INDIA'S TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS: IN SEARCH OF NEEDHAM.

[Guest guest]

What Needham did for China is badly lacking for India. Besides linguistics,

archeology, and genetics, Indology must also include Traditional Knowledge

Systems as a field of study. This would develop a deeper picture of a

civilization, its relationship to other civilizations at that time, its

critical economic strengths and weakness. There are many Indic technologies

and sciences that predated colonialism, and that comprised large scale

economic activity for the workers of India. Many TKS' were the foundation of

India's very massive export economy that thrived for centuries:

 

 

1. METAL TECHNOLOGIES: This consisted of not only metallurgy but also

tools, many of which were pioneered in India. D.P. Agarwal (who was at the

Harvard Roundtable on Indology) is a leading researcher in this field, and

has documented many examples of tools that were first developed in India. He

has been writing books on this topic. India was a major exporter of steel

since Roman times and perhaps earlier. The British sent teams to India to

analyze the metallurgical processes that were later appropriated by Britain.

(British archives on this were found and republished by Dharampala.) Making

India's metal works illegal was motivated partly by the goal to

industrialize Britain, but also because of the risk of gun manufacturing by

potential nationalists. India's steel industry was relocated to Britain.

Some Indians continued to operate production facilities, but are still

unlawful.

2. CIVIL ENGINEERING: From Harappan towns to Qutub Minar and other

large projects, indigenous technologies were very sophisticated in design,

planning, water supply, traffic flow, natural air conditioning, etc. Complex

stone work was another industry related to this. Bricks were invented as far

back as 5,000 BC. (Next time you see Indians in poor mud huts, think twice

before saying that their upgrading into brick homes would be a sign of

'westernizing'.)

3. TEXTILES: India's textile exports were legendary. Roman archives

contain official complaints about massive cash drainage because of imports

of fine Indian textiles. One of the earliest industries relocated from India

to Britain was textile, and it became the first major success of the

Industrial Revolution, with Britain replacing India as the world's leading

textile exporter. Many of the machines used by Britain were Indian designs

and had been constantly improved over long periods. Meanwhile, India's

textile manufacturer's were de-licensed, even tortured in some cases,

over-taxed, regulated, etc. to 'civilize' them into virtual extinction.

4. SHIPPING AND SHIP BUILDING: Vasco da Gama's ships were captained by

a Gujarati sailor (ref: Gyan Prakash of Princeton University History

Department), and much of the 'discovery' of navigation was in fact an

appropriation of pre-existing navigation in the Indian Ocean, that had

already been a thriving trade system for centuries before Europeans

'discovered' it. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated ships

were also built in India. The compass and other navigation tools were

already in use at the time.

5. WATER HARVESTING SYSTEMS: There were 1.3 million man-made water

lakes and ponds across India, some as large as 250 square miles. These are

now being rediscovered. Most of the rain water was harvested and used for

irrigation, drinking, etc. till the following year's rainfall. Village

organizations managed these resources, but got dismantled during the

colonial period, as tax collection, cash expropriation, and legal controls

became the primary function of local governance appointed by the British.

Recently, thousands of these 'talabs' have been restored, and this has

resulted in a re-emergence of abundant water in many places. (A very

different approach compared to the massive modern dams built in the name of

progress that have devastated the lives of millions.)

6. FOREST MANAGEMENT: Described under the term 'sacred groves', many

interesting findings have recently come out about the way forests and trees

were managed by each village and a careful method applied to harvest

medicines, firewood, and building material in accordance with natural

renewal rates. There is now a database being built of sacred groves across

India. Again, it's a story of an economic asset falling into disuse and

abuse. Massive logging by the British to export India's timber to fund the

two world wars and other civilizing programs of the empire are never

mentioned when scholars try to explain India's current ecological disasters.

The local populations were quite sophisticated in ecology until they were

dis-empowered.

7. FARMING TECHNIQUES: India's agricultural production was large, and

surpluses were stored and/or exported . But the British exported massive

amounts of harvests even during severe droughts, to expedite the cash flow

required to feed their own industrialization. This caused tens of millions

to die of starvation while at the same time India's food production was

exported at unprecedented rates to generate cash. Also, traditional

non-chemical based pesticides have been recently revived in India with

excellent results, replacing Union Carbide's products in certain markets.

8. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE: This is now a well-known field and much

re-legitimizing has already been done thanks to many US labs and scientists.

Many multinationals no longer denigrate this field and have in fact entered

it.

9. There were numerous other industries as well. Many of India's

manufactured goods were highly prized around the world. We must evaluate

these TKS' based on their economic power for their time, during which they

were as important as today's high tech would be in the modern context.

 

Recently, it was Madhu Kishwar who crystallized these issues in my mind. I

learnt how India's government today continues to make many TKS' illegal or

impossible to practice. After independence, British laws have continued, and

top-down Soviet style economic planning got added, turning it from a British

Raj to a British-Soviet modeled economy run by Indian Macaulayites. On the

other hand, Israelis have been very successful in rediscovering many lost

technologies relevant to their environment and culture by looking in their

ancient texts. They now pioneer in many processes of economic value that

conventional European technology lacks.

 

Traditionally, British Indologists did not study TKS except to quietly

document them as competing systems and to facilitate their transfer to

Britain. The civilizing mission of colonialists required publicly denying

any value in TKS. What was found valuable was appropriated and its Indian

manufacturers put out of business. Meanwhile, a new history of India was

fabricated to make future generations of the colonialized people believe in

their own inherent inferiority, and in the colonizers' bringing to them

solutions to their backwardness. (Sounds familiar?) Post-independence,

Marxist theory required a society to 'fit in' as either being capitalist or

as being feudalist. Hence, India's intellectual elite worked hard to

convince the west that India did qualify as feudalistic, so as to avoid

missing out on the anticipated revolution. Later, Subalternists tried to

return back to the indigenous, but they knew only Marxist hermeneutics and

its inherent disdain for the 'primitive'; hence, they lumped all the TKS as

'religion' and threw the baby out with the bathwater. These developments in

historiography were cumulative, adding more layers but without removing

prior ones. Today, despite these prejudices being discredited, the

Macaulayite mentality persists: they cannot face the possibility that after

aping the west, the indigenous systems they discarded had/have value.

 

Today, there are Indian economists and social developers who are hard at

work to revitalize many TKS'. Less than 10% of India's labor works in the

'organized sector', meaning corporate and governmental employees. The rest

are individual free-lancers, contract labor, private entrepreneurs, etc. It

is these 90% whose jatis were at one time the guilds of specialized workers

that supplied the world with many industrial items, and created a thriving

domestic economy that attracted many an invader. (The invaders did not come

to save souls or to civilize.) Most Indians were neither backward nor poor.

So next time you see a poor iron works villager, a poor weaver, or a humble

construction worker, think twice before calling his tradition backward or

primitive. It was massive economic drainage, oppression, social

re-engineering, that made millions of 'new poor' over the past few

centuries.

 

Now some evangelists and sociologists who built their own 'miracles of

modernity', standing on the foundations of this oppression and plunder, have

returned to 'save' the poor of India from what they claim to be the essences

of India's backwardness. What irony! It reminds me of the way white thinkers

once tried to explain slavery as being the result of the slaves being black.

To add insult to injury, many western 'liberals' proclaim that they are

compassionate and progressive, and wish to rescue Indians from themselves.

They badly need to learn an honest account of history, such as is beginning

to come out from western academic presses over the past few years.

 

Rajiv Malhotra

The Infinity Foundation

53 White Oak Drive

Princeton, NJ 08540

www.infinityfoundation.com

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