The Things India Knew First

[Guest guest]

The things India knew first

By Shashi Tharoor

United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public

Information.

 

IN an earlier column I wrote of how the roots of Indian science and

technology go far deeper than Nehru. I cited a remarkable new book,

Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi, which studies

the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science. While Teresi

ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians and other

Africans, it is his references to India that won me. Where my

previous piece focused on ancient India's remarkable breakthroughs in

mathematics, in this column I'd like to cover the other sciences in

which our ancestors excelled.

 

For a nation still obsessed by astrology, it is ironic that Indians

established the field of planetary astronomy, identifying the

relative distance of the known planets from the sun, and figured out

that the moon was nearer to the earth than the sun. A hymn of the Rig-

Veda extols "nakshatra-vidya"; the Vedas' awareness of the importance

of the sun and the stars is manifest in several places. The

Siddhantas are amongst the world's earliest texts on astronomy and

mathematics; the Surya Siddhanta, written about 400 A.D., includes a

method for finding the times of planetary ascensions and eclipses.

The notion of gravitation, or gurutvakarshan, is found in these early

texts. "Two hundred years before Pythagoras," writes

Teresi, "philosophers in northern India had understood that

gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the

sun, the most massive object, had to be at its centre."

 

The Kerala-born genius Aryabhata was the first human being to

explain, in 499 A.D., that the daily rotation of the earth on its

axis is what accounted for the daily rising and setting of the sun.

(His ideas were so far in advance of his time that many later editors

of his awe-inspiring "Aryabhatiya" altered the text to save his

reputation from what they thought were serious errors.) Aryabhata

conceived of the elliptical orbits of the planets a thousand years

before Kepler, in the West, came to the same conclusion (having

assumed, like all Europeans, that planetary orbits were circular

rather than elliptical). He even estimated the value of the year at

365 days, six hours, 12 minutes and 30 seconds; in this he was only a

few minutes off (the correct figure is just under 365 days and six

hours). The translation of the Aryabhatiya into Latin in the 13th

Century taught Europeans a great deal; it also revealed to them that

an Indian had known things that Europe would only learn of a

millennium later.

 

If Aryabhata was a giant of world science, his successors as the

great Indian astronomers, Varamahira and Brahmagupta, have left

behind vitally important texts that space does not allow me to

summarise here. The mathematical excellence of Indian science, which

I described in a recent column, sparkles through their work; Indian

astronomers advanced their field by calculations rather than

deductions from nature. Teresi says that "Indian astronomy, perhaps

more than any other, has served as the crossroads and catalyst

between the past and the future of the science." Inevitably, Indian

cosmology was also in advance of the rest of the world. By the Fifth

Century A.D. Indians became the first to estimate the age of the

earth at more than four billion years. Teresi's book has a

fascinating section relating Hindu creation myths to modern

cosmology; he discusses the notion of great intermeshing cycles of

creation and destruction and draws stimulating parallels with

the "big bang" theory that currently commands the field.

 

The ancient Indians were no slouches in chemistry, which emerges in

several verses of the Atharva Veda, composed around 1000 B.C. Two

thousand years later, Indian practical chemistry was still more

advanced than Europe's. The historian Will Durant wrote that the

Vedic Indians were "ahead of Europe in industrial chemistry; they

were masters of calcination, distillation, sublimation, steaming,

fixation, the production of light without heat, the mixing of

anaesthetic and soporific powders, and the preparation of metallic

salts, compounds and alloys." An Indian researcher, Udayana, studied

gases by filling bladders and balloons with smoke, air and assorted

gases. The ancient Jain thinkers predicted the notion of opposite

electrical charges and advanced a notion of the "spin" of particles

which would not be discovered by the West till the 20th Century.

 

So what about physics? Indian metaphysicists came upon the idea of

atoms centuries before the Greek Democritus, known in the West as the

father of particle physics. In 600 B.C. Kanada established a theory

of atoms in his Vaisesika-sutra; the Jains went further in later

years, expounding a concept of elementary particles. Indians also

came closer to quantum physics and other current theories than anyone

else in the ancient world.

 

The Upanishadic concepts of svabhava — the inherent nature of

material objects — and yadrchha (the randomness of causality) are

startlingly modern. The Upanishads developed the first

classifications of matter, evolving into an awareness of the five

elements and later of the five senses. When the Samkhya philosophers

explained, in the Sixth Century B.C., that "the material universe

emanates out of prakriti, the rootless root of the universe," they

anticipate Aristotle. And when Indian philosophers spoke of maya, or

that which gives illusory weight to the universe, they did so in

terms that evoke the 20th Century idea of the Higgs field, the all-

pervasive invisible field so beloved of particle physicists, which

gives substance to illusion.

 

Which brings us back to technology. Did India have any technology of

its own before the IITs? The answer is an emphatic yes. I have

already mentioned last time the extraordinary achievements of the

Harappan civilization, which included terra cotta ceramics fired at

high temperatures, a sophisticated system of weights and measures,

and sanitary engineering skills in advance of the West of the 19th

Century. Our skill at digging up, cutting and polishing diamonds goes

back millennia. In the Sixth Century A.D. India made the highest-

quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from

Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere

in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our

textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial

era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest

products with skilled labour. That was, in the end, how the British

defeated us.

 

 

http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/stories/2003072000120300.htm

 

Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under-Secretary General for

Communications and Public Information.