The Times of India MONDAY, JUNE 03, 2002
Rediscovery of India TIMES NEWS NETWORK When Stalin fell ill, the Communist Party's politburo asked the Russian church to pray for him. Mao Zedong presided over the celebrations of 2,500 years of Buddhism in the midst of the cultural revolution. Noted philosopher Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, in charge of the 50-volume 'History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture', cites these instances to emphasise culture 's role in the evolution of society. In an interview with Mahendra Ved, he says Indian culture has been remarkably catholic and integral: What prompted such an ambitious project? The project is being executed, from 1989, by the Centre for Studies in Civilisations for the Indian Council for Philosophical Research (ICPR). Our approach is inter- disciplinary, wherein the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) and the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) are represented. The project is based on the premise that the whole world will not come to us for science and technology, but we have the heritage of philosophy, like some other ancient civilisations. Philosophy is always inter-disciplinary. Inspiration for this project came from Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India, which he wrote in 1944 while imprisoned in Ahmednagar. Although Nehru was an agnostic, the book has numerous references to spiritualism, Vedanta, mathematical and astronomical traditions of India. Others who influenced the project's conceptualisation include George Sarton, a Flemish mathematician-philosopher who compiled six volumes from 1927 to 1957, and Joseph Needham of Cambridge University. His book, Science and Civilisation in China covers, besides China, the contributions of India, South East Asia, and central Asia to science and technology. The basic theme was how eastern ideas have moved to the West. We find an unmistakable Euro-centric bias in the manner in which Needham criticises the absence of a scientific revolution and university system in the east. We did have universities in ancient India. Yes. But Nalanda was the last of the ancient Indian universities, destroyed in the 12th century. Taxila and Nalanda were Buddhist, but had imbibed the guru-shishya parampara and the gurukul system which, centuries later, Swami Shradhanand and Dayanand Saraswati tried to resurrect. The ethos of Indian scientists was liberal. We did not have the type of persecution that Galileo and Copernicus faced. It is evident that Indian philosophy, mathematics etc mutually influenced central and South East Asia. The India-China contact was also constant. Tanchung, son of the Sinologist who worked under Tagore at Shantiniketan, has said that Fa Hien and Huen Tsang were mere signposts. The Hunanis talked of shindu (Hindu) settlements. How have you gone about the publications under your project? Our centre has published a treatise by A R Rahman on the ancient ties between India and central Asia. There is another volume on the history of science in India, central and west Asia and China. G C Pande has recently submitted his book on South East Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Pande is now working on the golden chain of civilisation linking India, Persia, Semitic and Hellenic cultures. All these show that there was never one-way traffic. Our contention is that if Euro-centrism in the study of cultures is wrong, so is Sino-centrism. As Tanchung says, the Himalayas are not a divider but a connector. See the way the dragon rules cultures from the Himalayan foothills to Korea. All that constitutes Indian culture did not evolve in the heart of present-day India. Panini wrote his grammar in 600-700 BC at a place near Purushpur, today's Peshawar. He was writing the language of that region, which extended beyond Hindustan and Pakistan of today. What about the 50-volume project? Twenty-four have been published so far. Three more should be out soon. Two volumes on social history of mediaeval India take a close look at the Muslim period. They are edited by J S Grewal, with contributions from Irfan Habib and Iftikhar Alam. Politics is discussed only when it influences social developments. Then, S N Prasad has submitted the military history of India. Daya Krishna's book on evolution of philosophy in the 18th-20th century period, with a lot of work in Sanskrit, has come out. Besides, there is a series of 12 monographs. Two volumes on life science and medicine in mediaeval India are already out. There is also a main volume on fine arts by B N Goswami. The quality and content of our volumes are favourably comparable with UNESCO's 'History of Mankind'. How do you make all this relevant to modern times? History is a dialogue between the past and the present, addressed to the future. All three are inseparable. When J C Bose said, ''Light and life are two limbs of the same reality'', he wasn't just being poetic. You cannot have contemporaneity that is oblivious of the past. Why did Nehru ask us to 'discover' India? When you debate the theory of the atom, you are going back to the scientific tradition of separating the grain from the chaff. Copyright © 2002 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.
