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A few thousand years are a short period in the timetable of India. Its myths and religious symbols take us millions of years beyond archaeological findings. And so "the Indian mind," as French thinker Guy Sorman puts it, "was better prepared for the chronological mutations of Darwinian evolution and astrophysics" that shook the west.
Behind this spiritual image is a hint of historical truth about its materialistic traditions. "By the lowest reckoning, India, China and the Arabian peninsula take from our empire 100 million sesterces [coins] every year," records 1st century Roman historian Pliny in his encyclopaedic Historia Naturalis. "That is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us."
Post-liberalisation India is familiar with such talk. But in the early part of the Christian era the active trade between Western Indian ports and Alexandria on the Mediterranean had spices, muslin, pearl, aquamarine beryl and steel draining Roman wealth in exchange for wine, vases, glass, tin and lead.
Ideas travelled faster in a world where there were no intellectual property rights. Scholars from Greece, Arabia, Persia, China and India interacted with one another, borrowed manuscripts and translated them. Buddhist scholar Sthavira Prajnadeva's letter of 654 AD to Chinese traveller Hsuan-Tsang talks of sutras and sastras which he would arrange to copy and send him.
There are clear indications that ancient India gave the world many a legacy in mathematics, medicine and natural sciences. The 'place value' concept in the decimal system of numbers and the concept of 'zero' travelled to Europe from India through the Arab world. The ingenious technology of zinc distillation predates by a few centuries a similar technique discovered in Europe. The technology of wootz steel still baffles metallurgists.
In the following pages The Week
unrolls the past for a look into some of ancient India's spectacular achievements
in science.
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