of a huge variety of plants that were being used in India for medicinal purposes and which was thereafter transmitted by him to Europe. The knowledge he collected was circulated in the form of the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (“Conversations on the simples, drugs and medicinal substances of India”), published at Goa in 1563. His understanding and systematic collection of this vast indigenous knowledge of plants is sometimes misunderstood to claim he discovered the various medical uses of these plants himself!

What about more basic things like food? In fact, from the point of view of nutritious food and a wide variety of recipes available especially the widespread expertise with the making of breads and fermented foods, one could only advance the argument that as far as food and preparation of food was (and is) concerned India and China were indeed both advanced civilizations which Europe would take several centuries to match and which it still shows no signs of catching up with. It is an undisputed fact that the variety of Chinese and Indian cuisine still excites and dominates the palates of the planet.

Several skills like the manufacture of textiles could not have developed in Europe without close study and import of Indian textile making procedures by English and European traders. In fact, English colonial masters in some areas had to cut off the thumbs of local weavers in order to kill the local industry. We know that the knowledge of natural dyes was widespread. Today after a relatively short and disastrous courtship with chemical dyes, natural dyes have returned under the garb of promoting sustainable industry which shows very clearly that some features of the Indian economy ought never to have been changed in the first place.

The intellectual traditions that were still very vibrant at this time were intensely preoccupied with the theories of aesthetics, architecture and grammar. For example, the cultural arts and their gharanas (including the various classical schools of dance) maintained their ability to reproduce the expertise, innovating when circumstances required. Psychological theories and therapies, still in use today because of their obvious therapeutic worth, were passed on without much damage. One of the most important demonstrations of dynamism is the maintenance of the system of commentaries on various scriptural texts by eminent teachers and spiritual men and women which sought to re-interpret them in the light of contemporary experience. The Bhakti movement is not the sole instance of vitality. All these are not signs of what is generally dubbed a “traditional” society.⁴

Those who think that the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries 15^th-18^th centuries was largely passive or stagnant – whatever image this may conjure – will have a difficult time explaining the speed with which India accepted a whole series of new crops including potatoes, chili, tomatoes and cashew that came from South America. The ready adoption does not indicate the presence of a moribund or static society stuck to its civilisational habits from which it was not inclined to move.

There is little doubt then that we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern simply because several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet.

Much of this work of discovery was triggered by the research of the late Dharampal who though not an historian eventually forced historians to take stock of his findings.

The point of this presentation is not simply to highlight the various competencies that people in India continued to display from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries (considered as the pre-modern era), though I find even very elementary knowledge of these facts especially among educated folk. There is no doubt that because our academic life has been submerged and soaked in Eurocentric perceptions of social history, and because most of our historians have come from arts faculties with little or no engineering or scientific or technical backgrounds, the general impression that has gained disproportionate credence is that whatever good has come to this country in the form of serviceable ideas has come exclusively from the West. This has had a severe impact on the self-esteem of the public at large because of the impression created that the modern tradition is borrowed and not their own whereas in actual fact it is quite apparent that much of modernity would not exist but for the fact that India (and China, Egypt, Arabia and Persia) existed and provided the foundations.

I am glad to hear at this conference that there are western writers like Jack Goody and Martin Bernal who have been working on similar themes. My grouse remains that this work has to be done and acknowledged first by Indian scholars who have for far too long continued to blindly accept the western view of modernity and work within its categories. This presentation is an invitation to this august audience to re-think the frame-works that rule and burden our intellectual work. Certainly we did not have a vast period like the dark ages in Europe and in almost other country (outside the west), ideas and innovation moved people with relentless force. In fact, it may actually be hazarded that our “dark ages” are only just beginning, ever since our intellectual elites including our planners decided to ignore history and instead place this huge billion plus civilisation under the self-destructive development path chosen by the West.

Notes:

1) C.K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16^th c. CE, Pearson Longman, 2007.

2) Dharampal’s work is to be found at www.dharampal.net. His Collected Writings were published by Other India Press, Goa, in 5 volumes.

3) Some of the important technical innovations that arose from India are discussed in Claude Alvares, “Technology and Culture” in Helaine Selin (ed), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, Springer, London (1997) and in Decolonising History, Other India Press, Goa.

4) For a stunning introduction to a functioning society today, see the recent article by Uzramma, “Learning from the Grassroots”, in which she introduces the work of Ravindra Sharma, founder of the Kala Ashram, Adilabad. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6179856/Uzramma%20on%20Learning%20from%20the%20Grassroots.pdf

(Paper presented at the Conference on Multiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities, 16-17 December 2011 Varanasi)