Supreme Court raps Patanjali

 

India's ancient contribution to science

Shashi Tharoor on NDTV

The unseemly controversy over ancient Indian science at the ongoing Indian Science Congress reflects poorly on all the parties involved, including the conference itself, which is now in its 102nd year without ever having discussed the ancient roots of our indisputable national scientific tradition till yesterday.

First, it reflects poorly on the traditionalists, who have turned revivalism into a form of revisionism with their outlandish claims of improbable Vedic accomplishments. The victory of Narendra Modi in the general elections this year has propelled a number of true believers of Hindutva into positions of unprecedented influence, including in such forums as the Indian Council for Historical Research, the University Grants Commission, and, it now seems, the programme committee of the Indian Science Congress, which scheduled a talk on "Vedic Aviation Technology" that elicited howls of protest from many delegates. 

It has also given a licence to unqualified voices who gain in authority from their proximity to power - none more significant than the Prime Minister himself, who suggested in a speech at a hospital, no less, that Lord Ganesha's elephant head on a human body testified to ancient Indians' knowledge of plastic surgery. Such ideas, because they are patently absurd, except in the realm of metaphor, have embarrassed those who advance them, as well as those who cite them in support of broader, but equally unsubstantiated, claims to past scientific advances, from genetic science to cloning and inter-stellar travel. Petty chauvinism is always ugly, but never more so than in the field of science, where knowledge must be uncontaminated by ideology, superstition or irrational pride.

But the controversy also discredits the modernists who, in their contempt for such exaggerated and ludicrous claims, also dismiss the more reasonable propositions pointing to genuine Indian accomplishments by the ancients. As I pointed out on Twitter yesterday, it is not necessary to debunk the genuine accomplishments of ancient Indian science in order to mock the laughable assertions of the Hindutva brigade.

As I have been repeatedly saying, not everything from the government-sponsored right is necessarily wrong. A BJP government choosing to assert its pride in yoga and Ayurveda, and seeking to promote them internationally, is, to my mind, perfectly acceptable. 

Not only are these extraordinary accomplishments of our civilization, but they have always been, and should remain, beyond partisan politics. It is only if the BJP promoted them in place of fulfilling its responsibility to provide conventional health care and life-saving modern allopathic medicines to the Indian people, that we need object on policy grounds.

Similarly, in asserting that ancient Indians anticipated Pythagoras, Dr Harsh Vardhan was not incorrect and should not have been ridiculed. In fact he could have added Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo as well, every single one of whom had been beaten to their famous "discoveries" by an unknown and unsung Indian centuries earlier.

The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together 24 centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. 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. Lost Discoveries, by the American writer Dick Teresi, a comprehensive study of the ancient non-Western foundations of modern science, spells it out clearly: "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." 

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.

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.

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. Modern mathematics would have impossible without the zero and the decimal system; just read a string of Roman numbers, which had no zeros, to understand their limitations. 

Indian mathematicians invented negative numbers as well. 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.

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! 

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. It was al-Khwarizmi who is credited with the invention of algebra, though he properly credits Indians for it himself.

But the point is that, alas, we let this knowledge lapse. We had a glorious past; wallowing in it and debating it now will only saddle us with a contentious and unproductive present. We should take pride in what our forefathers did, but resolve to be inspired by them rather than rest on their laurels. We need to use the past as a springboard, not as a battlefield. Only then can we rise above it to create for ourselves a future worthy of our remarkable past. 

Kerala plants encyclopedia

Minu Ittiype in Outlook India

One would be forgiven for mistaking Hortus Malabaricus to be a treatise on exotic plants from the Garden of Eden instead of the Garden of Malabar. For author Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein’s (then governor of Dutch Malabar, 1670-77) prose on his many journeys into the dense forests of Malabar (in present day Kerala) is almost as lush as the vegetation. Indeed, in one section he describes that he saw such a marvellous variety of flora that it was difficult to find two trees of the same kind in the same forest.

In a flourish of similes, he likens a tree adorned with green creepers to a magnificent palace. (Hardly the stuff one expects in a preface to a plant encyclopedia.) What astonished him no less was how the natives would pick up a few leaves, crush them to use as a balm or eat them to relieve themselves of some ailment.

The secrets of the leaves, roots, berries etc and their effects on the human body were common knowledge in Malabar in the 17th century, passed down orally from one generation to the next. Rheede was intent on documenting this vast trove of traditional knowledge for his fellow Europeans and proceeded to oversee the scientific description and paintings of the medicinal uses of 742 species of flora of Malabar. It was a herculean task which took him 30 years to complete. As governor, he employed 25 experts for the project, including physicians, botanists, painters, engravers, translators and a legion of 200 supporting staff to gather the plants. The Raja of Cochin and the Zamorin of Calicut readily lent their support. The period was not without political intrigue and in between Rheede found himself posted to Batavia in the middle of the project. But he remained ardently faithful to it. The 12 volumes of Hortus were published in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693.

For over 300 years the Hortus volumes remained in relative obscurity due to a linguistic barrier: it was written in Old Latin and there was none well versed both in Old Latin and the plant kingdom to decipher it. In 1968, K.S. Manilal, a botany scholar and taxonomist, finally undertook the arduous task of studying Latin for 12 years, collected over 400 species of the mentioned plants and decoded Hortus. The project took 35 years of his life, but an English translation was published in 2003 (published by Kerala University) with a Malayalam edition coming out in 2008.

A comprehensive analysis of the Hortus also throws up some uncomfortable questions, some of which have already got the state’s intelligentsia talking. Like the case of the Hortus’s main contributor, a hereditary Ezhava vaidyan (physician) named Itty Achuthan, who was at the time forbidden from using the official written form of Malayalam, vattezhuthu, because he was not from the upper caste. His certificate in kolezhuthu, published in the Hortus, is a testament to this though, ironically, he was the chief protagonist in the documentation. So Hortus, besides documenting the flora, is also a subverted commentary on the culture, linguistics and social structure of the period. The record shows that initially three Saraswat Brahmins—Ranga Bhatt, Vinayak Pandit and Appu Bhatt—gymnosophists well versed in the classic medical texts, were initially employed to assist in identifying the plants. But when Van Rheede found that the Brahmins relied on their servants for physical verification of the plants he found Itty Achuthan far more invaluable. (In a sense, through the encyclopaedia he created, for the first time, an unimaginable inter-caste collaboration.) Achuthan, a descendant of Kollatt vaidyans, had inherited certain ancient palm leaf manuscripts which set out in detail the medicinal use of various plants. During his time, he was considered the most knowledgeable man in the field.

Commemorating the 333rd year of the Hortus, historians now believe it is the only authentic source of the ancient ethno-medical knowledge of Kerala, pre-dating even Ayurveda. As Dr B. Ekbal, former Kerala University V-C, puts it, “It was a decentralised medical practice that was Dravidian and predated ayurveda. Almost like an internal colonisation, later Ayurvedic practitioners appropriated this knowledge.” Today’s Ayurveda doctors are not too sure about this theory, saying their system is codified and argue that the medicinal properties described in Hortus are based mostly on folklore. Dr K. Anilkumar, executive director of Kerala Ayurveda Ltd, says, “We need to study Hortus to ascertain its efficacy. Like it’s mentioned that the bark of the coconut tree can be used to cure liver diseases. We’ll need research to see if there’s any truth to it.”

Kerala’s traditional knowledge of the curative powers of plants has eroded over the years but with the translation of Hortus an intangible heritage has once again become accessible. Some of the plants mentioned have become extinct, others unidentifiable. Even the health of the forests has declined, with trees now reduced to pygmies: the biggest kokum or kodampuli tree of today would at most fill a man’s armspan today but the book has instances of a similar tree’s girth “filling the embrace of two men”. Hortus is a repository of medical treasures as well as insights: who knew the oil of the common brinjal taken with opium has the potent effect of poison?