The things Indians knew first

[barney]

The things Indians knew first

By Shashi Tharoor

"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper

July 20, 2003

 

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.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

.... we lost our lands and our pride to muslim invaders and british.

 

May be has the civilisation reached its peak, that lead to the natural downfall....

 

may be small men with big ego were at the helm of affairs?

[Guest guest]

good one

[ranjanbhandari]

Barney,It is very nice to see your posts...its so informative...keep up the good work.

Love,

Ranjan Bhandari

[Guest guest]

I remember reading somewhere that they were excellent metallurgists.

 

They used urines of different animals ( may be for nitrogen???) for heat treatment.

[Guest guest]

The Palani temple statue is made of nine poisonous materials, which when combined properly gives medicianl properties, and which cannot be combined by ordinary means.

It was made by a great siddha called Bhogar.

 

And the composition of the material of which the Kanchi Kailasanathar temple is not known even now.

[Guest guest]

I am bragging about tamil culture, but since I am from tamilnadu, and I have not seen the magnificient temples anywhere else, I cant help but write this.

 

[maadhav]

dont worry.

keep telling the truth.

thanks.

 

 

[Guest guest]

I am also from TN, and I find it annoying that Tamils should brag about their culture. It is wrong. Why can't we all call it "Hindu pride" and leave it at that? Why harp on Tamil rpide or Gujarati pride or Marathi pride? Regionalism is the most dangerous "ism" and by calling ourselves tamils, bengalis etc., we are only playing into the hands of ppl who want to balkanize India. I respectfully suggest that we call ourselves "Indians" or "Hindus", rather than tamils or sourashtrians. It is divisive and nothing good can come out of it. For instance, if a Tamil has achieved something, like the temple you ppl have mentioned, then why cant we say, "Hindus who incidentally happened to be from TN achieved such and such a thing, and so forth" The point is, the stress should be on Hindus/Indians rather than Tamils. I hope you understand.

[Guest guest]

"we are only playing into the hands of ppl who want to balkanize India"

 

I agree. I notice unfortunately many Tamils agree with aryan invasion theory. Very dangerous.

[Guest guest]

...are separate from the northern india...

 

learn some fundamental linguistics and genetics as ignorance can be dangerous.

 

[Guest guest]

...are separate from the northern india..."

 

So what's your point? We are Indians now, like it or not, and learn to accept it. What good would it do to brag about Tamil culture or whatever? Call yourself a Hindu or an Indian, that's more than enough. Shed your regionalism. It is dangerous. And this applies to not only tamils but all Indians. What if a Marathi is different from Gujarati, or a Bengali from a Keralite? Sure there will be differences, that's life, even in a small family, you see differences between brothers and sisters, so obviously in a big country like india, this isnt so surprising. But we must learn to forget the differences and focus on the similarity, the thing that binds us, unites us, which is called Sanatan Dharma.