Hindutva, Pythagoras and the Zero | Prabir Purkayastha

Hindutva, Pythagoras and the Zero

The BJP’s attacks on reason and critical thinking, on scientific temper, are an integral part of its assault on the Indian nation. Article 51 A (h) of the Constitution demands as a part of fundamental duties that citizens ‘develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’. In October 2015, more than 100 leading scientists of the country felt compelled to point out that ‘ . . . what we are witnessing instead, is the active promotion of irrational and sectarian thought by important functionaries of the government’. [1] This attack on reason and science is also an attack on history, replacing the actual advances in Indian mathematics, astronomy, and medicine with myths. In positing mythology as history, it destroys the basis of how to study history using reason and scientific tools. Instead, science and history become the playground of a perverted nationalism. By negating the actual advances made in India and replacing them with myths, it also destroys the basis of future advances in which critical reason and a scientific outlook have to be a part of any discipline. We will examine some of these vainglorious claims about India’s past achievements and contrast them with a few of India’s actual achievements.

The Batra School’s Historiography of Science

RSS ideologues take the imagination of mythology and present it as a matter of fact, of history. When it comes to the scientific imagination—how to generate new advances—they fall back on the sterile claim that we have nothing new to discover: it has all been done already by our sages. This is the version of science, as mumbo-jumbo, being championed by figures like Dinanath Batra, a former general secretary of the RSS’s school network, Vidya Bharati. Batra also runs the RSS offshoot, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. In Tejomay Bharat, a series of books authored by him—with a foreword from Narendra Modi—and introduced in 2014 as supplementary readers on the Gujarat state-school syllabus, Batra makes the following claim: ‘America wants to take the credit for the invention of stem cell research, but the truth is that India’s Dr Balkrishna Ganpat Matapurkar has already got a patent for regenerating body parts . . . . . You would be surprised to know that this research is not new and that Dr Matapurkar was inspired by the Mahabharata’. There follows proof positive of stem cell research in ancient India: a mass of flesh ejected by Gandhari’s body was stored with ghee in a hundred vats, from which, at the end of two years, emerged the hundred Kauravas. If Sanjay can describe the Mahabharata War to Dhritarashtra as they sit far from the battlefield, it demonstrates the existence of iron-age television. The graft of an elephant head on Ganesh was an instance of cosmetic surgery!

In his October 2014 speech at the opening of a new wing of the Reliance Foundation’s hospital in Mumbai, Modi endorsed Batra’s claim that genetics and organ transplants were available in ancient India. ‘What I mean to say’, proceeded Modi, ‘is that we are the country which had these capabilities. We need to regain them’.

Not only did we in the past have all the knowledge we needed, we also gave it to others. The Hindutva brigade have been proclaiming that the Greeks learnt Pythagoras’ theorem from India. This is what Harsh Vardhan, the BJP government’s Minister of Science and Technology from 2014 to 2021, claimed at the Indian Science Congress in 2015: that ‘we’, having discovered the Pythagoras theorem, gave it ‘magnanimously’ to the Greeks. Absurd claims have also been made for Vedic mathematics, which is being introduced into the school curriculum of Gujarat and is one of the projects being promoted under the National ducation Policy of 2022.

The Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, under the Ministry of Human Resources, declared on its home page, ‘Sanskrit . . . . provides the theoretical foundation of ancient sciences’. No need to study science, just study Sanskrit.

Development is not necessary, regaining ‘ancient’ knowledge will do. No wonder the science budget, as a percentage of the national budget, has been continuously cut under the Modi regime. What the RSS and the Hindutva forces propagate is ‘belief ’ in place of evidence and reason. Based on this belief, myth and fantasy become the real past. Only the Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata are to be used as evidence; all other evidence—of linguistics, archaeology and texts—can be safely isregarded. If scientific evidence—say, the carbon dating of artefacts—shows that the Vedic Age is 3,500 years old, that evidence is clearly no good, since the oral tradition claims for it a past of 10,000 or 20,000 years. Similarly, a Pushpak Vimana or a Brahmastra are to be believed as actual flying machines and nuclear weapons known to the ‘ancients’.

All that scientists need do—according to Batra and his fellow travellers—is learn Sanskrit and rediscover ancient science. Presumably, they need not bother about learning science in school and college, or go through the drill of developing theories and performing actual experiments for their verification. In the BJP’s scheme of things, Sanskrit departments are competent authorities to pronounce on everything, from science to ancient Indian history. It was the Sanskrit department at Mumbai University that organised a special session to accompany the Indian Science Congress in 2015: its findings were that the Rig Veda is 5,000 to 10,000 years old, that the Aryans were no migrants into India, and that we had flying machines.

Such a view in which myth masquerades as reality is not only damaging to history, but also to science and mathematics. This mode of fabricating knowledge is not new—it was practised extensively in India and Europe in the past. It meant learning by rote and reading only canonical texts, while relegating all experiments and examination of nature as the task of the ‘lower’ classes; or, in India, ‘lower’ castes. Europe’s monasteries privileged ancient knowledge over what developed in the living practice of societies.

Thus, a physician’s studies in medieval Europe involved three years of logic, and then one or two years of ancient texts. All of it by rote and no knowledge of everyday practice. This was also the method of study that destroyed all knowledge of India’s past in the so-called centres of Indian learning. The Gurukuls of Benares, on being shown the Ashokan pillar inscriptions from Sarnath, had no knowledge of what they meant; their learned texts had no information on Ashoka whose edicts were turning up all over India. The Brahmanical texts had destroyed all knowledge of Buddhism in India, and therefore in their books Ashoka’s reign never existed!

Vedic Mathematics Versus Real Mathematics

. . . modern number system was developed in Babylon and India, and then transmitted to the Arabs. Al-Khwarizmi (780–850 CE) wrote a treatise on the Indian system of numerals—Kitab al-jam’ wa’l-tafriq bi-hisab al-Hindi, which survived in a Latin translation as Algoritmi de numero Indorum (al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu art of reckoning). The word algorithm is derived from the Latin corruption of his name, just as the Almagest derives from an Arabic corruption of Greek. Leonardo of Pisa, more commonly known as Fibonacci, popularised the Indian system of numbers in Europe through his book, Liber Abaci (book of calculations), 1202 CE. Without such developments, we would not have had the industrial revolution or the birth of modern science in Europe.

There was also an exchange between all these cultures, particularly between India, Greece, Babylon and Egypt. There is a story about the great eleventh-century polymath, Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna), which relates that his father told him not to waste his time but go and learn some mathematics from the Hindu merchant in the market.

The one unfinished matter that I have not dealt with here is that if India had made major advances in mathematics and the sciences in the past, why did it fail to develop further? This is the same question that Benjamin Farrington had posed in his analysis of Greek and Roman science. His answer: it was the separation of the hand and the brain. [2] If thinking and doing are separated—even worse, if work is subordinated to thought—both thought and work lose their creative impulse. It is in the doing that we interact with nature and learn what it really is. And, of course, artefacts as instruments of enquiry, from the telescope to the microscope, allow us to advance knowledge.

Indian science suffered far worse by separating thought and labour. [3] Even writing was subordinated to memorising as a method of learning. Instruments were the territory of the ‘lower’ castes, therefore ‘higher’ knowledge was without instruments, reached by ‘pure’ thought. The only knowledge system that could still grow under such conditions, where all labour was held to be polluting, was mathematics. Though mathematical texts exist, most of the work was done using numbers written in dust, or dhuli-karma. Most texts were more of an aid to memory, as wisdom was passed by word of mouth and through rote learning in the guru-shishya tradition. Under such conditions, mathematics is the only branch of knowledge in which the subcontinent made major advances, from the number system to the developments of the Kerala School.

The caste system imposed a far stronger division of knowledge than in other countries where the aristocracy also looked down on manual labour. Even in Europe, the division between landowning aristocrats and the tradespeople who sullied their hands with labour continued for a long time. In Great Britain, where the landowning aristocracy looked down on all other sections, engineers were not classified as ‘gentlemen’ and stood much lower down in the pecking order from scientists, mathematicians and lawyers. The Hindutva lobby attempts to invert the arguments of the Eurocentric or Orientalist account of mathematics, using mostly empty assertions and fraudulent history. The answer to Eurocentric ‘history’ is not substituting it with fraudulent history, but with the real history of knowledge. And such a history does not support supremacist claims, whether of the Eurocentric or Hindutva kind. Confusing history with fantasy also ignores the central division that caused the ossification of Indian science, the separation of the hand from the head.

Extracted with permission from Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive Science and Technology by Prabir Purkayastha, LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 2023.

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