Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publication: The Hindu
Date: June 8, 2003
URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003060800310300.htm
Working, as I have been for the
last couple of years, on a short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, I became
conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy
of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and
technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive
advantage for the country today. Nehru was always fascinated by science
and scientists. He made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science
Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers' money) to scientists
in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like
Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments
in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors
have given the country a scientific establishment without peer in the developing
world. Jawaharlal's establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology
(and the spur they provided to other lesser institutions) have produced
many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley. Today, an IIT degree
is held in the same reverence in the U.S. as one from MIT or Caltech, and
India's extraordinary leadership in the software industry is the indirect
result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left
India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers,
integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel
outside the developed West.
And yet the roots of Indian science
and technology go far deeper than Nehru. I was reminded of this yet again
by a remarkable new book, Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick
Teresi. Teresi's book studies the ancient non-Western foundations of modern
science, and while he ranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians
and other Africans, it is his references to India that caught my eye. And
how astonishing those are! The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held
the universe together 24 centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head.
The Vedic civilisation subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a
time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat. By
the Fifth Century A.D. Indians had calculated that the age of the earth
was 4.3 billion years; as late as the 19th Century, English scientists
believed the earth was a hundred million years old, and it is only in the
late 20th Century that Western scientists have come to estimate the earth
to be about 4.6 billion years old.
If I were to focus on just one field
in this column, it would be that of mathematics. India invented modern
numerals (known to the world as "Arabic" numerals because the West got
them from the Arabs, who learned them from us!). It was an Indian who first
conceived of the zero, shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral
to Hindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in the West. ("In
the history of culture," wrote Tobias Dantzig in 1930, "the invention of
zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of
the human race.") The concept of infinite sets of rational numbers was
understood by Jain thinkers in the Sixth Century B.C. Our forefathers can
take credit for geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; the "Bakhshali manuscript",
70 leaves of bark dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era,
reveals fractions, simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, geometric
progressions and even calculations of profit and loss, with interest.
Indian mathematicians invented negative
numbers: the British mathematician Lancelot Hogben, grudgingly acknowledging
this, suggested ungraciously that "perhaps because the Hindus were in debt
more often than not, it occurred to them that it would also be useful to
have a number which represent the amount of money one owes". (That theory
would no doubt also explain why Indians were the first to understand how
to add, multiply and subtract from zero - because zero was all, in Western
eyes, we ever had.)
The Sulba Sutras, composed between
800 and 500 B.C., demonstrate that India had Pythagoras' theorem before
the great Greek was born, and a way of getting the square root of 2 correct
to five decimal places. (Vedic Indians solved square roots in order to
build sacrificial altars of the proper size.) The Kerala mathematician
Nilakantha wrote sophisticated explanations of the irrationality of "pi"
before the West had heard of the concept. The Vedanga Jyotisha, written
around 500 B.C., declares: "Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on
the head of a snake, so is mathematics at the head of all knowledge." Our
mathematicians were poets too! But one could go back even earlier, to the
Harappan civilisation, for evidence of a highly sophisticated system of
weights and measures in use around 3000 B.C.
Archaeologists also found a "ruler"
made with lines drawn precisely 6.7 millimeters apart with an astonishing
level of accuracy. The "Indus inch" was a measure in consistent use throughout
the area. The Harappans also invented kiln-fired bricks, less permeable
to rain and floodwater than the mud bricks used by other civilisations
of the time. The bricks contained no straw or other binding material and
so turned out to be usable 5, 000 years later when a British contractor
dug them up to construct a railway line between Multan and Lahore. And
while they were made in 15 different sizes, the Harappan bricks were amazingly
consistent: their length, width and thickness were invariably in the ratio
of 4:2:1.
"Indian mathematical innovations,"
writes Teresi, "had a profound effect on neighbouring cultures." The greatest
impact was on Islamic culture, which borrowed heavily from Indian numerals,
trigonometry and analemma. Indian numbers probably arrived in the Arab
world in 773 A.D. with the diplomatic mission sent by the Hindu ruler of
Sind to the court of the Caliph al-Mansur. This gave rise to the famous
arithmetical text of al-Khwarizmi, written around 820 A.D., which contains
a detailed exposition of Indian mathematics, in particular the usefulness
of the zero. With Islamic civilisation'c rise and spread, knowledge of
Indian mathematics reached as far afield as Central Asia, North Africa
and Spain. "In serving as a conduit for incoming ideas and a catalyst for
influencing others," Teresi adds, "India played a pivotal role." His research
is such a rich lode that I intend to return to ancient Indian science in
a future column.
(Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations
Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the
author of seven books, most recently Riot and (with M.F. Husain) Kerala:
God's Own Country.)
