LONDON: Most Indians know of two British individuals who live in India. They are Mark Tully, the famous former correspondent for BBC in India and William Dalrymple. William, who is a historian of Scottish origin, has been known to romanticise the Mughal rule in India. For him the Mughal rule in India was about Sufi poetry and grand palaces. He mostly fails to acknowledge the death and destruction as well as forced conversions and the plight of Hindu women under Mughal rule. He never mentions Shivaji, Rana Pratap or Guru Govind Singh. They brought the Mughal Raj to its knees. But the history of India for William Dalrymple began and ended with the Mughal rule. He has been oblivious of a Hindu civilization which is tens of thousands of years old.
It is therefore a great surprise that Dalrymple has written a book which credits Indians of yore with the most important inventions and a civilization which impacted large parts of the world. It looks like he had a Eureka moment when he attempted to look at India before the Mughal and British invasions.
Here is what he has said about India in his new book: The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. He writes, «In Britain, we are still astonishingly ignorant about the hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West with the flow of knowledge to Europe on maths, astronomy and much more which has gone unacknowledged by historians.»
He talks about the great mathematician Brahmagupta (598-670) who explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less inventedcand certainly defined—the concept of zero. For the first time it allowed any number up to infinity to be expressed with just 10 distinct symbols: the nine Indian number symbols devised by earlier generations of Indian mathematicians, plus zero.These rules are still taught in classrooms around the world. In his other writings, Brahmagupta seems to have been the first to describe gravity as an attractive force, a full millennium before Isaac Newton. Dalrymple goes on to talk about the Indian genius Aryabhatta (476–550). His work contains a very close approximation of the value of pi, 3.1416, and deals in detail with spherical trigonometry. The ease of making calculations using his system had direct implications for astronomy and allowed him to calculate the movements of the planet, eclipses, the size of the Earth and, astonishingly, the exact length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal points. Aryabhatta also correctly proposed a spherical Earth that rotated on its own axis. He was the author of the famous «Surya Siddhanta».
The ideas of these two men, bringing together the mathematical learning of ancient India, travelled first to the Arab world, then to the West, giving us not only crucial mathematical concepts such as zero, but the very form of the numbers we use today.
Dalrymple continues: «It was they who perfected the numeral system in use around the world, arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language; yet in the West, we attribute our numerals to the Arabs from whom we borrowed them, not the Indians. Although we in the West are almost entirely unaware of it, Indian learning, religious insights and ideas are among the crucial foundations of our civilization. For a millennium and a half, from about 250 BC to 1200 the rest of Asia was the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power—in religion, art, music, dance, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature. Out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought and devotion, Hindu and Buddhist.»
William Dalrymple adds: «This entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there, hiding in plain sight: in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan; in the place names of Burma and Thailand; in the murals and sculptures of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia; and in the Hindu temples of Bali. Yet somehow the Golden Road of monsoon-blown maritime trade routes linking all this into a single cultural unit—a vast Indosphere stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Pacific—has never been recognised as the link connecting all these different places and ideas to each other; and never been given a name. Williams poses an important question. Why such an advanced civilisation was not more widely known?»
Indeed many Europeans and Americans had acknowledged India›s greatness centuries ago.
Mark Twain(1833-1910) American writer said, «India is the cradle of human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grandmother of traditions.»
James Grant Duff(1759-1858) a British soldier and historian of India proclaimed: «Many of the advances that we consider to have been made in Europe were in fact made in India centuries ago. The place value system, the decimal system, was developed in India in 100 BCE. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India.» The irony was that it was Indian ideas that in many ways allowed the West to move eastwards and subjugate India.
These and many other voices were drowned out as Britain took over India. Indian›s were depicted as snake charmers. That is the reason why much of the world is unaware of India›s contributions to the human race.
Apart from Brahmagupta and Aryabhatta, there were many brilliant minds in India. Some of these names are: Sushruta, father of surgery (6th Century BCE), Kanada, Charaka, Pingala, Varahamihira as well as the Rig Veda—all explained the mysteries that had baffled human beings. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries, while India was still under colonial rule, it produced excellent inventors. Some of the names are: Jagdish Chandra Bose, Nivasa Ramanujan, C.V. Raman, Meghnad Saha, Vikram Sarabhai, Satyendra Nath Bose and many others.
Dalrymple observes that three-quarters of a century after Independence, many believe that India’s moment has come again. Its economy has quadrupled in size in a single generation. Its reputation as a centre for mathematics and scientific skills remains intact, as Indian software engineers increasingly staff the new Houses of Wisdom in Silicon Valley. He wonders if India can lead the world again. The answer is, yes. The process has already started. Hindu ideas of reincarnation, karma, yoga, meditation and vegetarianism are being accepted by followers of the Abrahamic faiths in their millions. Almost 30% of Christians believe in reincarnation, 300 million people worldwide do yoga and around 500 million people are vegetarian. Belief in Karma exists in all religions.
In the US, National Institute of Health shows that over 18 million Americans meditate and approximately 21 million adults and 1.7 million children practise yoga regularly.
There is a renewed interest in international academia for Sanskrit language, which is the mother of Indo-European languages.
Indians are settling in many parts of the world, bringing with them India’s heritage. Magnificent temples are being built in different parts of the world.
India’s might will not be about exploiting anyone. It will be guided by the ancient wisdom of India which considers the whole world as a family. Indians all over the world are scripting a new history.
Nitin Mehta is the author of “Ancient India’s Imprints and Influences on the World”. www.nitinmehta.co.uk