The puzzle is not why Newton is celebrated from London to Tokyo but why Bhaskaracharya remains largely absent even from India’s classrooms, public discourse, and collective memory.
If an Indian school student is asked about Sir Isaac Newton and Bhaskaracharya, the student is most likely to recognize the former and least likely to identify Bhaskaracharya. Principles of gravity as taught in schools make Newton a common name; knowing him is no mystery. But why no similar recognition of Bhaskaracharya, even though his Siddhanta Siromani has dealt with ideas resembling Newton’s differential calculus; he refined astronomical computations like none before him; and he explicitly discussed the Earth’s attractive force nearly five centuries before Newton? But one must not confuse this comparison between Bhaskaracharya and Newton as a way of initiating a comparative analysis seeking to know who is better or whose contribution matters more. Newton, for all intents and purposes, deserves his recognition for his contribution. Arguably one of medieval India’s greatest mathematicians and astronomers, Bhaskaracharya, or Bhaskara II, is largely a footnote or a vague reference in our schoolbooks, public discourse, and our collective imagination. Hence, the question and mystery are: where is Bhaskaracharya in our discourse, and why does he not occupy an intuitive place in India’s own intellectual consciousness? Bhaskaracharya was born in 1114 CE in Vijjadavidin in the Sahyadri region. Following his education, he eventually headed the renowned cosmic observatory at Ujjain, which was then regarded as the premier mathematical hub of ancient and medieval India. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, he authored his magnum opus, Siddhānta Siromani, in 1150 CE. Considered a monumental work even today, this masterpiece was divided into four celebrated treatises: Lĭlavati on arithmetic, Bijaganita on algebra, Grahaganita on planetary mathematics, and Goladhyaya on spherical astronomy.
The work was soon hailed as revolutionary, for it dealt with quadratic and indeterminate equations using the “Chakravala” method. This cyclic algorithmic approach would not be matched in Europe until the time of Fermat and Euler. Similarly, in the Lilavati, he transformed mathematics into poetry, using playful dialogues and analogies involving bees, swans, and lotus flowers to teach complex arithmetic, proving that rigorous science and artistic beauty were not mutually exclusive in the Indian tradition. Bhaskaracharya’s astronomical and calculus-related insights were equally staggering, especially since he introduced concepts of infinity, noting that any number divided by zero remains unchanged regardless of what is added or subtracted, likening it to the infinite nature of the divine. He anticipated the foundational ideas of differential calculus, understanding that at the highest point of a planet’s orbit, its instantaneous velocity is zero. In his astronomical texts, he described the Earth’s attractive force, explaining that the Earth naturally draws objects in the sky toward itself, which is why things fall. These were extraordinary leaps of human thought, achieved half a millennium before the scientific revolution in Europe realized the same. Although Bhaskaracharya did not formulate the universal mathematical law of gravitation, he recognized the phenomenon qualitatively and applied it to planetary bodies. But the thing is, acknowledging Newton’s revolutionary synthesis must not, however, require erasing Bhaskaracharya’s own foundational achievements. Both men belong to the global history of science, albeit for different reasons and in different epochs. The puzzle is not why Newton is celebrated from London to Tokyo but why Bhaskaracharya remains largely absent even from India’s classrooms, public discourse, and collective memory.
For generations, the Indian education system inherited a heavily colonized historical narrative, institutionalized during the 19th century, which presented scientific progress as a purely Western phenomenon. In this curriculum, science was depicted as beginning in ancient Greece, growing in Renaissance Europe, and culminating in modern Western laboratories. India’s profound contributions were reduced to brief cultural side notes, entirely detached from the rigorous history of ideas. Generations of Indian students learned of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes in exhaustive detail, but encountered Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and Bhaskaracharya only as passing references, if at all. This omission shaped a collective intellectual amnesia. We internalized a worldview in which the East was exclusively spiritual, and the West was exclusively scientific. What is not taught in schools gradually ceases to exist in the public imagination.
The contemporary push to integrate Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into the modern syllabus seeks to address precisely this historical imbalance. IKS has to be intellectually responsible. It has to restore Indian scholars to their rightful place within the global continuum of knowledge. The objective is to ensure that students understand that scientific inquiry has never been the monopoly of a single continent, but a river fed by multiple civilizational streams. By bringing texts such as the Lilavati into the curriculum, IKS can offer a decolonized narrative of scientific progress that acknowledges India’s sophisticated mathematical heritage. Recent curricular reforms have begun moving in this direction, yet the effort remains uneven, often facing resistance from an entrenched academic bureaucracy that still views ancient Indian science through a lens of scepticism.
Our continuing psychological dependence on external validation has sadly complemented this amnesia. India suffers from a peculiar post-colonial condition where it rediscovers its own intellectual heritage only after it has received a stamp of approval from the West. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a prodigious genius in Tamil Nadu, but he entered the mainstream Indian imagination largely because G.H. Hardy validated his intellect at Cambridge. Yoga acquired renewed mainstream prestige among the Indian elite only after it became a global wellness phenomenon in the West. Ayurveda is increasingly attracting serious attention as modern scientific journals publish clinical studies on its practices.
Similarly, Bhaskaracharya, too, periodically recounted in public conversation, but usually in a defensive posture. And doing so, sometimes, can be quite disheartening, as we end up using our historical figures as rhetorical weapons rather than studying them. Why must a civilization with such a rich, diverse, and unbroken intellectual heritage wait for someone else to tell it whom it should value? If we genuinely believe that Bhaskaracharya was among history’s great mathematicians, his legacy should be secured first in our own educational institutions, our research programs, and our textbooks. His algorithms should be solved on blackboards in Indian middle schools. His works should be read not because another civilization has finally recognized them, nor because his achievements must be framed as defeating a Western narrative, but simply because his mathematics deserves careful, rigorous study on its own merit. This is not a demand for the West to rewrite its history books to foreground Indian scholars. Every civilization naturally and rightly emphasizes its own intellectual traditions.
The pressing responsibility lies entirely with us. Before complaining that the world ignores Bhaskaracharya, we must ask ourselves if we have ensured that our own students know his name. Have our school curricula treated him as more than a mandatory footnote? To become intellectually confident, civilization does not mean or require that one must claim every modern technological discovery somehow originated within their ancient borders. Instead, true historical confidence rests on honest, unexaggerated recognition. Sir Isaac Newton absolutely deserves his place in every science textbook in India, for his mind changed the trajectory of the human race, but so does Bhaskaracharya. The tragedy is that India still allows one of its greatest minds to languish on the margins of its intellectual imagination, suffering from a curious, selective amnesia that it alone can cure.
* Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice-Chancellor of JNU.
