The Āryabha A - Nīlaka A - Sāmanta Evolution

THE
RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

THE RYABHAA NLAKAA- SMANTA EVOLUTION AND THE MANNER IN WHICH THE ANCENT INDIC SHAPED THE 0RIGINS OF ASTRONOMY
Narrated by
Kosla Vepa PhD

! !
INDIC STUDIES FOUNDATION
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HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY
THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

THIS M0NOGRAPH is part of a series on the distortions in Indian History Volume I was titled .Astronomical Dating of Events & Select Vignettes from Indian history. Edited by Kosla Vepa PhD ISBN 978-1-4357-1120-4 Available from Amazon and Lulu.com Volume II The Colonial Paradigm of Indian History Available at Lulu.com Volume III The Pernicious Effects of the Misinterpreted Greek Synchronism Available at lulu.com Volume IV The Reality of Knowledge Transmission Available at Lulu.com Volume V The Origins of Astronomy, the Calendar and Time ISBN 978-0-557-61097-6 Available from Amazon and Lulu.com Volume VI The South Asia File
ISBN 978-0-615-21391-0 Available from Amazon.com and Lulu.com
Volume VII The Dh rmik Traditions Volume VIII Selected Essays from ICIH 2009. Volume IX Souvenir Volume of ICIH 2009 (while supplies last) Volume X Philosophy and Motivations for ICIH 2009 Published by Indic studies Foundation 948 Happy Valley Rd, Pleasanton, CA, 94566 Copyright 2010 by Indic Studies Foundation No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner, who has also the sole right to grant licenses for translation into other languages and publications thereof.
978-1-105-55014-0
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AND THE MANNER IN WHICH THE ANCIENT INDIC SHAPED THE 0RIGINS OF ASTRONOMY
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
THE RYABHAA NLAKAA- SMANTA EVOLUTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 5 WAS COPERNICUS NEEDLESSLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE REACTION OF THE CHURCH ......................... 5 THE CALENDAR AND ASTRONOMY .......................................................................................................... 6 THE PREMISE BEHIND THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS ................................................... 8 IS THE CALENDAR A WORTHY OBJECT OF SCHOLARLY ATTENTION ........................................................ 9 6. A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLDS FIRST HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE ................................................. 11 7. UNCOVERING THE SCOPE OF ANCIENT INDIAN MATHEMATICS ........................................................... 12 8. OTTO NEUGEBAUER AND THE HEGELIAN HYPOTHESIS ......................................................................... 14 9. THE PROBLEM WITH THE OCCIDENTALIST CHARACTERIZATION OF OTHER CULTURES ........................ 16 10. THE FAITHFUL TRANSMISSION OF THE COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES ................................................. 17 11. GREEK AND ROMAN DIFFICULTIES WITH ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC ................................................. 19 12. STUDY INDIA FOR THE GREATER PART OF YOUR LIFE , ONLY TO MINIMIZE IT ................................... 20 13. THE INTEREST IN GERMANY IN INDOLOGY ......................................................................................... 22 14. THE RELUCTANCE OF INDOLOGISTS IN THE OCCIDENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE VEDIC EPISTEME .... 24 15. THE OBSESSION OF THE OCCIDENTAL WITH CHRONOLOGY AND TEMPORAL PRIORITY .................... 25 16. DIFFERING STANDARDS OF CLAIMS FOR TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE ........................................ 27 17. GEOCENTRIC AND HELIOCENTRIC MODELS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM .................................................. 35 18. INDIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ASTRONOMY ................................................................................... 38 19. THE PARADIGM SHIFT FROM A KINEMATIC MODEL TO A PHYSICS MODEL ...................................... 40 20. NO ROMAN EVER LOST HIS LIFE BECAUSE HE WAS ABSORBED IN cONTEMPLATION ........................ 40 21. ANCIENT INDIC MATHEMATICAL ASTRONOMY HAD A UNIQUE CHARACTER. .................................... 41 22. TABLE 2 ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS RETRODICTED BY PLANETARIUM (RNET) SOFTWARE ...... 42 23. MAJOR TRANSMISSIONS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY .. 44 24. THE EPISTEMIC CONTINUITY OF A CIVILIZATION ................................................................................ 46 25. THE COPERNICAN MODEL WAS NOT A RADICAL DEPARTURE FROM THE PTOLEMAIC ONE .............. 47 26. THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT HINDU ................................................................................................. 47 27. TABLE 3 NAMES OF INDIC SAVANTS SORTED ALPHABETICALLY .......................................................... 50 APPENDIX A THE REASONS FOR MY SIGNIFICANT INTEREST IN THIS FIELD ................................................. 55 APPENDIX B MY CREDENTIALS FOR DOING THE RESEARCH AND WRITING THE BOOK ................................ 56 28. INDEX ................................................................................................................................................... 59 29. NOTES .................................................................................................................................................. 60

THIS MONOGRAPH is primarily a collection of excerpts and key passages from my recent publication The Origins of Astronomy, the Calendar and Time (hereinafter referred to as The Origins). I will be issuing additional monographs until we cover the entire book, in 6 to 10 monographs. However , my first preference is that you get the whole book. Do not let people dissuade you from getting a copy of the book. There will never be another book like it again and eventually we will run our of print copies of the book. The purpose of this monograph is to establish the proposition that it was not the works of the Greeks culminating in the work of Copernicus work that set off a revolution , but the pain staking work of Indian and Persian astronomers. All the data you need for establishing this proposition is available in the Origins. We will cover only the gist of the arguments in these monographs.
1. INTRODUCTION
I have made the remark later in this paper that Copernicus, who was extremely cagey about releasing his work, need not have been alarmed to the degree that he was. I say this not because he thought he had written a landmark in the history of mankind but because, he was a cautious individual and did not stray too far from the reservation. The Reservation that we are trying to describe here is not merely the physical gulag, when most of the population of Europe had little freedom of movement but the mental imprisonment of most of the population where every aspect life was circumscribed by the church and originality of thought was severely discouraged. Individuals who flouted the injunctions of the church were burnt at the stake.
But the occidental has a habit of naming the most unpleasant periods in his history with nice sounding elevating names. Let us take the case of the Renaissance. This is an excellent sounding word especially if you pronounce it the way the French pronounce it. Re naissance literally means rebirth. The etymology includes the Italian word th renascimento and the French word renascere. But if you look at the conditions in Europe during that period (14 to th 1 17 Century), there is precious little of that going on. It must be remembered that the Renaissance period was overshadowed by frequent occurrences of bubonic plague and black death. The general living standards were very low , with poor hygienic practices especially when it came to personal hygiene. I have learnt just recently that the th th th name Renaissance was bestowed on that period (14 century to 17 century) in the 19 century long after the memory of the plague was forgotten. The black death resulted in the loss of nearly 100 million lives and 1 out of 3 Europeans was killed by the epidemic. In fact it affected the lives of everybody, including Sir Isaac Newton who had to leave Cambridge and go home in order to shield himself from the effects of the plague. In the end the punch line for the Renaissance period reads as follows. These changes, while significant, were concentrated on the elite, and for the vast majority of the population life was little changed from the . The much touted renaissance was a period of great misery in Europe, and is far from being a re-birth of an earlier golden era . But It had one redeeming feature. It was the period when Europe was in the process of digesting the vast amount of scientific literature that fell into their hands after the fall off Toledo. 2 I had already characterized the Enlightenment period, as being another misnomer with my remark To what purpose, by naming an age or era as an Enlightenment era, when the elite of this era do not show the slightest signs of such an enlightenment. One has to recall that the enlightenment period was congruent with the genocide of many native peoples, who have disappeared from the face of the earth
2. WAS COPERNICUS NEEDLESSLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE REACTION OF THE CHURCH AND DID HIS WORK REALLY SET OF A REVOLUTION
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There is one more word that the naive Indic needs to be aware of and that is the word Humanism. I will discuss it in section 22 I am making the assertion that things are not always what the Occidental would like us to believe. 3 The ancient Hindu by contrast was living in a virtual paradise of freedom . One must admit the bar was not very high 4 in terms of embracement of Diversity in the ancient era . Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that he could choose to be what he wanted without fear of retribution. He could be a Materialist Chrvka, expressing the sentiments of Lisa Minnelli (I am a material girl) or a Shramana, placing his body in an austere environment I remark on this because Europeans who are used to a Church telling them what they should or should not do in every sphere of life , do not have an inkling of the Dhrmik way of life in ancient India. They assume (because misery loves company or so they say) that just because their church was dogmatic, that other traditions are equally oppressive. I am not saying that there were no misfits in such a society, because the inherent nature of the diversity in the populations and the proclivities of the Normal distribution will ensure that there will be individuals who do not fit in and will have to be punished as a consequence of their actions . But it was rarely the case that any exploitation took place that was sanctioned by tradition. It was in such a milieu that the search for knowledge took place.
It is now recognized that River Valley civilizations flourished or at least started coalescing into communities around 8000 BCE5. The ancient Hindu nurtured his beliefs and practices in the river valley civilizations of the Indian subcontinent and soon he was able to anticipate the periodicity of his environment and apply it to his needs There are three characteristics of the ancient Hindu that stand out; 1. His ability to integrate the knowledge of the external world with the knowledge that he gained of himself 2. He became an adept at mastering the sciences. There are almost no stories in the Indian antiquity where an eclipse struck alarm amongst the population, leading one to believe that they were treated with nonchalance during most of recorded history. 3. There are no prayers where people ask for their daily bread leading one to believe that the average ancient Indic was pretty high up in the Maslow hierarchy of needs6. In the Origins I have given a tantalizing survey of the epistemology of the ancients, but it is a vast subject that needs study. My contention therefore is that what appears to be a revolution ceases to be so when we look at the totality of the effort in different civilizations . It is the insularity of the Occidental where he elevates his ignorance of other cultures to absurd levels, when combined with the not invented here syndrome that appears to be the hallmark of unsophisticated and parochial societies, that depend on prejudice rather than rationality, you have all the makings of groupthink, and everybody repeats the same thing without verification and introspection. I have given several example of such groupthink in the Origins, when it comes to the assessment of the Indic effort in astronomy.

3. THE CALENDAR AND ASTRONOMY
TABLE 1 SPECIFICATIONS FOR A USEFUL AND EASY TO USE CALENDAR The Civil year and the month must have an integral number of days. The starting day of the year and the month ought to be consistently defined. The dates should correspond to the seasons of the year. For the purpose of continuous dating, an era should be used and should be properly defined. The civil day, as distinguished from the astronomical day should be defined. While the use of an astronomical day was appropriate during the ancient era, the requirements of precision demand an objective measure that is independent of the variability of the so called astronomical constants. We draw attention to this to see if any of the ancients were perspicacious enough to see this, 5000 years ago. If a Lunar month is part of the design of the calendar, there should be convenient and elegant means to make luni solar adjustments. A calendar is a system for temporally organizing events in our daily life for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is an integer, known as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the Sun or the Moon. Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their systems, while ensuring that it is suited to their particular need calendars in the world utilize the periodicities of the repetitive motions associated with the Solar system, especially those that can be established with the use of the naked eye. It is remarkable that different societies have come up with similar (though not) identical paradigms in designing their calendars. In retrospect, it is not really surprising that this should be the case, since they use essentially the same parameters associated with the motions of the Sun and the Moon. A calendar is also a physical device (often paper). This is the most common usage of the word. Other similar types of calendars can include computerized systems, which can be set to remind the user of upcoming events and appointments. As a subset, a calendar is also used to denote a list of particular set of planned events (for example, court calendar). The English word calendar is derived from the Latin word kalendae, which was the Latin name of the first day of every month, when debts fell due and accounts were reckoned -- from calare "to announce solemnly, call out," as the priests did in proclaiming the new Moon that marked the calends. Regardless of the context or the region where the Calendar first got initiated, the design of a Calendar has never been a mathematically elegant exercise. This is so because there are not an exact number of days in either the Lunar month or the Solar year and there are not an integer number of months in a year. To put it in pithy terms, these quantities are not commensurate with each other. To summarize the objectives of designing a calendar; Calendars have been used in the main, for two purposes To administer the civic and regulatory needs of a people 7
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To regulate the socio religious activities of society The need for a calendar was felt very early in recorded history, especially after the advent of river valley civilizations and soon the quest began to predict the regularity of the seasons, in order to plan ahead for planting the crops. It was realized that there was regularity in the motion of the heavenly bodies that gave an indication of such repeated occurrences as the seasons. It is for this reason that the connection between the calendar and astronomy was established at an early stage of human development, beginning with the formation of river valley civilizations. As a result of the lack of exact relationships between integers representing the various periods, the Indic (and I suspect others such as the Babylonians) were compelled to develop mathematical techniques suitable or handling large quantities. And the inability to express relationships using merely whole numbers or integers forced the Indics at a very early stage in their development to postulate a decimal place value system, with the use of zero as the number whose value is dependent on its place. Nevertheless, the facility with large numbers which we take for granted today was not universal in the ancient world and Ptolemy7 himself expressed difficulty dealing with fractions8 and of course we know that the Occident did not use decimals till about 1000 years later. This leads us to wonder how Ptolemy was able to carry out the arithmetical operations needed in the Syntaxis in 160 CE especially when he admits that he had no facility with fractions. The Indic approach to astronomy, contrary to presuppositions in the occident was characterized by mundane motivations namely the need to determine accurately the date, time and place of the location of the main planetary bodies that he could see with the naked eye; the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in relation to the Earth. As we shall repeat on more than one occasion, in this endeavor he was eminently practical. Again, his motivation for the determination of these quantities was also driven by pragmatic considerations, considerations like a need for fixing the seasons when planting was necessary. He may have found it politic to cloak these mundane considerations in ritualistic garb in order to impress those in society not blessed with the analytical skills that he may have used. In summary the goal of the Ancient Indic Prayojana or raison-de-tre of the stra was primarily the determination of Kal (Time), Dik (direction or orientation), and Desha (Place) or what is customarily referred to as the Triprasna Adhikra. The story of the calendar and the development of mathematics and astronomy is indeed a fascinating chapter in the intellectual history of the species. It is laced with people of superior talents, but all too often these very same gifted individuals were not able to rise above petty considerations, while they were uncovering the secrets of the skies. I trust I can make it as exciting a tale as I discovered it to be during my researches. The structure of scientific revolutions was a landmark publication by Thomas Kuhn when it first appeared in 1962 and along with his companion volume The Copernican Revolution set the tone for the prevailing view on how we arrived at the current understanding of the Solar system. In his book Thomas Kuhn uses the term paradigm shift to explain why in his view dramatic changes occur in the manner in which we view the universe. The premise behind this is the assumption that Ptolemy was the pre-eminent Geometer of his time and Kuhn tries to explain why it took 1400 years for Ptolemys viewpoint to be supplanted by the Heliocentric model that is universally accepted today. My contention is that by focusing so intensely on the work of Ptolemy, Copernicus, (and some intermediate figures like Regiomontanus and Peuerbach), they miss the main developments which were taking place elsewhere. 8
4. THE PREMISE BEHIND THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

This is why I call the Prologue to my book The Parable of the Lost coin. I maintain that the tradition which eventually led to the Kepler Newtonian model was not Ptolemys work or that of Copernicus but the extensive work done by a succession of Indian, Persian and Arabic astronomers (see table) that led first to the Nlakaa Tycho Model and eventually to the Newtonian model. In fact the circular Orbit dogma was a major hindrance which even Copernicus did not have the mathematical skills to surmount. Anno Domini Nostri Iesu (Jesu) Christi ("In the Year of the Lord Jesus Christ") circa 1280 in a little village called Cambridge north west of London, a group of workmen began constructing structures to house Peterhouse, one of the first colleges constituting what would become in time one of the great learning centers of Europe and the world. But in 1280 Europe was largely a backwater. It would be well over 300 years before Cambridge could boast a world-renowned scientist on its roster. The writings of the ancient Greeks were largely lost, and it was only after Toledo and its world famous library was conquered from the Moorish rulers of Andalusia and Southern Spain in 1085 CE that Europe was able to make strides in the various branches of knowledge thanks to the large number of Arab documents that now fell into the hands of the Spaniards at one of the greatest libraries of the middle ages. For example, Ptolemys Syntaxis, which survives today as the Almagest (from the Arabic Al Majisti9) was translated into Latin from the Arabic reputedly by a Gerard of Cremona in 1175 CE. This was the sole text known as the Arabo Latin text, in Astronomy for the majority of the people in Europe during the ensuing centuries, until the 17th century. In fact one cannot mention Ptolemys Syntaxis without mentioning that there exist no manuscripts of this work dating back to the time when it was written(C.K. Raju10). Truth be told, it is wrong to refer to this text as Ptolemys Almagest; rather it would be appropriate to call it Ptolemys Syntaxis. One has to wait till the 9th century CE, for the translations into Arabic to happen. The credit for the Al Majisti should properly be given to the Arabic authors who compiled it. We place on record in Table 5 of chapter VIII, the lists of Islamic savants (only a minority of these were Arabs, and a predominant number were from Persia and Central Asia). The distribution of savants reflected the relative proportions of these people within the borders of the Islamic Khilafat. While we do not see the need for eulogizing the Islamic conquests, any more than we would eulogize the conquests of Alexander, or Ghenghiz Khan or Hitler, it remains a fact that the Islamic conquest challenged the Carolingian ruler Charles Martell in the West, after taking over most of the Iberian peninsula and it subjugated the mighty Persian Empire in the East. It brought an unintended benefit to the conquerors, which forms a significant part of our story. This was in the form of a resurgence of science, which flourished for more than 300 years. We will go into greater detail in Chapter VIII of the Origins as to how it affected the story of Astronomy. Throughout history, and especially thanks to the Arabs, the work of the Hindus was increasingly available to the Europeans. In 1068 CE id al-Andalus , as far as we are aware, the first historian of Science11 and as his name indicates from Moorish Spain, wrote Kitb Tabaqut al-Umam in Arabic (Book of Categories of Nations, Livres des Categories des Nations). The book was translated into French in 1835 by Regis Blachre12 and into English by Alok Kumar13 in 1992. The text was produced in Spain in the 11th century in which id was reported to have made the observation that only eight nations were interested in and comprehended Science14. These eight people were the Hindus, the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Arabs. In this List, he placed the Hindus at the Head of the list because Les Indous, entre tout les nations, a traverse le sicle et depuis lantiquit, furent la source de la sagesse, de la justice et de la modration. Ils furent un peuple, donne de vertus pondratrices, 9
5. IS THE CALENDAR A WORTHY OBJECT OF SCHOLARLY ATTENTION
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crature de penses sublimes, dapologues universel dinventions rares et de traits desprit remarquables, Amongst all nations, during the course of centuries and since antiquity the Indics were the source of wisdom, justice, and moderation. We credit the Indic nation and its people with excellent intellect, exalted ideas, universal maxims, rare inventions, and wonderful talents. They are indeed gifted with a trait characterized by a remarkable spirit. id al-Andalus (SAA) goes on to say To their credit, the Indics have made great strides in the study of numbers and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds and the peculiarities of substances. This much is largely uncontested and it is abundantly clear that the high opinion that SAA had of Indic advances in the sciences was not an isolated instance. We mention Severus Sebokht, a Syrian Bishop, who studied astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics in the monastery of Keneshre on the banks of the Euphrates in 662 CE: (the following statement must be understood in the context of the alleged Greek claim that all mathematical knowledge emanated from them). Severus Sebokht was familiar with the work of Babylonian, Indian, and Greek science and was apparently irritated by the superciliousness of those who propagated the myth of the superiority of Greek learning.15 "I shall not speak here of the science of the Hindus, who are not even Syrians, and not of their subtle discoveries in astronomy that are more inventive than those of the Greeks and of the Babylonians; not of their eloquent ways of counting nor of their art of calculation, which cannot be described in words - I only want to mention those calculations that are done with nine numerals. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value"16. We have listed these opinions in appendix E of The Origins17. But all of those high opinions of Indic science were anathema to the Colonial power that went to Herculean lengths to undermine the high reputation of the Indics and continues to do so even today. We begin our story in Toledo because it seems clear in retrospect that the seed for Hellenization of all knowledge, the forerunner of todays Eurocentric view of the world, sprang from the vaults of the Toledo Library, when what was then largely Catholic Europe, discovered to their dismay that there were advances in almost every field, that they were not privy to. It was colonialism that provided a second wind to the process of Hellenization. Colonialism is only a recent manifestation of Eurocentrism. It is not merely the conquest of dominion of vast lands and exerting ones will on millions of people. It is more than the act of unleashing unprovoked violence on a distant people, a violence not restricted to the physical realm. It subjects the colonized to an epistemic rupture of vast proportions. This book18 tells the narrative of one example of such an epistemic rupture. We will tell the story (and the history) of such a rupture in the case of Astronomy and Mathematics. We will amplify on what we mean by an epistemic rupture19 in the following pages and recapitulate the status of the Indian in the modern era.
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6.
id al-Andalus: Ab al-Qsim id ibn Ab al-Wald Amad ibn Abd al-Ramn ibn Mohammad ibn idi al-Qurub. 21,22,23, Born Almera, (Spain), 1029,Died Toledo, (Spain), July or August 1070 id al-Andalus was a Muslim historian, a historian of science and thought, and a mathematical scientist with an especial interest in astronomy, and until we see a name that supplants him probably the worlds first historian of science. Following in the footsteps of his paternal family, id pursued the career of a legal official, having received a solid education in the Islamic religious disciplines; in 1068, the Dhannnid Berber Amr of Toledo, al-Mamn Yay (reigned: 10431075), appointed id chief religious judge (q) of Toledo, an office his father had held earlier and that he himself was to fill until his death. What set him apart was his interest in history, history of science, and science itself, especially astronomy; here it may be recalled that in the present context science refers to what in pre-modern Islam often was termed the ancient disciplines, viz. the syllabus of Aristotelian philosophy, logic, medicine, the mathematical sciences (including astronomy). Toledo, known in Arabic Tulaytilah became, as a result of the efforts of Yay, an important literary and intellectual center and it was here that id wrote what has often been called his history of science: Al-tariff bi-abaqt al-umam (Exposition of the generations of nations) of 1068. The nations here intended are those said to have had a disposition toward the cultivation of learning, such as, Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, al-Rm (Byzantines and other Christians), Arabs, and Jews (in contrast to the others not so disposed, i. e., Chinese, Turks, and Berbers. He has obviously high regard for the scientific prowess of the Indians, even though he lived in far off Spain. He made such a determination based on 3 texts, which were translated into Arabic the Sindhind (by which we understand to be the Srya Siddhnta), the Arjabhar. (The ryabhaya) and the Arkand (Khandakdhyaka)24. He mentions he has received correct information only about Sindhind, which was translated and further developed by Al Fazari and AlKhwarismi amongst others. He does not speak of Al Biruni, even though Al Biruni predates him by a few decades. A word is in order on the conventions associated with naming an individual in the Islamic world. A Muslim child will receive a name (called in Arabic ism), like Muhammad Husain, Thbit etc. After this comes the phrase son of so and so and the child will be known as Thbit ibn Qurra (son of Qurra) or Muhammad ibn Husain (son of Husain). The genealogy can be extended for more than one generation. For example Ibrahim ibn Sinn ibn Thbit ibn Qurra, carries it back 3 generations to the great grandfather. Later he may have a child and may gain a paternal name (kunya in Arabic) such as Ab Abdullh (father of Abdullh). Next in order is a name indicating the tribe or place of origin (in Arabic nisba), such as alHarrni, the man from Harrn. At the end of the name, there might be a tag (laqab in Arabic), or nickname, such as the goggle eyed (al-Jahiz) or tentmaker (al-Khayyami), or a title such as the orthodox (alRashid). Putting all this together, we find that one of the most famous Muslim writer on mechanical devices had the full name Bad al-Zamn Ab al-Izz Ismail al-Razzz al-Jazar . Here the laqab Bad -al-Zamn means Prodigy of the Age, certainly a title that a scientist would aspire to earn, and the nisba al-Jazar signifies a person coming from al-Jazira, the country between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Thus there is considerable information encoded in the name of an individual that is useful from a historical perspective. 11
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLDS FIRST HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE20
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HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY 7. UNCOVERING THE SCOPE OF ANCIENT INDIAN MATHEMATICS
Uncovering the scope of ancient Indian mathematical astronomy faces a twofold difficulty. To determine who discovered what and when, we must have an accurate idea of the chronology of Ancient India. This has been made doubly difficult by the faulty dating of Indic historical events by Sir William Jones who is otherwise credited with practically inventing the fields of modern linguistics and philology, if we make the reasonable assumption that he was not aware of the contributions of Pini (Ashtdhyyi) and Yska (Nirukta) a couple of millennia before him. Sir William, who was reputed to be an accomplished linguist, was nevertheless totally ignorant of Sanskrit when he arrived in India and proceeded in short order to decipher the entire history of India from his own meager understanding of the language. In the process he brushed aside the conventional history as known and memorized by Sanskrit pundits for hundreds of years and as recorded in the Puras invented a brand new timeline for India which was not only egregiously wrong but hopelessly scrambled the sequence of events and personalities. See for instance my chronicle on the extent of the damage caused by Sir William and his cohorts in my essay on the South Asia File25 26. But there should be little doubt in anybodys mind that the subjects of linguistics and philology were a byproduct of the discovery of Sanskrit. The discovery of Sanskrit is often touted as a great achievement of the Europeans. It is obvious that it played a significant role in the manner in which the Occidental defined his own identity, and had a definite but significant impact in the manner in which they viewed the Indians. This contrived but highly negative image of the Indians was a major factor in the subsequent story that we have to tell. We are also of the opinion that Sir William played a major role in the shaping of the Indic mindset, but our reasons for doing so, do not form part of the conventional narrative. It is not clear whether the error in chronology by Sir William was one caused by inadequate knowledge of language or one due to deliberate falsification of records. It is horrific to think that a scholar of the stature of Sir William would resort to skullduggery merely to satisfy his preconceived notions of the antiquity of Indic contributions to the sum of human knowledge. Hence we will assume Napoleons dictum was at play here and that we should attribute not to malice that which can be explained by sheer incompetence. This mistake has been compounded over the intervening decades by a succession of British historians, who intent on reassuring themselves of their racial superiority, refused to acknowledge the antiquity of India, merely because it could not possibly be. When once they discovered the antiquity of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Babylon, every attempt was made not to disturb the notion that the Tigris Euphrates river valley was the cradle of civilization. When finally they stumbled upon increasing number of seals culminating in the discovery of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa by Rakhal Das Banerjee27 and Daya Ram Sahni28, under the Directorship of John Marshall, they hit upon the ingenious idea that the Vedic civilization and the Indus Valley Civilization or the Sarasvati Sindhu Civilization, a more apt terminology since most of the archaeological sites lie along the banks of the dried up Sarasvati river, were entirely distinct and unrelated to each other. They went to extraordinary lengths to give the Harappans an identity that was as far removed from the rest of India as they could get away with. The consequences of such a postulate have been detailed in the South Asia File29. There is also the Frawley Paradox30. There is the vast Vedic literature (see appendix D), but according to the current narrative of Ancient Indian History it has no location much less an archaeology associated with it. And the Sarasvati Sindhu civilization which has an immense amount of archaeology spread over 1.5 million square miles covering 2/3rd of the western half of the Indian subcontinent but according to the conventional wisdom has hardly any literature. The juxtaposition of these 2 artifacts occurring for part of their respective histories congruently in time and space should have suggested that Ockhams razor is 12

again a logical alternative and that the Harappan civilization is a late stage of the Vedic civilization, perhaps the mature stage of the Sulva Stra era. Why do we say this? Because fire altars were found in the sites of the Sarasvati that would necessitate the use of geometry developed in the Sulva Stras. But such an answer would vault the Indic civilization to the top of the totem pole of civilizations ranked according to antiquity and the prevailing colonial mindset was to squash such ideas since they gave the Indic civilization an antiquity higher than most other civilizations and that simply would not do. In any event we cannot afford to digress anymore in this direction, other than to suggest that examples of the use of Sulva Stra Geometry can be found in more than one location. The second difficulty was the Eurocentricity (a euphemism for a clearly racist attitude) of European mathematicians, who refused to appreciate the full scope of the Indic contributions and insisted on giving greater credit to Greece and later to Babylonian mathematics rather than recognize Indic and Vedic mathematics on its own merits as an independent effort with distinct and unique characteristics. If this was indeed a surprise revelation, I fail to see the irony, when a similar Eurocentricity was exhibited towards the antiquity of the Vedic people themselves. Eurocentricity pervades the thought processes of the Occidental to such an overwhelmng degree, that the resulting periodization adopted by Otto Neugebauer (ON) in ONHAMA31 where he adopts 700 BCE as the starting point for his deliberations, is completely irrelevant to the reality of the situation. There is a fundamental difference in the Weltanschauung of the Occidental versus the Vedantic concept of the heritage of humankind. The Vedantin regards the Universe as his playground and he rejoices in the triumphs of the human spirit unfettered by limitations of geography and race and identity politics. The primary consideration of the Occidental appears to be to ensure his primacy and the priority of his civilization. This is not to say that every Indic subscribes to the Vedantic ideal, but such ontology is rarely subscribed to in the west and perhaps is the likely explanation for the obsession that the Occidental has exhibited to claim priority in every field of endeavor and manufacture a competitive antiquity however incredible the resulting conclusions may be. The Occidental has tried his best to prevent us from seeing the Indic civilization in its totality, by denying us the autochthonous origin of various disciplines. He was extraordinarily vehement in defining the new chronology and was careful that no discovery should be attributed to India prior to the Golden age of Greece. And soon it became an axiom of Indic thought that we had borrowed everything from the Greeks and Indians today are caught in the web of a circular argument, where we assume the answer to the question 'when did the Indics discover this. Typical of such Indian writers (and almost no Indian writer has challenged the basic steel frame of the Indian chronology of FIGURE 1 MOORISH AL - ANDALUZ COMPRISED MOST Vincent Smith) was Gaurang Nath OF T HE IBERIAN P ENINSULA Banerjee who wrote about Hellenism in Ancient India, which was obviously written to placate occidental sensibilities in 1920. There is a reason why we should rely heavily on the works of Indic astronomers, apart from telling us what they knew, they were quite precise in dating their own period and by making observations of the sky enabled us to date an event with remarkable precision. But we are getting ahead of ourselves and we need to ask ourselves, as historians, when and how did the transformation of 13
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Europe and in particular the island nation of Britain take place, from a scientifically backward region of the world to the technologically most advanced one, all in the space of less than 500 years. We contend that theft of intellectual property played a very large role in this transformation. What constitutes theft? Generally the reluctance to divulge the source of the information is reason enough. Over the years the memory of this massive borrowing (and theft) from the non-European parts of the universe has been largely suppressed by many deliberate acts. The Vatican institutionalized such larceny in a papal bull, in the 15th century Law of Christian Discovery32. The ordinary European today does not have an awareness of the appalling conditions in a Europe that was largely feudal, prior to the renaissance and the widespread illiteracy and backwardness that was prevailing during the 16 centuries between the virtual eclipse of the Grecian civilization (the end of the Ptolemys), when Ptolemaic Egypt was subjugated by Rome and the beginning of the renaissance, which was coincident with the conquest of Meso America. We pick the example of calendrical astronomy or the history of the calendar to illustrate, the extraordinary lengths that the occidental would resort to, in order to deny the astronomical heritage of India. The occidental does not deny that there were extensive contacts between Greece and India especially after the invasion of Alexander, but he is loath to admitting the possibility that any of this happened to the benefit of the Greeks. The study of the calendar and astronomy in our view forms a canonical example of how a colonial power was able to undermine the self-esteem of an entire civilization, by creating a psychosis of inadequacy amongst the elite of its people. So thorough was this alteration of the mindset of the Indic that its after effects are being felt in a myriad ways even 60 years after the colonial power has left the scene. One of these aftereffects is the obliteration of the native achievements in mathematics and astronomy in the collective memory of the Indic civilization. Very few among the Indics are familiar with the vast scope of the ancient Indic episteme in this field of endeavor. The attempt to pass of all the work done in India as a pale copy of the Greek heritage is one that the Colonial Power has had a fair amount of success, since a majority of the English educated elite in India has bought into this notion. This is the story of how they did it in Mathematics and Astronomy, but it is clear that the damage is far more extensive and spans the entire gamut of human activity. There are lessons to be drawn from this sorry tale. The redeeming feature of this narrative is the expectation that future generations will be convinced that what had been accomplished in the millennia that the civilization has been active, can be a guiding principle for the future and that the Indic will not repeat those actions which had led to the loss of control over his own destiny. It is unfortunate that the Indic role in this fascinating chapter has been largely ignored33 in most western descriptions of the history of astronomy and time. There hardly exists a history book in Astronomy that does justice to the fact that the ancient Indians left behind a staggering amount of literature34 for us to decipher. In fact the perception is just the opposite; that Information about Indian mathematics is hard to get. This is in large part a problem that western historians have created by imposing unreasonable standards of reliability. In many cases the standards were impossible to meet, especially as researchers were hampered in their due diligence work because of inadequate knowledge of Sanskrit. On the other hand, these standards were never demanded of similar sources from Ancient Greece. As a result the bias against Indic contributions in antiquity has been institutionalized to a large degree.
8. OTTO NEUGEBAUER AND THE HEGELIAN HYPOTHESIS
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This is regrettable and as a result, the story within a story of how the occidental tried to ignore, minimize, and even suppress the Indic contribution is equally interesting. We do not propose to be equally as parochial as the Occidental has chosen to be for the most part, in his accounts of the history of time and astronomy, and we propose to be respectful of the contributions of other civilizations be they Babylonian, Chinese or Maya 35. It is vital to realize that we are not talking about the contributions of a handful of individuals but literally scores of mathematicians and astronomers. The table of savants in the field of Astronomy and Mathematics in Chapter XI gives an idea of the large number of contributors in one area alone. Thus, the study of the Indic contribution to the Computational Sciences has languished under a diminished set of extreme alternative hypothesis, one of which asserts that everything that the Indic developed in the exact sciences, was borrowed from Greece (or Babylon). Such an oversimplification is a familiar tactic used in denigrating ones adversary, and is known as Reductionism. The underlying assumption is that India has been for the most part a cultural cul-de-sac, where nothing new originated. This is what we term the Hegelian Hypothesis36 and it has been the fundamental assumption that most historians from the Occident have adopted largely ignoring the vast amount of Indic literature, where it was not consistent with their hypothesis. The counter to this is the hypothesis that all knowledge is contained in the Vedas and that it needs merely to be deciphered. It bears emphasizing that the later hypothesis has almost a zero set of subscribers in India, while the former is adhered to rather FIGURE 2 GWF dogmatically by the vast majority of the so called mainstream historians and philologists of India37 from the Occident. It is important and relevant to mention HEGEL that there are no assumptions made in the Vedic paradigm, which even remotely approach the exclusivity that remains a hallmark of the Occidental belief systems. The enthusiastic acceptance of diversity remains the core of the Hindu ethos; Hindu tattva or what is popularly referred to as Hindutva. We find it particularly incongruous that the Occidental sits in judgment over the Hindu, especially dismayed by the confidence, characterizing the resurgence and renaissance of the Hindu, given his own dismal record of culpability in the genocide and obliteration of native cultures in Meso America, not to mention the numerous inquisitions, pogroms and genocide that he frequently indulged in. People who live in glass houses should not throw rocks at others. I mention this because any assertion made regarding Indian history that does not toe the line and adhere to the mainstream version of History, as recounted by the steel frame of India, the East india company officers and the Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers who in large part rewrote the current revision of the history of india, is immediately dubbed as being a fundamentalist. It is pertinent to ask what and who the fundamentalist is? We give a definition of a fundamentalist in the glossary. In order to qualify as a fundamentalist38, one must publicly advocate violence against innocent bystanders, including women and children. One cannot brand an individual a fundamentalist merely because he entertains a violent thought. We can only presume that their use of the word fundamentalist in this context is meant merely for diversionary purposes, and is irrelevant to the substance of the argument and whether the alternative chronology that we propose has merit or not. 15
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In my view there are 2 fundamental problems with the current characterization of India in the context of the history of the computational sciences The fundamental problem bedeviling the proper narration of the Indic contribution to the sciences in antiquity is the lack of basic knowledge of the Sanskrit Grammar and language amongst historians of science in the occident. I am not speaking about the Professors of Sanskrit in the USA , in Germany, who for the most part are capable of translating Sanskrit texts into European languages. But such linguistic skills in the Sanskrit language are rarely present amongst most historians of science. The result is that they tend to ignore the vast literature of ancient India, have little cognizance of the subtle etymologies of Sanskrit words and even in the rare instance that they refer to the Indian work they resort to the circular argument of referring to other authors who exhibit an equally high degree of functional illiteracy in Sanskrit. Most, even when they claim to be a Sanskrit scholar are barely able to demonstrate proficiency in the language. Rarely will these scholars make a disclaimer that he or she is incompetent to judge the contribution of India, because of inadequate knowledge of Sanskrit. Neugebauer is one of the few exceptions, when he eludes to this in the introduction to his A history of ancient mathematical astronomy39. Even such a limited caveat is absent in the books I have cited on the history of astronomy. While most authors of the history of astronomy will admit that their knowledge of Sanskrit can best be described as moribund, they remain unwilling to apply the adjective of occidental to their historical works40, since that would amount to admitting publicly that their historical work is incomplete and is even false. The other fundamental problem is the faulty chronology that he has bestowed upon India. It does not matter whether this was deliberate or inadvertent. The myopic Eurocentric view that has become the accepted doctrine has had serious repercussions for the historian of science studying other cultures. By postulating the impossibly late migration of a mythic race of people the present narrative has completely garbled the entire history of India. It is easy to understand the British rationale behind such a narrative when several historians were paid to write such a history in the nineteenth century. The idea was to project that the English were simply the latest in a string of invaders to have invaded the subcontinent and have therefore as much right to rule over you as the intellectual leadership of the country who have been the real exploiters of the common folk. Never mind that the Colonial power ruled over India with an Iron fist (e.g. No Indian could own firearms) and the only person who could exploit the Indians was the colonial overlord. It made a good story and provided the Indians with a punching bag that was within their ambit. By inventing and making the late arrival of the mythic ryans a fait accompli, the narrative killed several birds with one stone. Indian chronology became a hostage to the late arrival of the Indo ryans that leads to the coup de grace. Because of this late arrival he the Indo Aryan could not have developed anything worthwhile before the Greeks and the Babylonians. We are aware that victors write the history of a vanquished nation. But nave as the Indics were, they did not dream that the resulting story would be so diabolically different from reality. Implicit in all this is the racist notion that only the Indo ryans (a euphemism for Europeans) were capable of undertaking the truly hard tasks the development of Sanskrit, the development of astronomy etc.41, and 27 It is true that knowledge grows exponentially with time and it would be the height of folly to take the position that the books of the Vedic age contain all knowledge developed since then, and need merely to be deciphered. We emphasize repeatedly in these pages that the reason that we seek to decipher the true history, is not solely to claim priority over inventions or to seek glory in the reflected greatness of a high antiquity during a bygone era. Our position is refreshingly different from that of the Occidental who takes 16
9. THE PROBLEM WITH THE OCCIDENTALIST CHARACTERIZATION OF OTHER CULTURES

great pride in adopting to piggyback on the heritage and antiquity of the most ancient urban civilization in their neighborhood, namely that of the Greeks.
The importance that various civilizations have placed on the faithful transmission of the computational sciences such as mathematics and astronomy is clearly articulated by Otto Neugebauer (ON) in the introduction of his classic on The exact sciences of Antiquity42. An extensive quote is in order here; The investigation of the transmission of mathematics and astronomy is one of the most powerful tools for the establishment of relations between different civilizations. Stylistic motives, religious or philosophical doctrines may be developed independently or can travel great distances through a slow and v ery indirect p rocess o f d iffusion. C omplicated a stronomical m ethods, h owever, involving the use of accurate numerical constants, requires for their transmission the direct use of scientific treatises and will often give us very accurate information about the time and circumstances of contact. It will also give us the possibility of exactly evaluating the contributions or modifications, which must be credited to the new user of a foreign method. In short the inherent accuracy of the mathematical sciences will penetrate to some extent into purely historical problems. But above and beyond the usefulness of the history of the exact sciences for the history of civilization in general, it is the interest in the role o f a ccurate k nowledge in h uman thought that m otivates the following s tudies. We a re in a greement w ith N eugebauer, that o ne d oes n ot n eed a rationale o ther than the s earch for an accurate narrative. The search for the truth is an end in itself. We are also in agreement with him on the c entral role that the h istory o f the m athematical s ciences s hould p lay a nd s hould h ave p layed in the development of the history of civilization in general, clearly implying that they have not done so in the p ast. W e h ave g one into s ome o f the reasons for s uch a s tate o f a ffairs later in this c hapter. Neugebauer c oncedes that independent d evelopment o f ideas c ould o ccur, b ut h e is c learly a sserting that such cannot necessarily be the case when it involves complex calculations, and the use of accurate astronomical constants. In those cases he asserts that there must have been direct transmission o f k nowledge. B ut it is c lear that w hen it c omes to India the a pplication o f this p rinciple has been very one sided. Wherever there has been little dispute about the priority of the Indian invention, (and the Occidental has made every effort to pare down such instances to an absolute minimum), he and others of his Parampara 43 (notably David Pingree) have pleaded that there was an independent invention by the Europeans, but in those instances where the reverse was the case, he has unhesitatingly and unequivocally declared that the Indic has borrowed from the west and has assumed that the Indic should not be credited with independent invention. He clearly violates his own prescription that such an independent development (in this instance in the west) is very unlikely in the mathematical sciences. The transmission to the east, particularly to India has been assumed to occur even when they have not been able to identify the person or mechanism by which such a transfer occurred. This has been the case in almost every instance in which the occidental claims that there was transmittal of knowledge from Europe to India. The occidental clings to this dogmatic belief even when he knows he cannot indicate a single instance where he can identify the person or persons who made the transfer of knowledge. We will allude to this later in the introduction. Thus, even as great a scholar that he was, Neugebauer succumbs to the prejudice of Eurocentrism when he makes the categorical statement that; 17
10. THE FAITHFUL TRANSMISSION OF THE COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES
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The center of "ancient science" lies in the Hellenistic" period, i.e., in the period following Alexander's conquest of the ancient sites of oriental civilizations (Frontispiece of his book). In this melting pot of" Hellenism" a form of science was developed which later spread over an area reaching from India to Western Europe and which was dominant until the creation of modern science in the time of Newton. On the other hand the Hellenistic civilization had its own roots in the Oriental civilizations, which flourished about equally before Hellenism as its direct influence was felt afterwards. The origin and transmission of Hellenistic science is therefore the central problem of our whole discussion. By so doing he has made an axiom, a postulate of something, which he needs to establish. We are somewhat puzzled by the repeated use of the term Hellenistic by Neugebauer, since most of the scientific developments took place initially in the little islands of the coast of Asia Minor in present day Turkey, beginning with Thales of Miletus, and subsequently in the mixed Greco-Egyptian civilization of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs at Alexandria. The Greeks of Asia Minor included Anaximander, Aristarchus of Samos, and Hipparchus or Hipparchus (Greek: , Hipparchus; c. 190 BC c. 120 BC) were known as Ionians and of course the Alexandrian Greeks such as Eratosthenes and Ptolemy were heavily influenced by the Egyptian episteme and should be regarded as belonging to the Egyptian Daranas (Philosophical episteme) and Parampara (a Particular tradition followed by a educational institution). In fact Neugebauer seems to contradict himself when he says in one of his endnotes. In o ur d iscussions w e h ave frequently u sed the w ord " Greek" w ith n o inherent q ualification. It m ay b e useful to remark that we use this term only as a convenient geographical or linguistic notation. A concept like " Greek m athematics", h owever, s eems to m e m ore m isleading than h elpful. W e a re fairly well acquainted with three mathematicians -Euclid 44, Archimedes, and Apollonius -who represent one consistent tradition. We know only one astronomer Ptolemy. And we are familiar with about equally many minor figures that more or less follow their great masters. Thus what is usually called "Greek" mathematics consists of the fragments of writings of about 10 or 20 persons scattered over a period of 600 years. *It seems to me a dangerous generalization to abstract from this material a common type and then to establish some mysterious deeper principle, which supposedly connects a mathematical d ocument w ith s ome o ther w ork o f a rt. What Neugebauer says about transmission of Mathematical and Astronomical knowledge resonates very appropriately in the case of the ancient Indic. But there is more to the statement that Neugebauer makes than mere availability of Greek documents. It is the inability to do simple arithmetic that made Greek works obsolete and made them dispensable and hence not worth preserving. We quote C.K. Raju6 ; Ever since state and church first came together, at the time of Constantine, Eusebius, a church historian, had initiated the program of distorting history to promote church interests. His successor Orosius, in his History against the Pagans, made it amply clear that history was just another tool of soft power in the churchs armory. This technology of falsehood was now applied to manage common perceptions. The story line was simple: it was the Greeks who did it. On this story, during the 600 years of the Christian Dark Age, all that the Arabs did was to preserve Greek works, the rightful inheritors of which were the chosen people, the Christians of Europe. It was this fantastic justificationcharacterizing Arabs as mere carriers of knowledge, and Greeks as the creative fount which made the (Greek) knowledge in Arabic books theologically acceptable in Europe, and enabled the translated Arabic books to be used as university texts for centuries in Europe. Arabs did not quite accept this story. In the 9th Century, when the Arabs built the Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad, they gathered knowledge from all over the world, including India, Persia, and China. They 18

certainly did not restrict themselves to Greek sources. The actions speak for themselves: the Arabs did not then think, nor do they concede to this notion today, that science was primarily a Greek invention. While speaking about the origins of the Calculus, Richard Courant, the guru of ON at Gottingen, makes the following perspicacious remark With an absurd oversimplification, the invention" of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part. Scattered over seventeenth century Europe, for the most part outside the schools, was a group of spirited scientists who strove to continue the mathematical work of Galileo and Kepler. While he is right about the inordinate emphasis on assigning credit and priority that the Occident has placed on the development of such subjects as Calculus and the myopic emphasis on granting these 2 individuals the entire responsibility and credit for developing the Calculus, Richard Courant is unable to see that he is part of the problem, when he restricts himself to seventeenth century Europe as the primary actor in this drama. It is clear that in expecting even a small number of Europeans to take the unconventional view that Asia and in particular India had a significant part to play in this, we are asking for something that is simply not there and will prove to be a task where success may be elusive and even if it comes, will be a grudging one. But that does not mean the attempt to tell the truth should not be a relentless one and should not cease until there is genuine recognition of the substantial Indic contribution. Quote45The non-textual evidence provides a good reason for assuming that the Greeks and the Roman had inordinate difficulties with elementary arithmetic. More than deduction, science is based on quantitative calculation. But the Greeks lacked basic arithmetic skills needed for calculation. The early Greek (Attic) system of representing numbers was worse even than Roman numerals. (We will use Roman numerals in the following examples, since they are better known.) Greek/Roman numerals are inefficient for two reasons. First they are clumsy: the small number 1788 requires 12 symbols, and is written as MDCCLXXXVIII. This system is hopeless for large numbers, such as 1053, which the Buddha was asked to name (by an opponent, who sought to test his knowledge46). The world might come to an end before one finishes writing down this number in Roman numerals! The unavoidable inference is this: the Greeks and Romans used this primitive system of numeration just because they never encountered large numbers, and never did the complex calculations required for astronomy and science. Conversely, when the need for such complex calculations arose in Europe, first among the Florentine merchants, and then among European navigators, Roman numerals were abandoned in favor of Arabic numerals. Can one get around this inefficiency by inventing names for larger numbers? No. Roman numerals are structurally inefficient: even the simplest sum needs an abacus. Try XIV + XVIII! To add two numbers, say 1788 + 1832, one would first represent these numbers on the Roman abacus, using counters. Multiplication is more difficult. Shakespeares clown knows that 11 sheep give 28 pounds of wool, which sells for a guinea. How much would he get for the wool from 1500 sheep? He cannot do it without counters. (We leave out subtraction and division as too difficult to explain!) The Greeks obviously could not have done science without properly knowing how to add and multiply .
11. GREEK AND ROMAN DIFFICULTIES WITH ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC
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So, the conclusion is inescapable. If Ptolemy, by his own admission47 could not carry out simple operations with fractions, how did he carry out all the arithmetical operations needed throughout the book, starting with the table of chords in the 2nd century CE? In order to understand the Indic approach to the challenges faced by the human, one must understand the cosmology and the calendar of the Hindu. The calendar and the cosmos have always played a large part in the consciousness or Weltanschauung of the Hindu and he spent a large portion of his observational powers in deciphering the universe around him. In this he was not alone, as we know now that other ancient civilizations, such as the Babylonian, the Egyptian, and the Chinese had similar interests and a curiosity about the heavens. But the answers the Indic came up with were quite prescient for his time, and the resulting numbers were far more accurate than the European world realized or knew, even millennia after the Indic discovered these periodicities. In the rest of this work, we will prefer to use the adjective Indic more as a Geographic identifier rather than the word Hindu that would subsume considerable work done by Buddhists and Jainas in the subcontinent. As neither of these words was widely used in the ancient era, such a distinction is not of great consequence, while we are mindful of current sensibilities regarding inclusiveness. While there are minor differences between the approaches of the Jaina and the Baudhik Parampara, these differences are insignificant when compared with work in the same field by others such as the Chinese, Babylonians, and Greeks. The extraordinary allergy that the Occidental, with a few notable exceptions, has exhibited to the serious, unbiased, and scholarly study of the Indic mathematical episteme, and when he has done so, the vehemence with which he has denied the value of these traditions, is astonishing to say the least. In those instances where the Occidental has recognized their value, and has used the resulting knowledge in his subsequent investigations, he has tried his best to assert initially that it was plagiarized from the Greeks and later from the Babylonians, when the relative chronology of the Indics and the Greeks indicated that such a hypothesis was a non -sequitur. When the Babylonians were discovered as having been the main progenitors, he immediately inferred that the Indic had absorbed this knowledge from the Babylonians. When such a stance became more and more difficult to sustain, he maintained that it was not autochthonous to the subcontinent but brought in from elsewhere by the largely mythic people called the ryans. The consistency with which the Occidental has denied the Indic contributions especially those which imply a terminus ante quem of high antiquity, is exemplified in the writings of various Indologists such as Whitney48, Bentley49, Moriz Winternitz50 Albrecht Weber51, W. W. Rouse Ball, G R Kaye, and Thibaut and continues on till today in the works of David Pingree. To quote Rouse Ball, the historian of mathematics;52 The Arabs had considerable commerce with India, and a knowledge of one or both of the two great Hindoo works on algebra had been obtained in the Caliphate of Al-Mansur (754-775 CE) though it was not until fifty or seventy years later that they attracted much attention. The algebra and arithmetic of the Arabs were largely founded on these treatises, and I therefore devote this section to the consideration of Hindoo mathematics. The Hindoos like the Chinese have pretended that they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic architecture and sculpture) can be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan 20
12. STUDY INDIA FOR THE GREATER PART OF YOUR LIFE , ONLY TO MINIMIZE IT

invasion. This seems to have taken place at some time in the fifth century or in the sixth century when a tribe of ryans entered India by the North West part of their country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognized by their superiority over the races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually degenerated. We remind our readers that such a racist sentiment was expressed as late as the beginning of the 20th century, well after the renaissance and the enlightenment. It is also astonishing that he chose to advertise his lack of scholarship by asserting that there were only 2 great books in Mathematics. By doing so, surely he elevates his ignorance to a new level of hubris. It is quite clear that the only people claiming they invented everything are the Occidentals. To what purpose, by naming an age or era as an Enlightenment era, when the elite of this era do not show the slightest signs of such an enlightenment. Further this habit of the occidental of assuming he is enlightened enough to make this determination, lacks credibility in the absence of an independent authentication. As we have emphasized, there were exceptions such as Brennand, Playfair, Colebrooke, Sewell, and Bailly. Even a scholar like James Prinsep feels constrained to remark that the real interest of the Occidental in matters Indic is generally aroused in those particular instances, (which I have highlighted in bold) where they have a more parochial interest. It is also interesting that Prinsep regards the historical narrative of India as largely legend when contrasted with Greece and Rome, which are rational. What makes the Indic historical narrative largely legendary and what makes the Greek History rational is not entirely clear. It is this kind of ad hoc characterization of the vast Indic literature, which leads one to conclude that the Occidental has no intention of studying the Indic contributions in a dispassionate, comprehensive, and thorough manner. The initial flush of enthusiasm for the literature in Sanskrit in the eighteenth century is now a dim memory, and amongst astronomers and mathematicians, the fact that the Bernoullis53 and Leonhard Euler54 had knowledge of the Indic contributions and yet chose to ignore it, even earlier, is either forgotten or swept under the rug. This is of course assuming the current crop of philologists have the mathematical savoir-faire to understand these matters. When such a behavior is exhibited by famous savants like Euler and the Bernoullis, it FIGURE 3 E UROCENTRICITY becomes increasingly easy to ignore the calls of conscience, and I N MATHEMATICS rationalize it in a variety of ways as a lacuna in the character of the Indic, until such a viewpoint becomes the norm. 21
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Leonhard Euler is one of the progenitors of the subsequent developments in Mathematics, which reached a level of maturity with David Hilbert. It is regrettable that Euler does not acknowledge his debt to Indic mathematics, even though he wrote a few papers on this topic, one of which was on the concept of the Hindu tropical /sidereal year. As long as the study of Indian antiquities confines itself to the illustration of Indian history, It must be confessed that it possesses, little attraction for the general student, who is apt to regard the labor expended on the disentanglement of perplexing and contradictory mazes of fiction as leading only to the substitution of vague and dry probabilities, for poetical, albeit extravagant fable. But the moment any name or event turns up in the course of such speculation, offering a point of connection between the legends of India and the rational histories of Greece and Romea collision between an Eastern and a Western heroforthwith a speedy and a spreading interest is excited, which cannot be satisfied until the subject is thoroughly sifted by an examination of all the ancient works, Western and Eastern, that can throw concurrent light on the matter at issue. Such was the engrossing interest which attended the identification of Sandrocottus with Chandragupta, in the days of Sir William Jonessuch the ardor with which the Sanskrit was studied, and is still studied, by philologists at home, after it was discovered to bear an intimate relation to the classical language of ancient Europe. Such more recently has been the curiosity excited on Mr. Turnours throwing open the hitherto concealed page of Buddhist historians, to the development of Indian monuments and Puric records.James Prinsep. Late Secretary of the Asiatic Society. In other words, this emphasizes what I wrote elsewhere when remarking on the interest that Germans have shown in Indological studies, that the interest of the Occidental in matters Indic, is primarily driven by curiosity regarding his own antecedents. In reality this field of study was dominated by German scholars. Interest in Indology only took shape and concrete direction after the British came to India, with the advent of the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones in the 1770s. Other names for Indology are Indic studies or Indian studies or South Asian studies. Almost from the beginning, the Puras attracted attention from European scholars. But instead of trying to understand the Puras and the context in which they were developed, the Occidental went about casting doubts on the authenticity of the texts, and in fact altering the chronology, which they could find in a particular Pura. The extraordinary level of interest by German scholars in matters Indic is a very interesting narrative in its own right and we need to reflect upon the highlights of this phenomenon. The German-speaking people experienced a vast increase in intellectual activity at about the same time that Britain colonized India. We do not understand the specific factors that came into play during this time, other than to remark on the tremendous intellectual ferment that was running concurrently during the French revolution, and the keen interest that Napoleon
13. THE INTEREST IN GERMANY IN INDOLOGY
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FIGURE 4 EUROCENTRIC MODEL OF THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS
FIGURE 5 MODIFIED EUROCENTRIC MODEL OF THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS
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showed in matters scientific including the contributions of the orient. Clearly the remarks that Sir William made about Sanskrit as well as the high level of interest that he provoked in the Sanskrit language, contributed to the overall sense of excitement. But why was it Germany and not Britain, the center of research on the Oriental contributions. The answer lies in the intense search for nationhood that was under way in Germany during that period. When Sanskrit was discovered, and it dawned on the Germans that the antiquity of Sanskrit was very great, and that Sanskrit and German were somehow related, the Germans suddenly had an answer to the question of their own ethnic and linguistic origins. Sir Henry Maine an influential Anglo Indian scholar and former Vice Chancellor of Calcutta university, who was also on the Viceroys council, pronounced a view that many Englishman shared about the unification of Germany. A NATION HAS BEEN BORN OUT OF SANSKRIT From the beginning, the great interest that Germany showed in Sanskrit had more to do with their own obsessions and questions regarding their ethnic and linguistic origins. It had very little or at least far less to do with the origin of the ancient Indic, about whom they had considerably less interest. And yet, that does not stop the proponents of the AIT in India, whose knowledge of European history appears to be rudimentary at best, from asserting that AIT is primarily an obsession of nationalistic Hindus. Such is the fate and the perversion of history that conquered nations can aspire to. From, the point of view of the Occidental, this is hardly surprising, and may not even be contested by him, but it is the propensity of the Indic, to grant these studies by the Occidental, uncritical approval and equal if not greater weightage, without sifting through the resulting distortions that they have introduced, that is unconscionable and does not bespeak the necessary due diligence that marks a scholarly approach to the topic and in the case of history, my contention is that the Indic has paid dearly for it.
As we have seen the problems in tracing origins back through time are many. First is the fact that great periods of time have a tendency to erase traces of cultures. When all traces decay then the culture is effectively obliterated. Whatever is left undestroyed by time becomes subjected to the cultural and personal opinions of archeologists. Such opinions may destroy and obliterate knowledge of the culture much more effectively than time ever could. Another problem is in the epistemology or method of knowledge used by countries foreign to the country or culture being studied. In the west we have a tradition of trying to understand life by studying corpses or trying to know health by studying disease. Archeology becomes an exercise of the imagination when trying to reconstruct a living culture based on remains of pot shards, bones, and bricks. 55 The resulting paucity of knowledge and illiteracy on the part of the western scholar on matters pertaining to India was lethal to the understanding of their own history and leaves Occidental historians, the task of explaining why there was no progress in Europe between the time of the Greek contribution to the mathematical sciences and the flowering of the renaissance resulting in the Keplerian paradigm shift, a period exceeding 1600 years. All traces of their debt to any other ancient civilization have been systematically obliterated and a debt is rarely acknowledged (see a typical genealogical tree in Mathematics, Figure 2, Prologue) The current understanding in the Occident of the developments in Mathematics and Astronomy follow the flowchart indicated in Figure 5, where Figure 4 indicates the situation prevailing till recently. Note that India did not even appear as a contributor till about a hundred and fifty years ago. the. Needless to say our view of the matter indicates that the more current Figure
14. THE RELUCTANCE OF INDOLOGISTS IN THE OCCIDENT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE VEDIC EPISTEME
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falls far short of reality by assigning the Indic contributions to the same chronological period as the Arabs and in many instances there is no mention of the Indic contribution at all. David Pingree had a great deal of difficulty, even conceding that the Indics started using the circle as part of the decimal place value system, until the Greeks brought this concept with them from Babylon to India. He asserts with great certainty that the Greeks appeared in India in large numbers bringing with them among other things, astronomical tables in which in the sexagesimal functions, the empty places were occupied by a circular symbol for zero, such as are found in the Greek papyri of that period.56 Surely if they were in such large numbers and he is sure of his facts he should be able to rattle of their names in rapid succession. One should rightly be critical of those who claim to foretell the future but what of those who are able to peer into the distant past and are able to see all the details of the above scene down to the minutia without any evidence whatsoever. All I can say is, would that we were all so blessed. I say it is time for the Indic to stop humoring such excursions into fantasyland using the excuse that it would appear unseemly to question events that have been misrepresented for a long period of time. We discuss Pingrees pronouncements on Indic contributions in chapter IX where we discuss the subject of transmission of knowledge, in much FIGURE 4 THE COMMAND OF LANGUAGE AND THE greater detail, including many Case studies, LANGUAGE O F COMMAND which consistently bear out our view of the matter. We have used these flowcharts from the work of previous scholars who have studied these developments. We are compelled to remark that the sudden explosion of knowledge that took place during the renaissance occurred shortly after the Jesuits sent 70 scholars to Malabar in the 1500s. When it came to reconciling himself with the obvious depth of knowledge of the ancient Indic, the occidental had no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the Indic had borrowed everything from Greece. But he is more than reluctant to accept that a massive transfer of knowledge took place from India to Europe during the 16th century, even though the evidence is far more compelling. In fact all evidence pointing to such a transfer is completely ignored. We will remark in passing that there is a palpable difference in the manner in which the Occidental views the transmittal of knowledge, depending on the direction in which the transmittal is alleged to have transpired.
Elsewhere we have documented the shoddy manner in which the Occidental (in this instance Sir William) had falsely interpreted a Greek synchronism57 and had lopped of 1200 years of the history of India. The Occidental has often accused the Indic of claiming a high antiquity. But surely this is a non sequitur, because if the ancient Indic was in fact obsessed with, and explicit about dates, this situation where the 25
15. THE OBSESSION OF THE OCCIDENTAL WITH CHRONOLOGY AND TEMPORAL PRIORITY
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Occident could introduce an element of uncertainty, and doubt would not have arisen. It is because of the allegedly cavalier and nonchalant treatment of chronology in the Puric accounts that gave the opening for the Occidental to claim that the Indics does not have sense of historical agency. Surely we would be forgiven if we asked ourselves the following question. What was it that motivated the Indologists to be so emphatic about the alleged lack of historiography amongst the ancient Indics? Was it motivated by a scientific quest to discover the true history of India or was it really meant to debunk the antiquity of India In reality the chronicles of the ancients are voluminous and there is more than a minimal amount of redundancy, so much so that, contrary to the notion of inadequate historical data we are faced with an embarrass de choix and not one of dearth of data. It is time the Occidental makes a choice, was the Indic nonchalant and indifferent about chronology, or was he obsessed with having a high antiquity. Both of these charges cannot be right simultaneously. Sir William Jones made his famous quote on the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have spring from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. He made these comments while speaking to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on February 2, 1786. Incidentally, while Sir William went on to say how much he loved Krishen and Arjun, the protagonists of the MBH War, that didnt stop him from barring Indics from becoming members of the Asiatic Society. In fact, the subcontinent of India was turned into a vast Gulag where no ideas were allowed to penetrate unless they had the sanction of the British. They then sequestered themselves in hermetically sealed cantonments to minimize their contacts with the natives. The control of ideas and weaponry was the key with which the British controlled every aspect of life in the subcontinent. It is no wonder that the Americans emphasized the possession of weapons to such an extent, that they made it a part of the American constitution. Ironically, these adulatory words on the beauty of the Sanskrit language were literally the kiss of death for research into advanced studies in India. We need to remark on the astonishing reversal that took place, where the vaunted mastery of the Sanskrit language in the land of its origin was forever decimated in the scant space of 50 years after Sir William pronounced it to be a language more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin. Fifty years later the first Sanskrit scholars from the occident started arriving in India to teach Indians the finer points of this language that was more exquisitely refined than either Greek or Latin and was spoken only in the Indian subcontinent. By promulgating Macaulays minute on Education and making it a necessity for being gainfully employed; the British accomplished the goal of severing the umbilical cord that had tied the Indic Civilization to the Sanskrit Language for several millennia. At the same time while publicly excoriating the use of Sanskrit, they shipped vast amount of manuscripts to London and Oxford, and created the Boden Chair of Sanskrit in Oxford in order to ferret out the knowledge base of the Hindus. It was indeed a masterful stroke of public policy making, especially if the aim was to perpetuate British rule forever. Publicly denigrate the Indian classics as not worth the palm leaf they were written on, but privately encourage the study of Sanskrit, to the extent they would pay Max Mller 4 shillings a page for every page he translated of the Sacred Books of the East. Needless to say, that by the time he stopped working Max Mller was financially very well off. There is more than enough irony in the fact that he owed his livelihood to the poverty-stricken land of India, a state of affairs that his employer the East
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India Company had no small hand in creating. The transfer of wealth was massive and the Colonial Overlord was quite convinced that the loss of the Americas to the new colonies was more than recompensed by the conquest of India. When Sir William made the colossally erroneous determination that Megasthenes was an Ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, it is doubtful whether he was aware that there was another Chandragupta of the Gupta Empire. Certainly he makes no mention of the later Chandragupta during the ensuing months before he died. A wave of jubilation swept through the handful of European Indologists when they heard that India did not have the antiquity, which they were originally led to believe. They rejoiced that in fact the Indian claim to hoary antiquity for their history was bogus. The Puras, they declared, were not reliable. They are the works of wily Brhmaas. How could a conquered nation aspire to an antiquity beyond October 23, 4004 BCE? they conveniently swept under the rug the glaring fact that the Puras were written many centuries before their arrival in India and that their compilers had no reason to distort the history and neither did they have to convince anybody of their antiquity, a point that Pargiter makes on more than one occasion in his book on Ancient Indian Traditions. Little did they realize that there would come a time when the events that they described would be questioned so vociferously? It is not even clear whether the ancients considered antiquity to be a desirable characteristic, and that it would in time be questioned by a group of people whose sole concern was to shorten the antiquity of India. Why do we mention these facts here in the context of the calendar? Because, the resulting shortening of the time line had several serious effects on the dating of the important texts such as the Vedga Jyotia. But the Occidental was not merely content to excommunicate the Indic from his own heritage58; he decided to appropriate this heritage as his own and went on to propound his own theory as to the origin of the ancient tradition of the Indic people. He proposed that Sanskrit could not have been developed by the natives of the subcontinent, clearly implying that they did not have the intellectual capacity to do so, but was grafted on to India by a band of marauding Central Asian nomads; the only restriction that was put on the origin of these ryans was that they hail from a place that was anywhere but from India. This was the first and most significant finding from the new field of Indology, a topic that had a lot of similarities to Entomology, the study of insects, the most significant similarity being that the subjects of the study had little say in the matter and were more than likely expendable in the process. 16. DIFFERING STANDARDS OF CLAIMS FOR TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE We would be remiss if we did not make the observation that the direction in which knowledge was transmitted had a profound impact on the perception of whether there was any transmission at all. Many have been the individuals from other parts of the world who studied at Indian universities like Nalanda, Takala, Vikramla, and Odntipura till the 12th century. It was a rare instance where they would go back and denigrate the knowledge they had so acquired or the land they acquired it from, and in fact went out of their way to eulogize the education they received at these locations which were studded all along the Gangetic valley, but particularly so in Vihara (Bihar). However all this changed during the 16th century when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) sent highly educated (for those days) individuals, the number sometimes exceeding 70 or 80 at times at any given point in time, whose sole purpose was to extract as much information from the people who practiced such skills, like Jyotish Pandits and engage in intellectual 27
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property theft. What defines such activity as theft? If the recipient does not acknowledge the source of his teaching then it is fair to call it theft. There is another oddity, in the obsession that Occidentals have, with their insistence that India borrowed everything from Greece. They cannot point to a single instance of any individual either Greek or Indian who is credited with the transmission. The only fact they refer to is the significant presence of Greeks left behind in Bactria after the invasion of Alexander, who survived till about a hundred years prior to the Common Era. The claim is usually made that there were several Greek emissaries who could have transmitted this knowledge. But such emissaries are rarely endowed with scientific knowledge, and to expect Alexander or any of his generals to sit down and patiently teach the Indics the intricacies of Greek astronomy is certainly not a realistic scenario, given also that the state of astronomical knowledge in Greece prior to the advent of Ptolemy was moribund. We maintain that in order for transmission to have taken place, either of 2 mechanisms must have existed; Indic scholars went to Alexandria after it was founded, returned, and taught it to others at one of the famed universities of India. While this is entirely possible, it is astonishing that the name of such a learned person would not be available to us. The absence of such an individual in the historical record leads one to believe that this did not happen. There are names of Indics who went to Greece but as far as I am aware we do not have the names of any Indic who returned. It is inconceivable that the author of a major text, during the time period in question, would not have left behind references to his work and association with the Greeks. The contrast with China is illuminating in that we have the names of more than one Indian and Chinese individual who went back and forth from China and India. Learned Greek astronomers came and taught at one of the famous universities of India (Nalanda, Odntipura, Takala, and Vikramla). Again the absence of such an individual in the historical record precludes this eventuality. Note that we have the names of several Chinese and Koreans who came to India during this period. The names of visiting Greeks who were scholars are conspicuously absent. The 2 names that we are familiar with are those of Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana, but neither of them was an astronomer and neither mentions teaching the Indics any particular subject. On the contrary their fame as men of wisdom and learning rested partly on their having spent time in India learning from the Indians. Furthermore a necessary condition for the transmission from Greece to India to have taken place is that the Greeks must have discovered the content at least decades before the Indians did (and probably earlier) in order to be able to record and disseminate the knowledge in Greece prior to transmitting the knowledge to India. The currently accepted chronology of India and Greece precludes such a possibility, since most of the developments in Greece took place after 600 BCE, while the date of the Vedga Jyotia is estimated to be between 1860 BCE TO 1300 BCE. We are confident that by the time we come to 1300 BCE the Indics had accumulated a vast body of knowledge about the solar system and had established their general approach to solving the problems of calendrical astronomy. The question of transmitting Greek science to India is a non-starter. And yet, the Occidental insists with a numbing regularity that it took place In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentals have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote C K Raju59in his monumental work on the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the mathematical sciences. (Page 314). However, we have also seen that the standard of evidence is not uniform, but varies with the claim being made. The standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from East 28

to West, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Thus there is always the possibility that similar things could have been discovered independently, and that western historians are still arguing about this, even in so obvious a case as that of Copernicus. Finally we have seen that this racist double standard of evidence is not an incidental error, but is backed by centuries of racist tradition, religious exhortations by Popes, and by legal interpretations authoritatively handed down by, say the US Supreme Court. Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from West to East, but priority and definite contact never seems to establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently. Hence to establish transmission we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose that the case for any transmission must be established on the grounds of Motivation, Opportunity, Circumstantial evidence (the circumstantial trail of evidence has been documented in detail by CK Raju and has been tabulated in Table 7.1 on page 453 of CFM) Documentary evidence. The importance of epistemological continuity has been repeatedly stressed above by Raju; any such claim, he emphasizes, must also take into account Epistemological issues. The cognitive dissonance resulting from incomplete understanding of epistemological issues and maintaining epistemological continuity is almost a certain indicator that the technology has been plagiarized from elsewhere. Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pingrees PhD thesis titled Materials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to India. (His thesis advisers were ON and Daniel Ingalls). Notice, he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that need not be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer that there was a transmittal, in the initial hypotheses, merely because there was probable contact however, tenuous though it may be, and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact. We will discuss in detail a couple of cases in chapter IX where the elite historians of the west have dogmatically (and erroneously) maintained that the Greek influence on India dominated Indic thought. The conventional wisdom in the West was that the Jesuits were sent to convert the Indics to the Christian faith and as a byproduct teach them the finer points of the occidental civilization. In reality it turns out, they were sent to learn a whole host of topics such as navigation, mathematical techniques including trigonometry, and the Indian approach to calendric astronomy by Christopher Clavius, the Director of the Collegio Romano. The list of names in this roster included Matteo Ricci124, who went on to spend a considerable time in China, but not before he spent 5 years in Malabar learning from the Namboodri Jyotia Pundits. In short, the Jesuits embarked on a systematic study of the Indic episteme, since it was obvious that the Indics had made considerable advances, which the Jesuits were quick to realize were far in advance of their own. We are in the process of chronicling the study of those individuals who in turn studied India or studied subjects in which the Indics had great proficiency, beginning with ancient Babylon to the British, primarily to understand the role that India and the Indic episteme played in the renaissance of Europe. 29
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It is quite clear that the Arab scholar during the heyday of Islam observed a higher degree of ethics than his brethren in the Occident, because he never exhibited the slightest hesitation in attributing to the Indic the episteme that he had learned from him. While there is nothing here that can be regarded as being morally reprehensible, one wonders why there was the extreme reluctance on the part of the Occidental to admit that they learned from others too. Typical of the stance of the Occidental is the attitude of the late Professor David Pingree who occupied the only faculty position that I am aware of, on the History of mathematics in the western world at Brown University. On the one hand, Professor Pingree, spent most of his entire professional career studying Indian texts and manuscripts. He compiled and catalogued a comprehensive bibliography of all materials available on the computational sciences in India. The work was so voluminous, that the net result was a 5 volume compendium which he aptly termed the Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (CESS)60, cataloging a massive amount of literary work61 that could never be replicated from what we know today to be the corresponding output from Greece. Yet he kept insisting that India lacked the astronomical tradition necessary for the development of these techniques.62 Typical of
FIGURE 7 J OSEPHUS J USTUS S CALIGER
his statements is one where he remarks that both the Brahma Paka and the rya Paka schools of Astronomy, seem to have antecedents in Greek astronomy.63He is unable to assert with any modicum of evidence that such a transmission happened. Yet he keeps insisting that it did. As CK Raju has shown, the work of the Greeks suffers from the basic difficulty that prior to Ptolemy there exist very few records of their work. It is now recognized that Euclid may have been a fictional character64,65. There are good reasons to assume that he in fact never existed and may have been manufactured by the Vatican to avoid giving the credit to the Arabs for the Geometry that they had mastered or possibly having to admit that the Theonine text which is usually referred to as the Elements of Euclid was partially coauthored by Theons daughter Hypatea, who was flayed alive at the behest of the church. The main claim of the Occidental to have any kind of priority over the orient in matters mathematic, rests therefore on texts, that did not even exist till well after the commencement of the Common Era. Given these realities it makes no sense to talk about Euclid as an individual, but as a process culminating with Theon of Alexandria in 400 CE. So, whenever the name of Euclid pops up we should associate this later date rather than the contrived date of 300 BCE.
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Record keeping in Greece did not have the benefit of an Ahargaa (or its later day adaptation the Julian day number). The Julian Day Count has nothing to do with the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar. It is named for Julius Scaliger, the father of Josephus Justus Scaliger, who is credited with enunciating the concept in 1582 CE. It can also be thought of as a logical follow-on to the old Egyptian civil calendar, which also used years of constant lengths. In fact the circumstantial evidence points to the adoption of this number by the Occident after the Principal of the Collegio Romano sent a posse of 60 to 70 Jesuits to Malabar circa 1560 CE with the express purpose of ferreting out the knowledge base of the Hindu. It was shortly after this that the reform of the Julian calendar was instituted by the Vatican and the Julian Day number appears to be a natural outcome of the knowledge gained by the Jesuits and is in fact a direct adaptation of the Ahargaa. The Greeks used to measure their eras based on the current Archon of Athens (I am indebted to the late Dr Murali Dhar Pahoja for pointing me towards this revelation) and their entire chronology is largely suspect. This may have been because of the fear of large numbers that seemed to have pervaded the Occident in the ancient era, which also explains why they had no symbols or numbers larger than a thousand. Most Indians have been persuaded by the Colonial power into believing that Indian chronology is faulty and wanting (compared to whom?). Such an assumption is belied by the fact that it is the Indian records that they depended on to decipher what the Greeks did according to David Pingree. We will illustrate the inherent contradictions in their stance towards Indian historical record keeping in the chapter on knowledge transmission, where we examine a half a dozen instances of similar contradictions.(See Chapter IX ) Typical of such pronouncements is that of MacDonell To the various excesses and grotesqueries that arise from defects of the Indian mind, according to A. A.Macdonell, is to be added the non-existence of history. The total lack of the historical sense is so characteristic, that the whole course of Sanskrit literature is darkened by the shadow of this defect Early India wrote no history because it never made any66. Along the same vein is the comment by A B Keith despite the abundance of its literature, history is so miserably misrepresented that in the whole of the great period of Sanskrit literature, there is not one writer that can seriously be regarded as a serious historian. It is now clear that these statements were made to create a doubt in the minds of the reader regarding the adequacy of the historical accounts of India in order to pave the way for the acceptance of the revisions of history that he (the colonial overlord) had concocted. The utter absurdity (I am being charitable in my characterization, where no charity is warranted) of these statements lies in the fact that eminent scholars like Colebrooke, Sewell, Max Mller, Albrecht Weber, Jean Filliozat, Moriz Winternitz, Ebenezer Burgess, Frederick Pargiter, Whitney, Hermann Jacobi, John Playfair, GR Kaye, Keith, and many others spent their entire lifetime studying the nonexistent history and literature of India. Robert Sewell, who did a lot of work in deciphering the Indian Calendar, also wrote a book on the Vijayanagar Empire, called the Forgotten Empire, presumably because he was afraid that the British policy of downgrading the Indian past, as one with no history, would also result in the overlooking of the Vijayanagar empire, which in fact lasted a longer period than the Mughal Empire. While one cannot escape the conclusion that envy played a large part in such judgments, there are several reasons why such statements should be considered suspect and lacking in objectivity; The presumption that the Occidentalist makes that he has seen all the literature there is to see. There is considerable hubris in such an assertion primarily because the manuscript wealth of India is so staggering , amounting to over 5 million manuscripts, out of which only a million have been catalogued 31
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and the number that have bee n read and translated is far less67.It is estimated68 that the number of texts written in Sanskrit dealing with Jyotia number around 100.000. . It would behoove the Occidental to add a disclaimer that he may not be familiar with the full breadth of the literature on the subject. I marvel at the certainty with which the Occidental pronounces that India has no history without at the same time conceding the possibility that ignorance of the subject matter on their own part, does not equate to evidence of absence. The statement is patently untrue because there are several treatises that qualify as itihsa. It is possible that the ancient history of India does not follow the requirements that modern historians place on it, but this merely tells us that the history of an ancient people should not be expected to meet retrospective ISO 9000 like criteria and should be judged by the criteria that the ancients have set themselves. The real comparison that should be made is with histories of other civilizations during comparable era. For instance any comparison of the Vedic historical period should be made with histories of other civilizations during the period 7000 BCE to 4000 BCE. The evidence is overwhelming that this was the date that they were set to meter. But the skeptics might rejoinder with, why did it take so long to write one book. Suffice it to say that we have a fairly accurate idea of the names and dates of the Rishis who wrote the various Mandalas In reality the Indians were the first to realize that there is value in referring to a sheet anchor and used the Ahargaa ($ ) to get a serial day count starting with the sheet anchor. The Greeks never made that extra step and even if they realized the need to do so, and did not have a name for a number larger than a thousand. In fact it would not be out of place to study the Shahnama of Firdausi to understand the basic structure of Greek history and contributions in astronomy. By any reasonable standard the Greeks would flunk the minimum requirement for accurate record keeping and it would take the European another 1500 years until Julius . But by perverse logic it is India that is saddled with the onus of proving it has a legitimate history. There is very little remaining of the work of Hipparchus or Aristarchus. Even Ptolemys Syntaxis is actually a translation of the Arabic Al Majisti. Balayms Al Qualuzi (Roman Name Claudius Ptolemy) who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria during the reign of the Ptolemys called his work the (Megali Syntaxis) , Great System of Astronomy. It was translated by Al Thbit ibn Qurra at about the time of the Khilafat of al Maamun (circa CE 850, see for instance Saliba69) and the name of the translation was Al Kitb al Majisti, the Greatest Book. In the early years after the translation into Latin from the Arabic, even as late as 1515 it was known as the Arabo- Latin translation and was the only book on astronomy available to the Europeans for several centuries. It was clearly an accreted work (see the extensive discussion by CK Raju70) reflecting the knowledge gained by the Arabs at the House of Wisdom, The Bayt al Hikmah. The Al Majisti was a completely revamped text by the time it reached the library at Toledo in the 11th century. It had profited immensely from the great Entrept that the Bayt al Hikmah became with inputs from Persia, India, Khorasan, and Alexandria. The direct translation from Greek was available only in the 16th century, from a Vatican manuscript. One wonders why the Vatican took 18 centuries to find this manuscript. Given that Europe used the Arabic version (translated into Latin) for several hundred years, I do not see how the Occident is so certain that Indians borrowed from Greece. But like the Village Schoolmaster (one of favorite poems by Oliver Goldsmith), David Pingree the Guru to those who currently maintain such a stance, never gave up his obsession with Greek Priority and "even though vanquished he could argue still".
FIGURE 8 T HE C OPERNICAN M ODEL
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His students (chelas) continue to spread this version with very little proof of their assertions. In most cases, the Occidental has resorted to what is known as Speculative Reconstruction in order to bolster his contention that the Indic has borrowed from the Occident. This is the fig leaf that he uses, since he has no other proof that the Greeks had anything to offer, in order that he establishes priority. This obsession of claiming an ancestor who is supposed to have invented everything under the Sun is a serious social pathology that the occidental should face up to with the very real danger that he may lose all credibility if he does not cease from such endeavors. In a powerful talk drawing upon the rich epistemological tradition of the ancient texts, the Chairman of the ICIH 2009 conference held in Delhi during January 2009, Prof Shivaji Singh71 demolished the notion originally enunciated by Hegel and others such as Karl Marx that the Indic civilization lacked Historical agency. That such an attitude was self serving and provided a rationale for retaining control of a vast geography of the planet , an attitude that Jawaharlal Nehru felt compelled to address, even though in a more oblique fashion, in his Discovery of India, is all the more obvious. Despite this, a substantial portion of Indian historians feel obligated to perpetuate this clich, which originated out of a lack of knowledge and understanding of the vast literature of India on the part of the Occidental, simply for no other reason than the Occidental origin of this assertion. The stonewalling of the Indic contribution has strong parallels in the effort to emasculate the Indic tradition, and it is only after I read extensively in the Indology literature, did I realize that the whole pattern of denigration of the Indic past was a concerted effort to reduce the Indic civilization, at best to an also ran category. It is this amoral stance towards the contributions of others of others that is monolithic amongst all the elite of Europe that has finally convinced me that the Occidental is beyond any rational appeals to justice when it comes to matters pertaining his overall perception of the superiority of his civilization. The long years of brainwashing about the inherent inferiority of pagan civilizations has finally taken its toll. The so called Protestant faiths are even more bigoted when it comes to issues of civilizational superiority, witness the brutality of the French-Dutch Huguenots towards the native Africans of South Africa. This goes merely to show that the Indic should free himself of the assumptions that his Occidental counterpart unconsciously makes when writing about the History of India and should not rely on his conclusions. Rather he should focus on the validity of the assumptions that the Occidental makes explicitly and implicitly while reaching his own categorical assertions. FIGURE 1 0 C ONCENTRIC M ODEL FIGURE 9 E CCENTRIC/EPICYCLIC MODEL
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We view the study of history and philosophy of science as central to the understanding of any civilization and its ethos. We were pleased to discover that Neugebauer28 made a similar statement regarding the utility of studying history of the mathematical sciences; hence we make no apology for the emphasis on science, and especially on Astronomy in our own studies of the Indic peoples. Such an emphasis has been lacking in the past partly because major advances in the sciences, that have the potential to be of use in the study of history, have occurred only recently in the last 100 years and partly also because it has been difficult to find individuals who have proficiency In more than one discipline, such as Astronomy and Archaeology. It is our expectation that Archeo Astronomy will become a field of study on its It is our expectation that Archeo Astronomy will become a field of study on its own right and ameliorate this situation to some extent, but the larger question remains as to why till hitherto, there have been so few
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studies of the Mathematical traditions of the Indic peoples , interwoven into the general studies of history of the subcontinent and into the history of each of these sciences. The Earth spins around its axis once a day and thereby causes the apparent motion of all the objects surrounding us. This leads us eventually to the heliocentric model. This was first hypothesized by AB. The Occidental claims that Aristarchus also hypothesized the rotation of the earth The entire celestial sphere with all the objects in it rotates once a day while the earth alone is stationary, In this model at least in the case of the inferior planets (see Glo-pedia in The Origins)Venus and Mercury, the Sun is orbiting around the Earth . This can be termed cycle 1 (Mandoccha), and there is a second cycle , where the inferior planet is orbiting the Sun. This we shall call cycle 2(Sighroccha), and is known as the Epicycle. In western literature cycle 1 is known as the Deferent in the case of the inferior planets. To a first order, the 2 models are similar and can be shown to be vectorially equivalent for the case of zero Eccentricity. A coordinate system that is geocentric is extremely useful for describing the map of the sky, if for no other reason than, that it is the way we see the universe around us. Still, it is pertinent to remind ourselves that the planet earth is only one of the planets of the Sun, which is an insignificant star (among billions of others) in one of the spiraling arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn is one of millions of Galaxies. The sheer vastness of the universe in which the planet earth is an insignificant tiny spec, should be a deterrent to taking ourselves too seriously, and insisting that we are at the center of the universe a stance so dogmatic in practice that were it not for the work of a succession of Indian astronomers, it might have taken much longer to pave the way for the introduction of Physics into the model. It is the consequence of the heliocentric system that forces us to re-examine our role and purpose in the Shiva Tandava, that is a quintessential metaphor for the vast cosmic drama that we are so privileged to be a part of. ryabhaa makes mention of the rotation of the earth about its own axis72, and since such a rotation would explain the apparent movement of the planets and other objects in the sky, he was tantalizingly close to an explicit statement regarding the heliocentric nature of our Solar system. Just as a person in a boat moving forward sees the stationary objects (on the river bank) as moving backwards, the stationary stars are seen in Lanka (at the equator) as moving towards the west. But it was not to be. It would be stretching the truth to say that as far as we can fathom, he had a clear idea regarding heliocentricity. In the interest of full disclosure we need to mention that in the very next verse he repudiates the heliocentric model73, indicating that he had not reached a final conclusion or that he was unable to reconcile the competing viewpoints. The rising and setting ( of all the celestial objects) being blown by the Pravaha wind, presumes the movement of the stellar sphere along with the planets at a uniform rate. Thus, we see no evidence that the Indic ancients ever hypothesized a consistent heliocentric model . The opposition that was expressed by Brahmagupta to the proto-heliocentric model, namely the key finding of AB, that the earth which was rotating around the sun, was due to his inability to explain the phenomena based on the heliocentric model and not due to any religious orthodoxy. In fact I can safely say that I know of no instance in Indian history where religious orthodoxy ever had a decisive say, much less a veto power on matters relating to science . 35
17. GEOCENTRIC AND HELIOCENTRIC MODELS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
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This is in stark contrast to Europe where the church had total control of the dissemination of knowledge resulting in the stagnant state of affairs till almost the 20th century when Laplace is reported to have replied to Napoleon Sire, Je n'ai pas TABLE 1 ryabhaa on Relative Motion anulomagati naustha payati achalam vilomagam yadvat | acalni bhni tadvat samapacimagni lakym || 9 || Golapdah, 4.9 of ryabhaya
*+ "$ ! " " $% "
udaystamayanimittam nityam pravahea vyun kipta | laksamapachimaga bhapajara sagraha bhramati || 10 || Golapdah, Chapter 4.10 of ryabhaya
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besoin de cette hypothse when asked why he hadn't mentioned God in his discourse on secular variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. This conversation was reported to have taken place after Laplace had presented a copy of his work to the brilliant Emperor, who undoubtedly did more than his share for encouraging the scientific revolution that was under way in Europe. When Napoleon repeated this to Lagrange, the later remarked . Ah but that is a fine hypothesis , it explains so many things. As I have emphasized, humanity was not ready till that time, to begin the long March to unshackling itself from the self imposed mental Gulag of dogmatic thought processes as well as the realization of the potential to free us from the cocoon of the Solar system. But I wish to emphasize once again that there was no opposition to ryabhaa stemming from a religious dogmatic point of view as it was the case in Europe. The idea of a heliocentric planetary model did not catch fire and did not cause a paradigm shift in the manner in which people viewed themselves either in a terrestrial frame or otherwise. Without the accompanying revolution of thought, such a statement is without impact and hence is of little significance from the point of view of further progress. After all, Aristarchus is reputed to have postulated a heliocentric system as well and the same remark applies to him also. But the spark that had ben lit by ryabhaa idea did not die in India and in Persia and it fell to the hands of people like al-Shatir(d 1374) and Urbi (d. 1268) at the El Maragha observatory and Nlakaa of the Kerala school(1443 to 1543 CE) to appreciate the significance of this statement. By this time it is becoming increasingly clear that Nlakaa, who lived for over a hundred years , was a perceptive individual, who had made a significant contribution to the understanding of the world around us. Almost all of the savants named in the accompanying table had sophisticated skills in analysis and were quite capable of developing infinite series. He revised the traditional view of the solar system in very significant ways. It also shows us how agile the Indians were in terms of the heuristics of solving a problem. A heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery.
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Heuristic methods are used to come to an optimal solution as rapidly as possible. Part of this method is using a "rule of thumb", an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. In more precise terms, heuristics stand for strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines. So what was the advance made by Nlakaa and why is it so significant and why do I consider it to be good example of the heuristic approach that was popularized by George Polya74. The realization that it is the relative motion that is important to capture, paved the way for the Indians to make conceptual changes to the model. There are literally scores of astronomers in India who kept chipping away at the problem, until Nlakaa had the answer to the question of why the inferior planets (Venus, and Mercury )only traversed a portion of the sky. And seemed to have the same periodicity as the Sun. We will let Nlakaa explain how he solved the puzzle in the Tantrasagraha. The following is an excerpt from the original paper by MD Srinivas75. Nlakaas revision of the traditional computational scheme for the longitudes and latitudes of the interior76 planets, Mercury (Budh) and Venus (Shukra) was based on his clear understanding of the latitudinal motion of these planets. It is this understanding that led him to a correct understanding of the motion of the planets. The best exposition can be found in the ryabhayabhya by Nilakanta; Now the ryabhaiya explains the nature of the orbits and their locations for Mercury and Venus. In this way for Mercury the increase of the latitude occurs only for 22d and then in the same numbers of days the latitude comes down to zero. Thus Mercury moves on one side of the Apamandala (the plane of the ecliptic) for 44d and it moves on the other side during the next 44d . Thus one complete period of the latitudinal motion is completed in 88d, which happens to be the period of revolution of the ghroccha (perihelion of Mercury). The latitudinal motion is said to be due to that of the ghroccha. How is this appropriate? Isn't the latitudinal motion of a body dependent on the motion of that body only, and not because of the motion of something else? The latitudinal motion of one body cannot be obtained as being due to the motion of another body. Hence we should conclude that] Mercury goes around its own orbit in 88d. However this also is not appropriate because we see it going around in one year and not in 88d. True; the period in which Mercury completes one full revolution around the Bhagola (the celestial sphere) is one year only (like the Sun]. In the same way Venus also goes around its orbit in 225d only. It is this latitudinal period of 88 days that gave Nilakanta the final clue that the inferior planets (Mercury and Venus) were in fact orbiting the Sun and not the Earth. How so ? The clarity of Nilakantas subsequent explanation is simply stunning in the manner in which he frees himself, not totally but in large measure, from the gulag of the Geocentric model. All this can be explained thus: The orbits of Mercury and Venus do not circumscribe the Earth. The Earth is always outside their orbit. Since their orbit is always confined to one side of the (geocentric] celestial sphere. In completing one revolution they do not go around the twelve Ri (the twelve signs). For the inferior planets, the mean Sun is the ghroccha (converts the heliocentric value of the Manda anomaly to the geocentric value. It is their own revolutions, which are stated to be the revolutions of the ghroccha. ln ancient texts such as the ryabhaya, it is only due to the revolution of the Sun (around the Earth that they i.e. the interior planets. Mercury and Venus) complete their movement around the twelve Ri and complete their revolution of the Earth. Just as in the case of the exterior planets (Jupiter etc.). The 37
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ghroccha (i.e. the mean Sun) attracts (and drags around the Mada-kaksya-madala (the Manda orbits on which they move). in the same way as it does for these (interior] planets also. To integrate the diagrams for all the planets into a single diagram of the planetary system, we shall have to use the notion of bhu-tra-graha-vivara or the Earth-planet distance. Nlakaa has discussed this extensively in his own commentary ryabhayabhya and has shown how the effects of the latitudinal motions of the planets should be taken into account in the computation of the Earth-planet distance. The final picture that we would obtain by putting all planets together in a single diagram adopting a single scale is essentially what Nlakaa has described as the qualitative picture of planetary motion that we presented earlier: The five planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn move in eccentric orbits around the mean Sun. which goes around the Earth. The planetary orbits are tilted with respect to the orbit of the Sun or the ecliptic, and hence cause the motion in latitude. Since it is well known that the basic scale of distances are fairly accurately represented in the Indian astronomical tradition, as the ratios of the radius of the ighra epicycle to the radius of the concentric (trijya) is very nearly the mean ratio of the Earth-Sun and the Earth-Planet distances (for exterior planets) or the inverse of it (for interior planets), the geometrical picture of planetary motion will also be fairly accurate in terms of the scales of distances. We shall term this model the Nlakaa-Tycho Model. The net result is that Nlakaa ends up with a model very much like that of Tycho Brahe, but one hundred years before Tycho. It is interesting to see what the Jesuits took back from Malabar in 1560 and whether Tycho Brahe did have access to these papers, given that he always had excellent relations with the Vatican. Indian astronomy reached China with the expansion of Buddhism during the Later Han dynasty (25220 CE). Further translation of Indian works on astronomy was completed in China by the Three Kingdoms era (220265 CE). However, the most detailed incorporation of Indian astronomy occurred only during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) when a number of Chinese scholarssuch as Yi Xing were versed both in Indian and Chinese astronomy. A system of Indian astronomy was recorded in China as Jiuzhi-li (718 CE), the author of which was an Indian by the name of Qutan Xidaa translation of Devanagari Gautama Siddharthathe director of the Tang dynasty's national astronomical observatory. I am indebted to Prof Bhu Dev Sharma for bringing the following to my attention. The astronomical table of Sines by the Indian astronomer and mathematician, ryabhaa, was translated into the Chinese astronomical and mathematical book of the Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era (Kiyun Zhnjng), compiled in 718 CE during the Tang Dynasty. The Kiyun Zhnjng was compiled by the aforementioned Gautama Siddhartha, an astronomer and astrologer born in Chang'an, and whose family was originally from India. He was also notable for his translation of the Navagraha calendar into Chinese. Another interesting study has recently been brought out by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen77. In a chapter on China and India, he mentions, Several Indian mathematicians and astronomers held positions in Chinas scientific establishment, and an Indian scientist, Gautama Siddhartha (Qutan Xida, in Chinese) even became the president of the official Board of Astronomy in China in the eighth century. Sen further writes: Calendrical studies, in which Indian astronomers located in China in the eighth century, were particularly involved, made good use of the progress of trigonometry that had already occurred in India by then going much beyond the purported) Greek roots of Indian trigonometry. The movement east of Indian trigonometry to China was part of a global exchange of ideas that also went west around that time. Indeed this was also about the time when Indian trigonometry was having a major impact on the Arab world (with 38
18. INDIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ASTRONOMY

widely used Arabic translations of the works of ryabhaa, Varhamihra, Brahmagupta and others) which would later influence European mathematics as well, through the Arabs. Sen points out, Gautama Siddhartha (Qutan Xida) produced the great Chinese compendium of astronomy Kiyun Zhnjng an eighth-century scientific classic. He was also engaged in adopting a number of Indian astronomical works into Chinese. For example, Jiuzhi li, which draws on a particular planetary calendar in India (Navagraha calendar) is clearly based on the classical Pancha Siddhantica by VarhaMihra We are confident that the Indic contribution will be recognized as a significant portion of the total effort, not just for the efforts of savants like ryabhaa but also because it contributed to the sum of knowledge in more ways than the occident cares to admit78. Certainly the Ancient Indic deserves better than to be completely ignored in any narratives of the history of Astronomy79,80,81 We wish to make it clear that unlike the Occidental we are not trying to establish priority in every field that the Indic may have made contributions, but it also does not make sense to ignore the contributions of the Indics merely because they fell prey to the colonialist urge to plunder and lost control of their own history and should pay for this lapse for all time by never correcting the historical narrative. But even this limited recognition of the work done by the ancient astronomers of India is currently absent and there remain compelling reasons to assume that the Occident will remain reluctant to grant even this limited recognition. Why, because, he is concerned that the whole edifice of lies and half truths will come tumbling down when subjected to a closer look. Furthermore, the carefully cultivated image of an Occident solely concerned with the quest for knowledge using the principles of the scientific method would become a casualty of excessive hubris. Regardless of the potential for success, it is time that the Indic challenges the Eurocentric descriptions of the development of various sciences and technologies with tenacity and steadfastness and this is what we have done with my recently published book The Origins of Astronomy, the Calendar and Time. The main motivation for doing so is not merely to claim precedence in the discovery of various episteme where appropriate, but also to establish the legitimate place of the Indic civilization within the diverse family of ethnicities and weltanschauungs that comprise the sum total of the human experience. We owe this much to the giants who came before us and bequeathed such a rich legacy. By the time we are done, we are confident that the name of Yjnavalkya82 will be well known at least amongst Astronomers as the man who determined that there is a 95 year synchronism between the rotations of the earth and its Moon and that he knew this from the strong traditions of observation that were already established by his time. I am looking forward to the day when the comment of the Occidental ceases to be about the unpronounce-ability of the Indic episteme and focuses on the content. The current approach to the Sciences and the historical developments that contribute to Civilizational progress is that these are heavily weighted towards Europe. Clearly such an attitude on the part of the Europeans is increasingly resulting in lack of credibility in the traditional accounts of such subjects as the history of astronomy . And then when other civilizations make a legitimate claim on the priority of a particular development , the knee jerk response is that they are claiming to have invented everything. Such emotional responses, that stem from the realization that such a charge (claiming to have invented everything ) is more appropriately leveled against the Occidental, are repeated ad nauseum and do not permit a healthy debate to occur and certainly it is not amusing for those of us who are engaged in the serious endeavor of deciphering the past. 39
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A word is therefore in order about the manner in which we construct the models of the universe. It is only in the last 500 years, or even less, that we have shifted unambiguously to a heliocentric view of our Solar system. This step was a major paradigm shift for the human species. But this does not mean that the geocentric models that were constructed in the past were wrong or that the models were an obstacle to further progress. Nor does it mean that the ideas leading inexorably to a heliocentric model, such as the realization that the earth rotates about its own axis , did not occur to those who were capable enough to visualize the consequences (ryabhaa and Aristarchus come to mind). It simply means that the species had not evolved to the point where it could appreciate the consequences of the heliocentric model. From time immemorial, humans have been watching the periodical rising and setting of the objects in the sky including the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. One cannot help but ask the question, why is this happening', and how did they collect the data and when did they come up with the computational algorithms that were needed to determine the positions (latitude, longitude) of the various heavenly bodies. There are more questions rather than real answers. However, the ancients made several observations that can be forensically examined in order to arrive at the truth.
19. THE PARADIGM SHIFT FROM A KINEMATIC MODEL TO A PHYSICS MODEL
reflected Alfred North Whitehead, the well-known British Mathematician, while commenting on the legend of the death of Archimedes at the hands of a Roman soldier. But what of the Ancient Indic? What if anything, would he have wished on his epitaph? Despite his pragmatism, the Indic of antiquity would probably wish to be remembered for his love of knowledge for its own sake and for his insatiable quest to quantify the universe around him. I do not believe any of the Ancient Indics lost much sleep over the fact that they would be accused of borrowing everything from the Greeks. Au contraire, they would have been amused at the inordinate amount of time spent by otherwise intelligent individuals to prove that they the ancient Indic - plagiarized everything from the Greeks and that they were not of such great antiquity. After all can there be a greater compliment to a person than to study his works for the greater part of ones life, even after the lapse of 2 or more thousand years. We have covered a great amount of material in the Origins. My purpose in writing the book was primarily to tell the story of Ancient Indian Astronomy to an audience that includes those who are not of Indic ancestry. We have tried to tell the story in the manner in which it should be told. While we do not try to hide our belief that the story of Ancient Indian Astronomy is one of great antiquity, we feel we have adhered to the truth scrupulously as we know it today and have not made any claims for which we do not have an adequate data or evidence. At no time in the narrative have I suggested that the Ancient Indic was the sole source of knowledge in the computational sciences. The evidence suggests however that the Indic was the first to progress to computational astronomy with algebraic and trigonometric expressions. We have maintained that his contributions were unique and original and some of these unique approaches became part of the mainstream. Even this is rarely acknowledged in public.
20. NO ROMAN EVER LOST HIS LIFE BECAUSE HE WAS ABSORBED IN THE CONTEMPLATION OF A MATHEMATICAL DIAGRAM.
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There are certain omissions we had to make, as we could not cover the subject in an encyclopedic manner. Having said that, there is a lot of material here to fill many lectures. We could not go into the details of the calculation to determine longitude and latitude of the planets as we ran out of pages. We have not touched upon the instrumentation aspects, which while being pre-Galilean is a very interesting story. Some of these topics await the 2nd volume of this book. We did not include autobiographical sketches on all 200 of the Indic savants. Our treatment of Jaina astronomy is cursory at best. Our treatment of Ancient Indian Mathematics is restricted to topics that arise in the context of Calendrical Astronomy. I have tried not to get into advanced areas and have attempted to maintain the technical content of the material at an introductory level so that those who may not have an advanced math background will appreciate the logic behind some of the inferences. Even with all of these omissions we feel we have managed to cover a lot of topics necessary to make the reader a highly competent naked eye astronomer, capable of understanding of the main issues involved in Observational & Calendrical astronomy. In addition there is an extra bonus, in that the reader will for the first time have at his finger tips all the necessary data and resources to undertake the study of comparative astronomy of various civilizations should he so choose. The real value of the book is to bring the reader up to date on a broad range of topics and issues relevant to the origins of Calendrical astronomy. We have tried to impart the notion that Astronomy was more than just a playground for the Europeans. In the process we have established a prima facie case that our Heritage in Astronomy was not just a legacy of the Greeks but of all of humankind and to reach where we are today we stand on the shoulders of Giants who hailed from various parts of the globe and not just Greece or Babylon. We have put forward a chronology that is consistent both internally and externally and does not violate the known facts about Indic History. We have made a convincing case that Hindu or Ancient Indic Astronomy is of great antiquity and the ancient Indic was using reasonably accurate calendars a very long time ago (terminus ante quem of 4000 BCE). More importantly he was the first to use his considerable powers in Mathematics to derive expressions for the orbital elements
21. ANCIENT INDIC MATHEMATICAL ASTRONOMY HAD A UNIQUE CHARACTER.

The use of epicycles as well as eccentric circles were known to the Indics before the Greeks and are mentioned in the Srya Siddhnta, a text that is considered by informed Indic historians to be a literary document contemporaneous with the era prior to the common era. We have given reasons why we believe that David Pingree (as well as his Guru Otto Neugebauer) was grossly in error when he made the oft-repeated assertion that India borrowed much from Greece. Obviously one must exercise due diligence and study the vast Indic literature before making such a priori & rash judgments, judgments that David Pingree has been making since his introduction to the subject during the period when he wrote his PhD thesis on Greek transmission of Astronomy to India. We feel he is wrong both from a chronological standpoint as well as from epistemological standpoint. There is epistemological continuity in the approaches that the Indics used going back several millennia till the advent of the Colonial era. It is only after the mandatory imposition of English that such an epistemological continuity was broken. Currently the Indic is in the process of synthesizing the ancient episteme with the Occidental systems of knowledge that he has imbibed along with the English language 41
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and once he reaches equilibrium in this transition there is no reason why he may not continue to advance the state of the art as he once did. While we have compared the Indic achievements to those in Greece, this was not to suggest that the Greeks contribution was insignificant, especially in the axiomatic approach to mathematics. The fact remains that the only extant documentation on Greek astronomy dates to a time that is significantly later than the Golden age of Greece. We take issue mainly with the current day Historians of Mathematics in the Occident whose main interest appears to be in claiming priority of invention in a retrospective manner in every field of human endeavor, and their unwillingness to concede priority to the ancient Indic even in those cases where there is no documentary evidence of the Greek effort. Trigonometry is a case in point. Their views are so full of clichs, that the final result is almost fatally flawed and banal to the point where it competes strenuously with the superficial views of India which I lump under the lumpen category of the Cows, Caste and Curry caricaturization of India, that is peddled as being representative of India. Unfortunately such superficial assessments abound among even the top rungs of journalists and public leaders in the occident. When such assumptions color their judgment, it is impossible to take the rest of the work seriously. We have devoted an entire chapter to Astronomical dating in the Origins, since we feel that the precession of the equinoxes provides a very reliable clock with a period of approximately 25,800 years. Such a large period is particularly fortuitous since this is in the same order of magnitude as the entire length of recorded history that spans about 10 millennia. We have run planetarium software for the entire matrix of 27*4 = 108 equinoctial/solstitial events for one complete precessional cycle that can be used as a reference,(Table ) when the reader comes across such an event or observation to determine the date of the event. These calculations simulate the effects of the drift of the aphelion that takes about 120,000 years to complete one cycle. It is a simple matter to interpolate the dates of other events such as the equidistant locations on the sidereal zodiac (13.33, 26.67, 40 etc.) from the RNET (Retrodicted Nakatra Event Table ). Fortunately ,the Sanskritic literature is laced heavily with observations of this type and the Origins quotes many of these seemingly abundant references .
22. TABLE 2 ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS RETRODICTED BY PLANETARIUM SOFTWARE AT THE 4

CARDINAL POINTS RETRODICTED NAKATRA EVENT TABLE (RNET) THIIS INCLUDES THE EEFECTS OF NUTATION, Winter Solstice Summer Solstice Feb 11, 7313 BCE, Mar 25, 401 BCE, Nov 5, 20362 Dec 3, 18310 Feb 19, 25098 CE BCE CE(GPC 25,623) ( GPC 25499) Jun 17, 5721 CE (GPC 26,083) Feb 17, 8272 BCE Apr 4, 1623 BCE Jun 19, 4786 CE Feb. 22, 8947 BCE Apr 8, 2220 BCE, Nov 2, 21891 Dec 5, 16738 CE, Feb 22, 23291 BCE, (25686) CE(25511) Jun 19, 4139 CE (GPC 26030) Vernal Equinox
NAKATRA 1
NAKATRA WITH WESTERN ZODIAC & OTHER NAMES Avini, Mean Nyp = 25,785 , Arietis Apabharani 41 Arietis, Musca Krittika , , Taurii, Pliades, Alcyone 27 or 28 Taurus
2 3
Autumnal equinox Sep 9, 11693CE Dec 26, 14244 BCE (25937) Dec 31, 14898 BCE Dec 31, 15622 BCE Sep 13, 10308 CE, (GPC 25928)
42

4 Rohii Taurii, Aldebaran Mrigar, (Jacobi 112 Taurii, El Nath Ardra Orionis Betelgeuse Punarvasu Geminorium, Pllux Tisya or Pusya (Pargiter, Siddharth) Cancri le Cancri 1,2 Magha Leonis, Regulus Indian name Western Zodiac name Prva Phlguni Leonis Uttara Phlguni, Jacobi Leonis Hasta Virginis. Porrima Chitr Virginis, Spica Swti Pi Hydrae Feb 28, 9654 BCE Apr 16, 3247 BCE Jun 20, 3442 Sep 13, 9904 CE CE June 21, 2531 Sep 14, 8696 CE CE Jun 20, 2089 Sep 15, 8911 CE CE
7 8
Dec 7, 15150 CE Apr 21, 3835 BCE Mar 6, 10608 BCE, GPC 25758 March 9, 11038 Apr 30,5011 BCE BCE Dec 8,14739 CE Dec 10, 13008 CE May 7, 6048 BCE Dec 11, 11936 CE
9 10 1) 11 12
Dec 13, 11543 CE Dec 13,10465 CE WS Dec 15,9648 CE Dec 16, 8933 CE
Jun 21, 332 CE Sep 18, 6517 CE May 17, 7414 Jun 30, 790 Sep 19, 5631 BCE(Siddharth BCE CE p.73) May 20, 7953 Jul 3, 1149 Sep 20, 5443 BCE BCE CE May 27, 8953 July 13, 2324 September BCE BCE 21,4132 CE VE SS AE May 30, 9306 July 19, 3151 BCE BCE June 4, 10131 July 24, 3903 BCE BCE (Jacobi)Tilak June 15, 11814 Aug 2, 5271 BCE BCE Jun 21,12973 BCE Aug 8, 6284 BCE Mar 15, 11534 CE Jun 6, 18243 CE Jun 1, 7389 BCE (25632) Mar 15,11409 CE Aug 20, 8147 BCE Mar 16,10190 CE Aug 26, 9135 BCE Mar 17, 9153 CE Aug 29, 9667 BCE Mar 18, 8299 CE Sep 5, 10766 BCE Mar 18, 7828 CE Sep 9, 11489 BCE Mar 19, 7194 CE Sep 13, 12236 BCE Sep 21, 2880 CE Sep 23, 2212 CE Sep 16, 1185 CE Sep 22, 349 CE Sep 28, 370 BCE
13 14 15
Dec 18, 7647 CE Dec 20,6690 CE Dec 20 , 5654 CE
16 17 18 19 20 21
Vikh Librae. Anurdh Scorpii , Jacobi Jyeha Scorpii, Antares Mla Scorpii Prva Asdh Sagittarii Uttara Asdh Sagittarii
Dec 20,4888 CE Dec 22, 3955 CE Dec 22, 3443 CE Dec 22, 2387CE Dec 21, 1671 CE Dec 16, 935 CE 43
Oct 8, 1847 BCE Oct 12, 2476 BCE Oct 14, 2921 BCE Oct 20, 3702 BCE (Jacobi) Oct 27, 4682 BCE Oct 31, 5484 BCE
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22 23 24 25

rvaa Capricornus ,Dabih Dhanist (Sravishta)(1) Capricornus Deneb al Geidi Satabhisaj Aquarii Prva Bhdrapad( Jacobi) BG Siddharth Pegasi (Markab) Uttara Bhdrapada Pegasi Algeneib Revati Piscium Dec 25, 453 BCE Jan 5 , 1861 BCE Vedga Jyotia Jan 14, 3181 BCE Mar 19, 6111 CE Mar 19, 4512 CE Mar 21, 3303 CE Jun 11, 12268 CE Jun 24, 10903 CE Jun 28, 10234 CE Jun 16, 8836 CE Nov 10, 7228 BCE Nov 18, 8419 BCE Nov 26, 9604 BCE Dec 7, 11413 BCE
Jan 19, 4072 BCE Mar 20, 3092 CE (Jacobi)
26 27
Jan 28, 5217 BCE Dec 1, 19075 CE, Feb 5, 6507 BCE
Mar 21, 1743 CE Mar 21, 238 CE
Jun 16, 7729 Dec 14, 12290 CE BCE Jun 16, 6483 Dec 9, 12585 CE CE Dec 19, 13304 BCE
While transmission of ideas and knowledge is a continuous process, we believe that there have been 4 periods in recorded history that can be characterized as periods of more than average transmission the case of the Indics 1. The first wave of transmission during which there appears to have been a period where migration took place after the Dasarajna War (mentioned in the g Veda) where there was migration of Druhyus and other clans. The Kassites appear mysteriously in Babylon worshipping Hindu deities. The Ionians could very well be the culmination of the resulting Yavana migration. 2. The second transmission took place indirectly via Iran from Jundishapur, where Indic astronomy was well known when Alexander looted ancient Persia and had the loot of books shipped to Alexandria. But prior to looting the books from JUNDISHAPUR he had them translated into Greek and he had the original custodians of the books at Jundishapur murdered so that they would not live to tell the tale. For when Alexander conquered the Kingdom of Darius the King, he had all the books translated into the Greek language. Then he burnt all the original books, which were 44
23. MAJOR TRANSMISSIONS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY

kept in the treasure houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought, might be keeping any of them. Except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them83. 3. The third period of intense transmission occurred when an individual named Ganaka or Kanaka, presented himself to the Khalif al Mansur in Baghdad as an expert in computational astronomy. I include Al-Khwarismis work in this category. 4. The transmission that took place from 1500 onwards is the one that is most hidden from scrutiny, despite the fact that it is the most recent one, but we have cited at least 4 instances in the book of such a transmission and there are undoubtedly many more.
5. Albrecht Heefer84 has presented very convincing data in the form of a comparison between a
Random text in Paris by Jacques Peletier titled Larithmetique and while there is substantial similarity in the table of contents (see table 5, chapter XI of the Origins), he is unwilling to commit to the certainty of a direct contact between India and Europe. This, despite a massive amount of data, attesting to such contacts, see table 6, chapter VIII of the Origins . Even if he admits to such a direct contact , he admits that the so called Humanist movement in Italy (which took place contemporaneously with the Italian renaissance ingrained in the European such a firm belief in the infallibility of the Greek Episteme, that they would not countenance the Indic effort being independent of the Greek version. We quote Hankel to the effect that
the humanist movement gave rise to a deeply inculcated prejudice that all of the higher intellectual tradition that is now attributed to the Orient, in particular all science, has risen from Greek soil and that the only mentally truly productive people have been the Greek, and such a prejudice makes it difficult for Europeans to turn around and accept in the blink of an eyelid (Augenblick) that the Indic effort was independent of the Greek effort and in fact preceded it. So we have it. a great European mathematician has the grace to admit that the Greeks were not necessarily the purveyors of all knowledge as it was made out to be as a result of the Humanist movement. Das uns durch die humanistische Erziehung tief eingeprgte Vorurtheil, dass alle hhere geistige Cultur im Orient, insbesondere alle Wissenschaft aus griechischem Boden entsprungen und das einzige geistig wahrhaft productive Volk das griechische gewezen sei, kann uns zwar einen Augenblick geneigt machen, das Verhltniss umzukehren
And what of the Renaissance Humanism. In my opinion, it was a well intentioned effort to break loose from the stranglehold that the church had till then. As a matter of fact Cardinal Bessarion was a keen collector of Greek manuscripts. But the Greeks had already been coopted by the Church, notwithstanding incidents such as the flaying of Hypatea to death, as long as the date of the Greek heathen was prior to the Common Era and it did not violate Aristotelian principles. But the Renaissance accomplished very little in dispelling the parochial attitudes that the Eurocentric continue to propound to this day, and it failed in imbuing the European with a universal outlook, because, again in my opinion it remained agnostic on the infinite potential of the Purusha. 6. We have catalogued several instances where the Occidental has either ignored the Indic contribution or consciously belittled it. We have given the example of George Thibaut and George Kantor ignoring the prior antiquity of the Sulva Sutra despite the fact that they were aware of the Sulva Sutras and had in fact created an English version of the same. We have used the word Occidental on several occasions in this book. We feel that such a gross generalization of people living in such a vast area is nevertheless very appropriate, since it is by choice that the Western 45
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savant has chosen to be largely monolithic in his views on India, especially when it comes to topics that indicate a high degree of antiquity.
In those instances where the evidence was overwhelming that the Indics were responsible for a paradigm shift, leading to a greater capability such as for instance the impact of the decimal place value system on mathematical astronomy, he has for the most part, refused to acknowledge that the Indics had an advantage. He refuses to acknowledge that Europe was lagging behind in several fields including Mathematics and that it is only during the start of the colonial era that Europe decisively shot ahead, despite clear cut evidence that the DPVS was popularized in Europe only after the advent of Simon Stevin. Most text books in the occident , refer to the DPVS as Arabic numerals and do not even mention India. It is totally mind boggling that they do this 1.knowing that the word decimal ( ) is clearly of Sanskritic origin, and 2.the Persian/Arab authors themselves make no bones that the numbers and the associated technology is of Indian origin, since most of the texts have the phrase al Hind in them and 3. the Indian methods of reckoning are known by the appellation Hindisa The epistemic heritage of a civilization plays a key role in the history of the people. There are many questions to answer. What role does knowledge (Gyna) play in the ethos of the civilization? Does the civilization value knowledge for its own sake or does the knowledge need to have a utility in order for us to be motivated to pursue it? We have tried to belabor the point that the ancient Indic has been responsible for bequeathing to India a unique epistemic heritage, the core values of which were universally appreciated. We have also made the point that the current perception of mediocrity of this civilization is only of recent vintage. There can be little doubt that the body politic of India is undergoing a massive epistemic rupture as we speak, a rupture that began when the colonial Overlord decided consciously to devalue the heritage of the Indian people. Before the Indian decides that there is very little to preserve from the past, he or she should inform himself of the true facts regarding the past. He should internalize the value of epistemic continuity in a civilization by studying the correlation between successful civilizations and the epistemic continuity in their history. Only then can he make an informed choice. India does not have a history is the popular refrain amongst Indologists west of the Bosphorus. In reality Indian calendars were far more accurate for most of recorded history and Indian records were superior compared to anything that Greece had in 2000 BCE or even as late as the Roman era. For example the Greeks did not have an Ahargaa system and had to do considerable guessing when there were gaps in the record. They reckoned their calendars in terms of the regnal period of the Archon of Athens. In fact it was only after the Julian day count was instituted by Justus Scaliger in 1582, was it possible to get an accurate day count from a day in the distant past. This explains why it is almost impossible to quote an accurate date of birth in the Occident, till a couple of centuries ago, unless you belonged to the Nobility or the Royalty. We trust that future generations of Indologists will not make such an asinine claim anymore. We have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the occidental claim to priority of Greek Science and Astronomy has absolutely no basis in fact and is accompanied by statements such as those of Pingree, that we quoted earlier History shows that essentially all of the methods and many of the parameters of Indian astronomy, prior and subsequent to the fifth century CE, were derived from Mesopotamia and Greece; it also is apparent that the planetary models of the Brahmagupta, ryaPaka, and Ardhartrika
24. THE EPISTEMIC CONTINUITY OF A CIVILIZATION
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Paka are of Greek origin. So categorical is the assertion that most Indics faced with such certitude would tend not to question such emphaticity. This would be a major tactical error. If I may be permitted to paraphrase Bertrand Russells85 admonition; the method of simply assuming results, once one is persuaded that they are true, rather than trying to prove them, (as in the case of Greek priority over the Indics), has all the (accoutrements and )advantages of thievery over honest toil.
We are in agreement that the transition to a physical model from a purely Kinematic Model was a major event in the history of the human species and caused a veritable explosion in the sciences, not because It was a major departure from the prevailing orthodoxy of looking at the problem in a purely geometric manner, but because it paved the way for a completely new paradigm the idea of conservative force field under which all celestial bodies would be constrained to move. Again, Copernicus, who was understandably circumspect about his work, need not have been unduly concerned for the simple reason that he did not stray too far from his predecessors and the Ptolemaic tradition, since he retained the 2 assumptions that had been the greatest obstacle to further progress in the Occident . T hey were 1. The retention of circular orbits as a fundament of their whole approach, even faced with data that clearly indicated otherwise. This is the Aristotelian Principle that no western astronomer could shake himself loose from because the Church was adamant that this principle was divinely ordained. Notice that the Indics remained characteristically nonchalant about circular orbits and nowhere do they make the assumption that circularity of the orbit is a necessary condition . In fact it is their judicious non recognition of the circularity hypothesis (in fact I would go so far as to call it a circularity dogma (in as much as such a principle formed the core of the teachings of Aristotle) that had invited the scorn of successive historians(starting from Neugebauer and David Pingree in the occident) as being too crude. 2. The second great mistake that he retained from Ptolemaic astronomy was the retention of uniform angular velocity postulate. First let me make the disclaimer that the inherent assumption in treating these as independent assumptions, is one if it was made by a current day PhD candidate, would be considered to be a howler of such immense proportions that he would not be allowed to proceed on to his PhD . The reason why Copernicus failed in his approach, as did all the Occidental astronomers till Kepler , was this inability to see that once you made the assumption of circular orbits, you were doomed to remain in the gulag of uniform angular velocity. So that for religious reasons , Ptolemy was constrained to define an Equant which plays no useful role in his theory, other than as a fig leaf that he was worshipping at the altar of uniform angular velocity. We have ample evidence that the Indics realized that uniform angular velocity is an intrinsic property of circular orbits and that one cannot specify that property independently and expect it to remain a constant , once one has decided to abandon the circular orbit . In fact they allowed the radius of the deferent to vary in order to fine tune their models.
25. THE COPERNICAN MODEL WAS NOT A RADICAL DEPARTURE FROM THE PTOLEMAIC ONE
26. THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT HINDU
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In fact after I wrote the Origins, I was more than ever convinced that the revolution that ensued owed more than ever to the many astronomers that graced the Indian subcontinent, and should properly be termed the RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA evolution , in honor of all the Indian astronomers who painstakingly ferreted out the secrets of the solar system. We have already mentioned the names of
RYABHAA AND NLAKAA SOMAYJI, but who is Smanta you might ask . He is the Last of the Mohicans86, the Chingachgook of Indian astronomers, the traditional naked eye astronomers imbued with a very modern mind. There is not sufficient space to go into his vast contributions here of which we give a glimpse in the Origins, but we encourage the reader to investigate as a starter , two books87. I am confident that after studying the Siddhntic models, with its greater understanding of relative motions between the interior planets, earth and the outer planets, culminating in the Nlakaa Tycho model, most historians would realize that the Indian effort was the more logical stepping stone to the Kepler Newtonian formulation, and the Ptolemaic model with its heavy reliance on the compass and straight edge, the circular orbit dogma and its primitive trigonometry was in fact a hindrance to proceed to a physics model.
Again as in the case of Analysis and the Calculus, we agree with Richard Courant that it make little sense to say that one individual was responsible for the evolution to a model where the physics was the key, but we can say that certain individuals like Sir Isaac Newton, the Great Swiss family of Bernoullis, Leonhard Euler , who regarded himself as belonging to the Bernoulli parampara and the wonderful work done by the bevy of French mathematical astronomers Joseph Louis Lagrange, Jean le Rond DAlambert, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Augustine Cauchy , Simeon Dennis Poisson) made major contributions to the new science of Mechanics. And so our story of the origins of Astronomy ends here at the point where Mechanics matures into a subject of study in its own right. This is where I had began my quest into the understanding of our universe four decades ago. Much water has flown through the Ganges, the Seine, the Elbe, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi ,during those decades but my love of Mechanics and Mathematics has never waned and my desire to see that proper recognition be given to those practitioners in the past who were brushed aside has kept me focused on telling this story, especially when nobody else came forward to do so. In the end , the Indics lost the battle for supremacy in the Sciences to the Europeans in the Seventeenth century of the common era but at the same time the Indic can take comfort in the fact that the ancient Indic has left behind a huge cornucopia of treasures and a legacy of thinking rationally about problems and habits of thought that will endure long after the Pyramids decay into dust. He has taught us how to count, how to convert an angular measure into a linear one, how to use analysis in the service of mankind, how to systematically solve a problem so that each step could be executed precisely as he would have wanted it implemented even after the lapse of a thousand years the forerunner of a computer code that is readily interpreted. He taught us that Etymology should be part and parcel of an dictionary. He taught us the science of semantics. And he reduced the study of language to a set of grammatical rules, so that we need not place the words in any particular order. Most importantly he cautioned us not to get too cocky with our mathematical models and assume they were divinely inspired in contradistinction to the Greeks and their successors , and by implication that we should be ready to discard our models once their usefulness had worn of . In this connection . it is relevant to recall the remarks that the preeminent French historian of science Pierre Duhem makes with respect mathematical models. Duhem classifies models into 2 categories one in which the models can be regarded as convenient fictions devised by mathematicians to aid in making 48

calculations, and the second which aims to describe the fundamental nature of the physical laws needed to describe the motions of celestial bodies. To get into the distinction between these two categories is an interesting exercise, but the point I wished to make is that the Indic did not negate the possibility of there being ontological principles that need to be enunciated simply because he has a mathematical model that works. In that respect he was already showing sufficient sophistication in recognizing the distinction between a solution satisfying one or more necessary conditions to one which has to satisfy both necessary and sufficient conditions. It is a matter of great pride for the Indians, they never resorted to the underhanded approach of the west whether it was in dealing with matters of real estate, war or the purloining of intellectual property, nor did they indulge in the officially sanctioned savagery and butchery of the West which was replete with egregious acts such as the Inquisition , the genocide of the natives of Meso America , the pogroms of eastern Europe, and the massive pogroms of civilians instituted by the colonial authority in the Gangetic Valley after the 1857 Anglo Indian war and finally the wars initiated by the European and mostly fought between themselves were the most bloody wars in human history. If the Occidental had applied the same criteria in 1857 as in the Nuremburg trails after World War II , the conduct of the British officers in 1857 would have been found to be beyond the pale of civilized conduct and these sorry specimens of humanity , such as the infamous Colonel Neill, who was subsequently promoted for this very same conduct to Brigadier Neill, would have been summarily found guilty and hanged from the nearest tree a treatment that he meted out indiscriminately to countless Indian civilians whose only crime was that they had a dark skin and were not of British Nationality. Finally, it is a legacy of the eclectic character of ancient Hindu thought that valued all life forms and that no Indian savant was beheaded or even threatened to be beheaded on the pretext that his scientific findings violated prevailing traditions and beliefs. We are confident that the reader who approaches this topic with an open mind will be convinced that the Origins provides a true account of the computational sciences in Ancient India and its pioneering spirit in the ancient era.
Here are my thoughts on this issue
2. WHAT SHOULD THE STANCE OF THE INDIC BE IN THE FACE OF SUCH A DETERMINED ASSAULT BY THE OCCIDENTAL
To capitulate to such a determined assault without considering the consequences of such an action would be a highly irresponsible action that would be devoid of elementary qualities such as courage. And
But as I have already remarked to walk away from such a battle is anrya justam While devising a strategy to counter this civilizational assault, he should simultaneously take stock of where he is at in his own life and make sure that he is not exhibiting signs of cognitive dissonance, which would undermine his belief in his own self that he can make difference. In this instance cognitive dissonance manifests itself in 49
A. While I hesitate to prescribe what others should do steeped as I am in the fundamental belief that every human (I can extend this argument to all life forms) being is fundamentally divine and imbued with same potential for achieving a transcendental approach to life, so who am i to arrogate upon myself the presumption that I have the wisdom to tell others what to do?
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the form of contradictory positions that the Indic adopts. Let me give one example of a cognitive dissonance that I have observed the Indic indulges in. The Indic rarely praises another contemporary Indic in an unqualified manner in public and even if he does so, he rarely uses superlatives . This situation is to be distinguished from a purely obsequious situation where the Indic is effusive about the other person he is addressing. This was first brought to my attention by my Uncle , the late Sri Kappagantula Ramesam when he remarked to me that an Arab does not like to see another Arab praised effusively. Later when I pondered on this statement, I realized that it is a quality that is unfortunately a characteristic of large number of Indians. It manifests itself in many ways. The most common manifestation of this characteristic is that the Indian spends less time clapping at the end of any event (less than 10 seconds) , whether it is a musical performance or a talk. Successful Indian authors will rarely quote other Indians. Little do they realize that they are behaving in exactly the same manner that the occidental is behaving They have to do better than that in order to distinguish themselves from the very people they are criticizing. There is another more compelling reason for Indians to quote other Indians, because if they do not quote other Indians they are sending the message that there are no Indians worth quoting. This characteristic of the modern Indic, which can be attributed to poor self esteem (I am not OK, so since I am the best among all Indians, you must be worse than not OK) Is most certainly the result of being treated as second class citizens in our own land by a succession of barbarians (any people that considers it OK to attack another country in an unprovoked manner is barbarian and automatically forfeits the right to be considered a civilized Individual ). This is an important lacuna in his character that the Indic has to overcome , in order to be taken seriously by the global community It is important for the Indic to publicly commit to an ethical code of conduct by developing his own set of core values. I give below a set of core values which I adhere to , merely for illustrative purposes. The Santana dharma is not a one size fits all tradition but it is one that is finely tuned to each individual Nr 27. TABLE 3 NAMES OF INDIC SAVANTS SORTED ALPHABETICALLY 1. Achyuta Pirati (c. 1550 CE-1621 CE) 2. Al Biruni, although not from India, he spent a good part of his life in the subcontinent and made himself familiar with a vast number of subjects of relevance to the life of the Indic during his era. 3. Allanrya Sri, wrote commentary on Srya Siddhnta in Telugu, in Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai 4. Amaredhya, son of Gosvamin, author of Krika of Surya Siddhanta 5. pastamba, author of Sulva Stra, circa 2000 BCE 6. ryabhaa (476 CE - 550 CE.) or 2764 BCE(appears implausible) but currently accepted date of 476 CE is highly improbable 7. ryabhaa A1a (author of ryabhaa Siddhnta) ? 8. ryabhaa, A1b (author of ryabhaya of Kusumapura) Born in Asmka , A1b = or not=A1a 9. ryabhaa II ( author of Mahsiddhnta) 10. AsuraMaya or Mysura, apocryphal (?) author of Srya Siddhnta 11. Bakl Manuscript 12. Baudhyana ( 2000 BCE)
50

13. Bhadrabhu (. seventh, eighth, or ninth century CE) wrote Bhadrabhu Sahiti. A Jaina Sage at Rajagrha during the reign of Senajit. Probably the same Bhadrabhu who led the Jainas to Shrvana Belgola in Karnataka. BhaktiSiddhnta Sarasvati Thakura (1874- 1936), author of the Grahagranitdyaya commentary on Siddhnta Siromani, Bharthari, considered to be the father of semantics( by Saussure) Melpathur Nryaa Bhattathiri Bhskara ( 629 CE) resident of Vallabhi country. Astronomer familiar with Gujarat and Asmka (in the upper Godvari river valley). Bhskara was one of the foremost followers of ryabhaa Bhskara II (1114-c. 1185, Bhskarchrya son of Mahewara) Bhatta Utpala of Kashmir (. 966-969 CE) wrote the commentary on Srya Siddhnta. He wrote a large number of commentaries on Varhamihra and others as well as authored independent treatises. Three of his commentaries have verses at the end indicating the dates on which they were composed. King Bhoja, author of Rajamrganka, coronation during 646 CE Bhishma Pitamaha, author of Paitamaha Siddhnta ?, Paitamaha Siddhnta is incorporated in Visnu Dharmottara Pura, and not available elsewhere Bhutivesnu son of Devaraja, circa 12th century CE? ,commentary on AB Bhudara (1572 CE) wrote commentary on Srya Siddhnta Brahma ( author of Brahma Siddhnta ), same as Brahmagupta ? Brahmadeva son of Chandrabuddha 1092 CE Brahmagupta (c. 598 to 670 CE) , son of Jinugupta , author of Brahmasphuta Siddhnta, translated into Arabic @ 750 CE Brihaddeshi Changadeva ( 1205) Chandra Prajnpati, 5th century BCE , title of Jaina text Chakradhra, 1550-1650, (Godavari), Yantra-chintamani. Chandeshvara. 12th century Chandraekhara Simha or Chandraekhara Smanta, 1835 CE, the last of the traditional astronomers of India Chintamani Dikita , 1736-1811,Golananda (1800) Misc. Damodara, son of Paramevara and guru of Nlakaa Somasutvan (aka Somayj) also wrote Bhatattulya (1470 CE?) Dasaballa (son of Vairochana) 1055 CE Deva (Deva chrya) , wrote Karana Ratna Drghatamas, prolific composer of Vedic Madalas , makes the first mention of wheel of heaven of 360o divided into 12 equal parts. Appeared to have a very dry sense of humor. He coined the phrase Biting the dust as another euphemism for Kicking the bucket Divakara. 1606 CE. father of Narasimha, author of Prauda Manorama, commentary on Kesavas Jtaka Paddhati Garga 51
14. 15. 16. 17.
18. 19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39.
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Ganesha Daivajna I (1505 CE son of Lakshmi and Kesava)) Ganesha Daivajna II (great grandson of Ganesha Daivajna I(1600 CE) Gangdhara Gangesha Upadhyaya Ghatigopa Govinda Bhatta Govindaswami (c. 800-850) obtained more accurate Sine tables, Mahbhskariya Bhaya Halayudha (fl. 975) Haridatta (circa 850 CE) wrote Grahachara Nibhandana Hema, 15th cent. , (Gujarat), Kasa-yantra, Cylindrical Sundial. Hemachandra Sri (b. 1089) Hemachandra Jaganath Pandit (fl. 1700) Jagannatha Samrat Jaisimha or Jaisingh II(1786- 1843 CE) virtual ruler of the Mughal rump empire after the sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah, the Turkish ruler of Iran who carried way anything that was not bolted down in 10 feet of concrete Jayadeva (1000 CE) Jnnarja fl1425 or 1503 CE Jyehadeva of KERALA (circa 1500 CE?) author of Yukti bha Kakalaka Bhatti (1530 aka ) wrote Siddhnta Tattva viveka Kamalakara (1616) alt.1610 CE, son of Narasimha (belongs to Daivajna family tree Ktyyana , Author of Sulva Stras Kesava Daivajna (1496 1507 CE), son of Kamalakara of the Kauika Gotra, and the pupil of Vaidyanatha, residing at Nandigrama. His sons were Ananta (fl.1534 CE), Ganesha (b.1507 CE) and Rama ( Kotikalapudi Kodandarama (1807-1893) of the Telugu country alternate (1854 CE ) son of Venkateswara Yajwan Ka Daivajna Kadesa Kumarajva, (344 CE 413 CE) son of a Indian Brhmaa and a Kuching princess translated a number of texts including the Vednga and transmitted Astronomical knowledge to China Lagadha, author of Vedga Jyotia (1300 CE 1861 CE) Lakshmidasa , son of Vachaspati Misra Lakshmidasa Daivajna Lalla or Lallacharya son of Bhatta Trivikrama, (ca. 638 to 768 CE) . We do not know the exact date of his birth. Wrote the SDVT Latadeva , pupil of ryabhaa lb Lokavibhaga (Jaina text) Mdhava (son of Virupaka of the Telugu country) Mdhava of Sagamagrma in Kerala (1340 to 1425 CE) laid the foundations of Calculus, including series expansions for a number of trig functions. Is regarded by common
55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.
62. 63. 64. 65.
66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.
52

74. 75. 76. 77. convention as the founder of the Kerala School of Astronomy Mahdevan (son of Bandhuka) Mahdevan, wrote Venvaroham Mahdevan son of Parasurma Mahraja Sawai Jai Singh , 1688-1743,Yantra-prakara,Yantra-raja-racana ,Misc., Astrolabe, Entries in bold have been given a more complete treatment in chapter XI Mahvira (Mahvirchrya) ( 850 CE) wrote the first book that was solely on MATHEMATICS. THE FIRST TIME WE SEE SUCH A LEVEL OF ABSTACTION Mahvira , founder of Jainism, author of Srya (?) and Mahvira of the Digambara sect Mahendra Sri (1349 CE), pupil of Madana Sri, wrote Yantraraja, a treatise on the Astrolabe in Sanskrit. Malayagiri, Jain Monk from Gujarat , likely author of Srya Malikrjuna Sri , 1178 CE, name suggest Telugu country, wrote 2 commentaries in Telugu as well as in Sanskrit Mnava, author of Sulva Stra Manjula (930 CE) Mathukumalli V. Subbarao Melpathur Nryaa Bhattathiri Munivara (17th century) author of Nagesh Daivajna (son of Shiva Daivajnya) (1619 CE) Narasimha Daivajna (son of Ka Daivajna) 1586 CE Nryaa Pandit (fl. 1350) Nryaa (c. 1500-1575) Nryaa Bhattathiri Ayana Sukhopadhyaya(1730) translated Al Tsis Arabic Recension of the Spherics by Theodosius of Bithunia Nlakaa Somayj or Nlakaa Somasutvan (1443 CE to 1543 CE) of Kelallur, son of Jatavedas, Bhatta, following the Ashvalyana Stra of the RV wrote Aryabhatiyabhasya, 1977 (Available in Library of Congress) Trivandrum series. Pupil of Parameswaras son, Damodara, advocate of DrgGaita system. Proposed a partial Heliocentric system, where he asserted that the inferior planets (Venus and Mercury) revolved around the Sun Nisanku - son of Venkataka Sastri (source, sourcebook KVS) Nityananda (circa 1639)court Astronomer of Shah Jahan (1627-1658) Author of Siddhnta Singhu, a Saskta translation of Zij I Shah Jahani compiled by Fariduddin Munajim Padmanabha son of Narmada (same as Paramevara?) 1400 CE, author of Yantra-Kiranavali developed an instrument ,Astrolabe, Dhruva-Brhmaa- yantra, Panduranga Swami Pini Paramevara (1360-1455 CE) alt.1380 1460 CE, a Namputiri of Vataserri in Kerala, founder of DrgGaita school Parara circa 3000 BCE 53
78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.
95.
96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.
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Pavaluri Mallana Patodi Pingala Prabhkara (pupil of ryabhaa I, 525 CE? Prashastidhara (fl. 958) Chaturveda Prthudaksvamin (fl. 850), commentary on Brahmasphuta Siddhnta , Just as grammarians employ fictitious entities, such as Prakrti, pratyaya, Agama, lopa, vikra, etc to decide on the established real word forms, and just as Vaidyas employ tubers to demonstrate surgery, one has to understand and feel the content that it is in the same way that the astronomers postulate measures of the earth etc., and models of motion of the planets in Manda and ghra-pratimadalas for the sake of accurate predictions In other words, a Model is a representation of reality but not reality itself. Do not fall in love with your model, is the constant refrain of Indic astronomers. Putumana Somayj (c. 1660-1740) Rajagopal Rama Daivajna , son of Madhusdhana Daivajna Ramaka Aradhya Ranganatha son of Narasimha Daivajna (1643 CE). commentary on Srya Siddhnta Smanta Chandraekhara Simha (see also Chandraekhara Sinha) akalya, 821 CE Sankaranryana (869 CE) wrote Sankaranryanyam Sankara Variyar (1500 1600 CE) pupil of Jyehadeva Sankara Varman (fl. 1800) Satnanda, end of 11th century, wrote calendrical work Bhaswti, based on Varhamihra s Srya- Siddhnta. Somevara circa 11 century CE Sphujidvaja Sridhara (fl. 900) Sridharchrya Srinivasa Rmnujan (1900) Sripati (son of Nagadeva, 999 CE) Sumati of Nepal (800 CE), wrote 2 works called Sumati tantra and Sumati-karana Sryadeva Yajwan (1191 CE of Gangaikonda Cholapuram in South India) 61 km from Thanjavur wrote commentary on the ryabhattiya Tamma Yajwa, 1599 CE, commentary on Srya Siddhnta, son of Malla Yajwa and Venkatamba, wrote commentary (in Telugu?) Trikkantiyur - Udaya Divakaran (1073 CE), commentator of the Laghu Bhskariya Umsvti (fl. 150 BCE.) Vararuchi. There are at least 3 Vararuchis mentioned. One of them was an astronomer and a contemporary of Varhamihra Varhamihra (son of dityadsa), (c. 505-c. 558) Vaia
109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.
128. 129. 130. 131. 132.
133. 134.
54

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. Vatevara (fl 882 - 904 CE), author of Vatevara Siddhnta ,follows ryaPaka and Saura Paksa Vijayanandi Viddana 14TH Century Virasena Virasena Acharya Virupaka Sri of the Telugu country Vu Daivajna (son of Divakara Daivajna) same as Visvanatha? Visvanatha Daivajna (son of Divakara Daivajna) 1578 CE Vriddha Garga Yjnavalkya (author of atapatha Brhmaa and Brihat ranyaka U) 3000 BCE. The BU constitutes in fact, the last 6 Chapters of the atapatha Brhmaa Yallaiya (1482 CE of Skandasomeswara of the Telugu country) Yska Yatavrisham Acharya Yativabha (Jain monk, 6th century ) Yavanevara (see Sphujidvaja) ca. 200 BCE
APPENDIX A THE REASONS FOR MY SIGNIFICANT INTEREST IN THIS FIELD
My research in the field of history of the sciences has been a highly satisfying experience for me. In so doing, I have learnt a lot about the Ancient Indic and other civilizations of high antiquity and his way of life. And yet we are still in the infancy of trying to decipher the Ancient Indic past and we have much to learn and I dare say that is true also of other Great Civilizations of high antiquity. I will first make some remarks on why I wrote this book. But before I do so I wish to share with the reader how my interest gravitated to this subject. It was during the late 60s and early 70s that I went back to graduate school after a 5-year stint in industry in India, West Germany, and Canada. My employment at the time I went back to School was not in jeopardy and I had completed a highly productive period where I had developed the first finite element computer code to evaluate the structural integrity of rotors used in aero engines. This was in 1967 when such codes were not available commercially and in fact the theory behind the method was only imperfectly understood by a small group of practitioners. The subject fell under the general rubric of Engineering Mechanics. The reason I went back to school was that I felt I had to augment my knowledge in the field of mechanics. During my Graduate Studies at Waterloo in Canada I came in contact with leading practitioners in the field of Engineering Mechanics. I developed an interest in the history of mechanics starting from Greece to Leonhard Euler and the development of Variational methods that would utilize the Principles of Conservation. In fact I give a brief account of the history of mechanics, especially the Global principles that are used to determine the equations, in my thesis. I read a lot about the history of mechanics, and one book that made a deep impression on me was Essays in the History of Rational Mechanics by Clifford 55
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Truesdell. From that point onwards I have maintained an abiding interest in the history of Mechanics and Mathematics88, since many of the practitioners in the field of mechanics were also first rate Mathematicians, a state of affairs that lasted virtually till the time of Hnri Poincar, arguably the last of the great mathematical savants of Europe, who was knowledgeable in a broad range of topics in the field of Mathematics.
The Origins belongs to the genre which seeks to expose the actions of a very small group of people among the elite of the western civilization that have taken it upon themselves to pronounce that the Indic past in the sciences was of no consequence. It belongs in the same category as Seymour Herschs book on Target, and Ashley Tellis book on Indias Emerging Nuclear Posture. To describe the sequence of events needs good journalistic skills and one does not have to be a World renowned Cosmologist to unravel this story. That may very well be, but it does not follow that I am invoking the privilege of writing as a Georg Gamow or as an Isaac Asimov about a very wide field of subjects just for the fun of writing. Mechanics is a field I have a passion for , for a very long time. It is my curiosity about how ancient minds worked in the absence of everything that we take for granted. In my graduate school I truly lived up to the adage that in order to achieve mastery of the field one must become a good philosopher, both in the limited sense of the word in western philosophy, as a lover of wisdom and knowledge as well as the Darshanic sense of the world where one transforms oneself into a being that is of this world while at he same time be able to study it from a point not in it. I set myself the task of studying mechanics from an inertial reference frame of reference which is invariant with respect to the coordinate axes chosen. As I have said elsewhere , the foundations of this work were laid when I went to the Graduate school in the Solid Mechanics division at the University of Waterloo at Canada. Solid Mechanics comprises the study of the motion and response of any object that cannot be classified as a fluid or a gas, in a customary environment under the action of an external stimulus. My thesis , in search of a topic not already subscribed to , was a cutting edge work on the Optimal structural forms when subjected to forces to both static and dynamical loads. Remember that originality of the research work was a mandatory prerequisite for awarding the PhD With a degree of hubris that can only be ascribed to the callowness of youth, I set out to generalize on the ontological principles that needed to be satisfied if the structure or object under consideration would qualify in order to earn the sobriquet of the adjective Optimal. It is only years later that I realized that my work was well cited, despite the disappearance of the aerospace field as a potential consumer of my product and means of earning a livelihood, and that when pursued over a greater period of time would have been the preferred choice for achieving my goals. I mention my thesis work only because some publishers have raised the issue of my not having adequate credentials to write such a book on Astronomy and Mathematics. They obviously are not familiar with my background in Celestial Mechanics, that I acquired in Graduate school , a topic that lies at the very core of astronomy. In fact the computational aspects of astronomy are very similar mathematically to what we come across in engineering today. There is one thing that the astronomer in Ancient India had in common with the modern engineer and that was his title. In ancient times he was known as a Ganaka, which is not very dissimilar to my title of Berechnungs Ingeneur at Siemens Schuckertwerke in Mulheim Ruhr , Germany , my first assignment out of India and as a Analytical Engineer at Canadian Pratt and Whitney in Montreal, Canada 56
APPENDIX B MY CREDENTIALS FOR DOING THE RESEARCH AND WRITING THE BOOK

I made good use of my time at Waterloo , as I was among a small group of candidates in all of Canada to be awarded the prestigious PIER (Post Industrial Experience Research Fellowship) by the National Research Council of Canada, which freed me of having to earn my way as a teaching assistant saddled with very time consuming teaching and grading tasks. I took the time to read about Philosophy and to ponder over the eternal quest of Man to come to grips with his environment and I tried to come up with my own answers as to the meaning of existence . I was also plagued by recurring questions as to how the ancient managed to ferret out the secrets of the universe, without the benefit of electricity, light, paper, a formal learning environment and the companionship of other savants. As I was researching the history of mathematics, it dawned on me that a lot of the numerical techniques used in Engineering had their antecedents in the work of ancient Indic mathematicians. Until then I was focusing on Greek mathematics. But apart from the work of the pseudo Euclid of Alexandria (who used little or no Algebra) and the work on conic sections by Apollonius, I did not find the Greek effort particularly rich in algorithms. It took many years for me to realize that most of the Algebra, Analytical geometry and Trigonometry, we deal with in High school and even at an undergraduate level, did not have its roots in the Occident. My desire to learn more about the Indic contribution continued to be hampered by lack of adequate texts on history of ancient Mathematics in the English language. While the situation was slightly better in French and German, the trail was very cold by the time you went back beyond 1400 CE and could not pick up any of the threads in the work of the Greeks. I came to the realization that there was very little extant of the Greek work in mathematics and this is even truer in the case of Astronomy. No European text could explain in a satisfactory manner why there was no progress in the sciences in Europe between the beginning of the Common Era and 1400 CE other than saying that the Church played a big part in structuring the content and extent of education. What is particularly galling is that the Occidental admits that all Greek work was lost to Europe, but he credits the Indic with getting their hands on the Greek work, even though these works were presumably lost at a very early time. It seems to us an even more likely scenario was that whatever Greek texts existed at that time became rapidly obsolete and were no longer reproduced because there was no longer any need for them. The stonewalling of the Indic contribution has strong parallels in the effort to emasculate the Indic tradition, and it is only after I read extensively in the Indology literature, did I realize that the whole pattern of denigration of the Indic past was a concerted effort to reduce the Indic civilization, at best to an also ran category. The main reason for my interest in the field of Astronomy, apart from my life-long interest in he history of the sciences is that the real story of the Indic contribution to Astronomy has yet to be told. Few books give a coherent account of the Indic odyssey as it unfolds from the mists of antiquity to the pioneering work of Astrophysicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar on the nature of the universe. If they do mention it at all, it is merely to say that they borrowed everything from Western historians of Mathematics (e.g. Toomer, Van der Waerden, Otto Neugebauer, or David Pingree) as their authoritative source. Rarely will they mention a Primary source in Sanskrit, because they are not familiar with the literature in Sanskrit and they do not trust the Indians to tell the true story. They prefer to get the story from an Occidental who may not have read a single book in its Sanskrit original rather than get it from Indian sources89. The net result is a book filled with clichs where the content is already degraded from multiple levels of interpretation and inadvertent filtering of the original source. 57
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The Origins is primarily a book on the origins of Astronomy as the title aptly suggests and in writing it I have been to some of the places, I have listed in Appendices I and K of the book such as the British Library, London, cole Franaise d'Extrme-Orient in Paris, the School of African and Oriental studies, London, the Columbia University Library in New York, The Travancore University Library in Thiruvananthapuram, The Adyar Library in Chennai, the Bhandarkar Oriental research institute in P, and I have had access to the excellent collection at University of California at Berkeley. My thanks goes out to all of these institutions for maintaining such a vast collection of books on Ancient India. Again actions speak louder than words, to those who would minimize the Indic civilization, my question to you is why spend all these resources on a worthless civilization But there was one institution that did not give me access to their stacks and that was the Boden Library at Oxford. I pleaded with them that I had come along way and that if I did not satisfy their bureaucratic requirements (that I should have obtained a prior document attesting to my bonafides from a Professor at a UK ) it was more out of incompetence rather than defiance of their rules. I informed them that a search on Google would satisfy them that I was who I said I was. But the more they looked at my Google citations, the more adamant they became that they would not let me in. I am certain that had Sir Isaac Newton been there he would have recognized in me a kindred soul and a lover of mechanics and for all his secretiveness would have welcomed me into the hallowed portals of the library. But that is an impossibility, because Sir Isaac was from Cambridge. So, it came to be that I missed the opportunity to tell Sir Isaac that I was probably the person best suited to write the Origins. My quest was in search of the latest vulgate text of the primary sources. I have built up a sizable library of my own in Sanskrit, English, Hindi, German and French in the areas of History of Mathematics and Astronomy. I have decided to emphasize the evolutionary nature of this Indic effort and have called this Paper THE ARYABHATA NILAKANTA SMANTA EVOLUTION, AND HOW IT SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY, in honor of all the unsung heroes who contributed mightily to this effort, as described in my 625 page book The Origins of Astronomy, the Calendar and time.
28. THE CORE VALUES

58

A. A.Macdonell ............................................................. 28 Abbasid ........................................................................... 50 Acyuta Pirati(c. 1550 CE-1621 CE) ................ 44 Ahargana ....................................................................... 27 Al Kitab al Majisti ................................................ 29, 50 Al Maamun ................................................................... 50 Alok Kumar .............................................................. 3, 50 Anaximander, ............................................................... 15 Andalusia .......................................................................... 3 Anurdh ........................................................................ 40 pastamba .................................................................... 44 Aristarchus of Samos ................................................ 15 Arjabar ............................................................................... 4 ryabhaa ......................................... 35, 44, 46, 47 31, Astronomy ...................................................................... 26 AsuraMaya .................................................................... 44 Bakshali Manuscript ................................................. 44 Balamys Al Qualuzi ............................................... 29 Baudhyana ................................................................. 44 Bayt al Hikmah ........................................................... 29 Bentley ............................................................................ 18 Bernoulli ......................................................................... 18 Bhadrabhu .................................................................. 44 Bhdrapad .................................................................. 40 Bharthari ..................................................................... 44 Bhskara ................................................................. 44, 45 Bhatta Utpala .............................................................. 45 Bhattotpala of Kashmir ........................................... 45 Bhishma Pitamaha .................................................... 45 Bhutivesnu son of Devaraja ................................... 45 Brahma ............................................................ 27, 45, 47 Brahmagupta ......................................... 32, 35, 42, 45 Brhmaa ............................................................... 47, 48 calendrical astronomy .............................. 10, 25, 26 Chaldeans .................................................................... 3, 4 Chandragupta ....................................................... 19, 24 Chandrasekhar, Subramanyan ............................... 7 CK Raju ..................................................... 26, 27, 29, 50 Claudius Ptolemy ................................................. 29, 50 Colebrooke ............................................................. 18, 28 Colonialism ...................................................................... 4 Darshanas ..................................................................... 15
29. INDEX
Dasaballa ....................................................................... 45 Dhruva ............................................................................ 47 eccentricity ................................................................... 31 Eratosthenes ................................................................ 15 Euclid ................................................................... 6, 16, 27 Eusebius ......................................................................... 16 Gerard of Cremona ....................................................... 3 Govindaswami ............................................................. 45 Guru ................................................................................. 29 Halayudha ..................................................................... 45 Haroun al Rashid ....................................................... 29 Hasta ............................................................................... 39 Hnri Poincar ............................................................... 6 Hipparchos or Hipparchus ..................................... 15 Hypatea .......................................................................... 27 Jacobi, Hermann, George ......................... 28, 39, 40 Jyeha ............................................................................. 40 Jyotia .............................................................................. 46 Khalif ............................................................................... 50 Kim Plofker ................................................................... 29 King Bhoja ..................................................................... 45 King Bhoja, author of Rajamrganka, ................ 45 Krittika ........................................................................... 39 Lagadha ......................................................................... 46 Lalla ................................................................................. 46 Laplace ............................................................................ 32 Law of Christian Discovery .................................... 10 Leibniz ............................................................................. 16 Leonhard Euler .................................................... 18, 19 Magha ............................................................................. 39 Mahvira ........................................................................ 46 Mnava ........................................................................... 47 Mathematics, ................................................................ 26 Megasthenes ................................................................. 24 Melpathur Nryana Bhattathiri ................ 44, 47 Mrigar, .................................................................... 39 Mla ................................................................................. 40 Murali Dhar Pahoja .................................................. 28 Nalanda ................................................................... 24, 25 Neugebauer ............................................. 13, 14, 15, 16 Newton ..................................................................... 15, 16
59
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Somaswara ................................................................... 48 Sphujidvaja ............................................................ 48, 49 ravaa .......................................................................... 40 Sridhara ......................................................................... 48 Sripati .............................................................................. 48 Sumati of Nepal .......................................................... 48 Tabaqut al-Umam ........................................................ 3 Takala ....................................................................... 24 terminus ante quem .................................................. 18 Thales of Miletus ......................................................... 15 Tycho Brahe ................................................................. 34 Udaya .............................................................................. 48 Umsvti ........................................................................ 48 Varhamihra .............................................................. 48 Vatevara ....................................................................... 48 Vedga ......................................................................... 24 Vijayanagar Empire .................................................. 28 Vikramla .............................................................. 24, 25 Whitney ................................................................... 18, 28 Yativrsabha .................................................................. 49 Yavanevara ................................................................. 49
Nlakaa .................................. 12, 32, 33, 34, 45, 47 Odntipura ............................................................. 24, 25 Pni .............................................................................. 47 Parampara .............................................................. 15, 17 Phlguni ......................................................................... 39 Pingree ....................................... 15, 18, 22, 26, 27, 29 Prabhakara ................................................................... 47 prajnpati ..................................................................... 45 Prashastidhara ............................................................ 47 Ptolemy ................... 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 25, 27, 29 3, Punarvasu ..................................................................... 39 Puras ................................................................... 19, 24 Pythagoras .................................................................... 25 Ri .................................................................................. 33 Revati ............................................................................... 40 Richard Courant .................................................. 16, 43 Rohii .............................................................................. 39 Said Al-Andalusi ............................................................. 3 Sandrocottus ................................................................ 19 Severus Sebokt ................................................................ 4 Sindhind ............................................................................ 4 Sir William Jones ................................................. 19, 23
W Brennand Hindu Astronomy p.320, chapter 15, 1988 Upon the antiquity of that (Hindu Astronomy) system it may be remarked, that no one can carefully study the information collected by various investigators and translators of Hindu works relating to Astronomy, without coming to the conclusion that long before the period when Grecian learning founded the basis of knowledge and civilization in the West90, India had its own store of erudition. Masterminds, in those primitive ages, thought out the problems presented by the ever-recurring phenomena of the heavens, and gave birth to the ideas, which were afterwards formed into a settled system for the use and benefit of succeeding Astronomers, mathematicians and Scholiasts, as well as for the guidance of votaries of religion. No system, no theory, no formula concerning those phenomena could possibly have sprung suddenly into existence, at the call or upon the dictation of a single genius. Far rather , is it to be supposed that little by little, and after many arduous labors of numerous minds, and many consequent periods passed in the investigation of isolated phenomena, a system could be expected to be formed into a general science concerning them.

30. NOTES
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1 The Italian Renaissance was the beginning of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement
in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The term renaissance is in essence a modern one that came into currency in the 19th century, in the work of historians such as Jacob Burckhardt. Although the origins of a movement that was confined largely to the literate culture of intellectual endeavor and patronage can be traced to the earlier part of the 14th century, many aspects of Italian culture and society remained largely Medieval; the Renaissance did not come into full swing until the end of the century. The word renaissance (Renascimento in Italian) means rebirth, and the era is best known for the renewed interest in the culture of classical antiquity after the period that Renaissance humanists labeled the Dark Ages. These changes, while significant, were concentrated in the elite, and for the vast majority of the population life was little changed from the Middle Ages. 2 An Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th-century Europe, that sought to mobilize the power of reason, in order to reform society and advance [1] knowledge. It promoted science and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and abuses in church and state. Originating about 16501700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (16321677),John Locke (16321704), Pierre Bayle (16471706), mathematician Isaac Newton (16431727) and historian Voltaire (16941778). The wide distribution of the printing press, invented in Europe in 1440, made possible the rapid dispersion of knowledge and ideas which precipitated the Enlightenment. Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as Enlightened Despotism. The Enlightenment flourished until about 17901800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force. i agree that Europe made strides and set itself up to become the pre-eminent power in Sciences and effectively overtook India. But it was also a dark period for the rest of the world including the Meso Americans who were decimated as a civilization . The eighteenth century was a bad century for india because for the first time in its history India was ruled by a group of people who had every intention to loot the country, with the intention of taking the wealth out of the country. Between 1770 and 1830 the transformation was complete. India went from 25% OF World GDP TO 2% and Britain did just the opposite. We feel it is in extremely bad taste for Europe to celebrate a period in which few of its leaders showed the slightest enlightenment towards the tragic consequences of their actions. The colonization of India was one of the major tragedies of this so called Enlightenment period resulting in the deaths of 50 million Indians. The British, who have been shielded from the more unsavory aspects of their empire by their rulers are proud of their Empire. But once they know the terrible cost that their Empire extracted from the Indic, they may well change their mind. 3 I am often asked what is the single most unique feature of Hinduism and I reply without much hesitation that it is to discover who you really are and the freedom to achieve your highest potential. There is no intermediary who plays the role of the prophet. The Guru plays the role of a mentor, explicating the choices available to the individual and the consequences of embracing each choice. As he reaches maturity, the individual is encouraged to seek his own answers and to rely less on others. 4 While there were other civilizations that embraced freedom of thought and behavior in the ancient era, it remains true today that the Prophetic faiths ( I am mainly referring to the 3 major faiths Judaism, Christianity and Islam ) have prevailed in large portions of the planet). While the Jewish religion has largely taken a more liberal view, than either Christianity or Islam, the basic tenet in each of these religions remains exclusivist . The Sanatana Dharma or the Dhrmik way is the only surviving civilization of the ancient era that remains proactively enthusiastic about embracing diversity. The Evangelistically oriented Christian take advantage of this golden opportunity which the Islamic world would never grant them while abusing the Sanatana Dharma in no uncertain terms.. 5 Neval ori in Eastern Turkey comes to mind 6 Abraham Maslows Self Actualized individual has obviously been influenced by the Vedantic concept of self realization. An explicit definition of self-actualization according to Maslow is "intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately of what is the organism itself...self-actualization is growth-motivated rather than deficiency-motivated." This explanation emphasizes the fact that self-actualization cannot normally be reached until other lower order necessities of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are satisfied. While Goldstein defined self-actualization as a driving force, Maslow uses the term to describe personal growth that takes place once lower order needs have been met, one corollary being that, in his opinion, "self-actualization...rarely happens...certainly in less than 1% of the
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adult population." The fact that "most of us function most of the time on a level lower than that of self-actualization" he called the psychopathology of normality. Common traits amongst people who have reached self-actualization are: They embrace reality and facts rather than denying truth. They are spontaneous. They are "focused on problems outside themselves." They "can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings, are similarly acceptant of others, and generally lack prejudice. I will shortly write a comparison of The relevant Vedantic concepts and Maslows hierarchy 7 Then, there is the small detail as to the identity of Ptolemy. Almost nothing is known about Claudius Ptolemy, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1966 edition, volume 18, and page 813. Then the Encyclopedia spins an elaborate tale of this individual, about whom very little is known. We will discuss him in greater detail in the chapter on comparative study of Greek and other astronomies. 8 In general we will use the sexagesimal system, because of the difficulty with fractions, and we shall follow out the multiplications and divisions Ptolemy, translated by R Catesby Taliaferro, Great Books of the Western World, vol.15, Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago , 1996., P.14, 9 Claudius Ptolemy called his work the , Megaly Syntaxis, Great System of Astronomy. It was translated by Al Thbit ibn Qurra circa CE 880 after the Khilafat of the 7th Abbasid Khalf Al Maamun and the name of the translation was Al Kitb al Majisti, the Greatest Book. In the early years after the translation into Latin from the Arabic in the late 11th century or early 12th century, even as late as CE 1515 it was known as the Arabo Latin translation. The direct translation from the Greek was available only in the 16th century, from a Vatican manuscript. One wonders why the Vatican took 16 centuries to find this manuscript. The premise here is that only the Vatican had the means, motive, and opportunity to control the dissemination of such a well known document. It is also a legitimate question to ask why the Almagest is always referred to as Ptolemys Almagest, when in fact he never wrote a book with such a title. 10 See CK Raju, Is Science Western in origin 3 The first significant effort at what the European terms the modern history of science is attributed to Pierre Duhem (1861- 1916). Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. See also To save the phenomena, an essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. OCLC 681213472. http://www.amazon.com/Pierre-Duhem-History-Philosophy-cience/dp/0872203085/ref=sr_1_1#reader_0872203085 12 Rgis Blachre Le Livre de la catgorie des Nations 13 aid Al-Andalusi Science in the Medieval World: "Book of the Categories of Nations" (History of Science Series) (Hardcover) translated by , Semaan I. Salem (Author), Alok Kumar (Editor) 14 Richter-Bernburg, Lutz (1987). id, the Toledan Tables, and Andalus Science. In From Deferent to Equant: A Volume of Studies in the History of Science in the Ancient and Medieval Near East in Honor of E. S. Kennedy, edited by David A. King and George Saliba, pp. 373401. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 500. 15 Nau, Franois, Journal Asiatique 3 (13) (1899): 56-101, 238-303. 16 Nau, Franois. (1910) Notes d'astronomie indienne. Journal Asiatique 10 Ser. 16, 209 - 228. Needham, J. (1959) Science and civilization in China vol. .. www.es.flinders.edu.au/~mattom/science+society/lecture6.html. Franois Nau (May 13, 1864 at Thiel September 2, 1931 at Paris) was a French Catholic priest, Mathematician and specialist in Syriac studies and other oriental languages. He published a great number of eastern Christian texts and translations for the first and often only time. 17 We will refer often to the book The Origins of Astronomy, the Calendar and Time, by the phrase The Origins. The adulatory remarks abut the Indic technology, are listed in Appendix E of the Origins. The remarks which we have collated from various sources but the primary source is from Smith and Karpinski The Hindu Arabic numerals reprinted by Forgotten Books. This is an extremely valuable book for the necessary forensic work which must
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accompany an investigation of this kind. Another useful book is that of Georges Ifrah on the Universal History of numbers 18 This essay is an adaptation of the Prologue to the Origins .I strongly recommend the purchase of the book by every Indian who is interested in the true history of the Indic People rather than the superficial treatments that are the norm in most books written by Englishmen and Europeans. My extensive reference list in appendix G has two lists of Primary and other sources on this topic and appendix H contains list of general interest books on history and current affairs in India, which is of contextual value in answering questions like who were the dynasties who were ruling India during periods when the great savants of India such as Panini, Patanjalis, Mahvira, Aryabhata, 19 Episteme, a system of understanding or a body of ideas which give shape to the knowledge of that time. We use the Term Vedic Episteme in the sense of the Prama, means of obtaining knowledge and Pram; the correct knowledge obtained through rigorous reasoning and includes such methods as Pratyaksha, Upamna, Anumna, Anupalabdhi, Arthpatti, and Upapatti. 20 No occidental would dare call him the first historian of science for fear of offending the Church, even if perchance he happened to be one of the very few who were liberal (neither the term nor the associated baggage associated with the use of this term would be recognized during the so called age of enlightenment. Heathens were considered beyond the pale of civilization and according to the law of Christian discovery. But the habit of denigrating non European and non Christian cultures so ingrained in the mindset of the European remains extant even today 21 id al-Andalus (1912). Kitb abaqt al-umam, edited by P. Louis Cheikho. Bierut: Imprimerie Catholique. French translation with notes by Rgis Blachre as Livre des catgories des nations. Paris: Larose, 1935. 22 (1985). Kitb abaqt al-umam, edited by ayt B _Alwn. Beirut. 23 Khan, M R., IJHS, 30(2-4), 1995 Tabaqut Al-Umam Of Qaldi Said Al-Andalusi (1029-1070 CE) 24 See for instance Berggren, J Lennart Mathematics in Medieval Islam in The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and Islam A sourcebook, ed. by Victor Katz 25 Vepa, K., The South Asia File, Original Publications, Delhi, 2009 26 Vepa, K. The Pernicious effects of the misinterpreted Greek Synchronism, paper presented at the ICIIH 2009, available as vol.5 of the series on Distortions In Indian History from Lulu.com 27 See Glo-pedia 28 Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, (1879-1939) initiates the first extensive excavations at Harappa in 1920 under the general direction of John Marshall. 29 Vepa, K., op.cit. 30 Named after David Frawley see for instance In search of the cradle of civilization, Wheaton, Illinois, Quest Books, 1995 31 ONHAMA, p.2 32 Under various theological and legal doctrines formulated during and after the Crusades, non-Christians were considered enemies of the Catholic faith and, as such, less than human. Accordingly, in the bull of 1452, Pope Nicholas directed King Alfonso to "capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ," to "put them into perpetual slavery," and "to take all their possessions and property." Acting on this papal privilege, Portugal continued to traffic in African slaves, and expanded its royal dominions by making "discoveries" along the western coast of Africa, claiming those lands as Portuguese territory. Thus, when Columbus sailed west across the Sea of Darkness in 1492 - with the express understanding that he was authorized to "take possession" of any lands he "discovered" that were "not under the dominion of any Christian rulers" - he and the Spanish sovereigns of Aragon and Castile were following an already well-established tradition of "discovery" and conquest. [Thacher:96] Indeed, after Columbus returned to Europe, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal document, the bull Inter Cetera of May 3, 1493, "granting" to Spain - at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella - the right to conquer the lands which Columbus had already found, as well as any lands which Spain might "discover" in the future. Eventually the law of Christian Discovery was adopted by the USA in 1823, in order to give legal sanction to the theft of land from the Native Americans. This law of Christian discovery included the right to claim discoveries made in the sciences in the conquered and colonized lands. Thus it was that genocide and theft of intellectual property was sanctioned by the highest authorities in the occident. 33 See for instance, James Evans, The history and practice of Ancient Astronomy, Oxford University press,
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New York,1998 34 David Pingree, Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (CESS) five volumes, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia,1970. 35 Space considerations preclude us from doing equal justice to all traditions, in which case we will have to restrict ourselves to point to other treatments of the subject mentioned in our extensive bibliography in appendix G,H 36 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Wrttemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. His influence has been widespread on writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (F. H. Bradley, Sartre, Hans Kng, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, Karl Marx), and his detractors (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling). He introduced, arguably for the first time in philosophy, the idea that History and the concrete are important in getting out of the circle of Philosophia Perennis, i.e., the perennial problems of philosophy. He also stressed the importance of the other in the coming to be of self-awareness (see master-slave dialectic). We are primarily concerned here with his ideas on Indic studies. The invasion theory of Indian History was first postulated by Hegel in his Philosophy of History that India lacked historical agency and that India was a cultural cul de sac from which nothing worthwhile ever emanated. It strikes every one, in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products, and those of the profoundest order of thought, has no History. Hegel, G. W. F. (1956). The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, New York, Dover Publications, Inc. 37 It is relevant to point out that the large majority of historians of India who were born in Britain, were Civil servants either of the East India Company or members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who ruled India on behalf of Whitehall and the India office in London They had neither the accountability nor the motivation to tell the true history of India, and we understand that such an ethical code of conduct is perhaps too high a burden to bear for the men who were entrusted to keep the empire in Britains possession for a long time to come. While we understand the compulsions under which they wrote their books on History, we feel that such a mercenary association automatically disqualifies them from being classified as dispassionate scholars interested only in the truth. 38 The principle we are adhering to, in making such a distinction is that it is not merely sufficient to entertain the thought of violence but one must publicly advocate, in order to qualify for applying such a pejorative to an individual. 39 Otto Neugebauer A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy Springer-Verlag, 1975ISBN038706995X, 9780387069951Length 9780387069951. Length 1456 pages. A limited preview of this extremely expensive book is available in Google Books .on the web. 40 Bertrand Russell was contrite enough to change the title of his work on Philosophy, to History of western Philosophy, when it was pointed out to him that his book was devoid of any mention of the vast Hindu, Buddhist and Jain literature 41 Kosla Vepa The South Asia File Low Priced Books, Delhi 27 Kosla Vepa The Pernicious Effects of a Misinterpreted Greek Synchronism Paper presented at the ICIH2009 , Available at Lulu.com 42 Otto Neugebauer The Exact Sciences in Antiquity first published in 1957 by Brown university press, republished by Dover publications, New York, NY, in 1967 43 Parampara (Sanskrit: #, parampara) denotes a succession of teachers and disciples in traditional Indian culture. It is also known as guru-iya parampara, succession from guru to disciple. In the parampara system, knowledge (in any field) is passed down (undiluted) through successive generations. The Sanskrit word literally means an uninterrupted series or succession.[1] In the traditional residential form of education, the iya remains with his guru as a family member and gets the education as a true learner. In some traditions there is never more than one active master at the same time in the same guruparamparya (lineage). The fields of knowledge taught may include, for example, spiritual, artistic (music or dance) or educational. See for instance the Glo-pedia in Appendix A 44 It is important to remind our self that Euclid to a greater extent than Ptolemy is a very elusive character in Greek history and it is not known with any degree of certainty whether such a person really existed and even less is known about his chronology. See the work of CK Raju documented in CFM 45 Raju, CK, Is Science western in Origin, Page 9. For a more comprehensive treatment we strongly recommend a detailed study of The Cultural Foundations of Mathematics (CFM) by the same author. The complete citation is
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available in the Appendix under Primary and other sources. A massive amount of forensic research has gone into the writing of this book, most of which is not easily available elsewhere. 46 See Appendix O, regarding the Indian penchant for large numbers 47 The Almagest by R Catesby Taliaferro, Book I, Chapter 10, P.14. In general we shall use the sexagesimal system because of the difficulty of fractions, and we shall follow out the multiplications and divisions, aiming always at such an approximation as will leave no error worth considering as far as the accuracy of the senses is concerned. The translator claims that sexagesimal arithmetic is easier to do than decimal arithmetic. I fail to see why that is the case. If Ptolemy could not do fractions, he is unlikely to have found that it is easier to deal with 53/60 vs. 7/10. 48 American Indologist. One of Salisbury's students at Yale, William Dwight W hitney (1827-1901) went on to become the foremost Sanskrit scholar in the continental US, having studied in Berlin under alleged German scholars as Bopp and Weber. One would have thought that to become a Sanskrit scholar, one should study under the great masters and pundits of India. But like Weber, Whitney became one of the principal detractors of the notion that anything worthwhile came out of India especially in the field of Astronomy. Whitney became a full professor of Sanskrit language and literature at Yale in 1854, wrote his classic Sanskrit Grammar (1879), and was the doyen of Indologists of his period. Like many in the occident, who considered themselves expert in Sanskrit, it is doubtful he could ever chant a single loka in his life or was capable of conversing or writing a decent essay in the Sanskrit language. This raises the question of the credentials needed to usurp the title of Sanskrit scholar. What should be the minimum competency that one should demonstrate before one calls oneself a Sanskrit scholar? American Indologists have generally toed the line that Whitney first pursued and have not deviated from the Eurocentric, presumably because racial considerations predominated above all else. One wonders why in the face of such contempt for a people, these gentleman continued to study the heritage of the Indic people. The answer lies in their assumption that Sanskrit was not autochthonous to the subcontinent but was brought into India by the mythical Indo European or as they were known then by the name ryans. They not only appropriated the Sanskrit heritage as their own but denied that it was native to the geography of the Indian subcontinent. This is a direct consequence of the loss of control by the Indics of their own historical narrative. No civilization or peoples can afford this luxury, if they wish to retain the authentic narrative of their own heritage See also Whitney (1874) and Whitney (1895) 49 "John Bentley: Hindu Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ., Delhi 1990, p.xxvii;" By his [Playfair's] attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the pretended sanction of antiquity. Nay, his aim goes still deeper, for by the same means he endeavors to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction." So this is the argument that prevailed. Hindu astronomy could not be believed not because it was flawed, but that it would overturn the orthodoxy of the Christian church. So much for the scientific temper of western scholarship and their much vaunted blather about the importance that they attached to the scientific approach and the love of proof they inherited from the Greeks. In doing so, the Occidental chose to abandon all pretence of scholarship and with few exceptions preferred to succumb to his own prejudices. 50 In 1925 The Professor of Indian Studies at the German University of Prague, Moriz Winternitz (1863-1937), denounced Schopenhauer for his admiration of the Upanishads with the following words - Yet I believe, it is a wild exaggeration when Schopenhauer says that the teaching of the Upanishads represents the fruit of the highest human knowledge and wisdom and contains almost superhuman conceptions the originators of which can hardly be regarded as mere mortals... On the subject of the Vedas, Winternitz had this to say -It is true, the authors of these hymns rise but extremely seldom to the exalted flights and deep fervor of, say, religious poetry of the Hebrews. Not even scholars seem to be immune to the quality of lack of graciousness when it comes to recognition of the work of other cultures and civilizations that seems to pervade the Occident. 51 The famous German Indologist Albrecht Weber (1825-1901) was a notorious racist whose German nationalistic tendencies were thinly veiled as works on Indian philosophy and culture. When Humboldt lauded praise upon the Bhagavad-Gita, Weber became disgusted. His immediate response was to speculate that the Mahabharata and Gita were influenced by Christian theology -The peculiar coloring of the Krishna sect, which pervades the whole book, is noteworthy: Christian legendary matter and other Western influences are unmistakably present... 52 W. W. Rouse Ball in 'A short account of the History of Mathematics' Dover Publications,1960, (originally appeared in 1908, page.146
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53 Bernoulli, J., Description Historique et Gographique de I Inde, Tome I, p. 5, Berlin, 1786. Tieffenthaler, J. Historisch-geographische Beschreibung von Hindustan. Aus dessen Latein. Handschrift bersetzt. Herausgegeben. Von J. Bernoulli. 2 Bde. Berlin und Gotha 178586; Description historique et gographique de Linde, qui prsente en 3 volumes enrichis de 68 cartes et autres planches: i) La gographique de I'lndoustan, ecrite en latin, dans le pays mme, par le pre Joseph Tieffenthaler. 2) Des recherches historiques et chronologiques sur Linde, et la description du cours du Gange et du Gagra, avec une trs grande carte, par Anquetil du Perron. 3) La carte gnrale de Linde, celles du cours du Brahma- poutre, et de la navigation intrieure du Bengale, avec des mmoires relatifs a ces cartes, publics en anglais, par Jacques Rennel. Le tout, augmente de remarques et d'autres additions, rdige et public en Franois, par Jean Bernoulli. 3 vols. 4 Berlin 1786 91. 54 Cited by CK Raju in 11 Eulers article was an appendix in TA Bayers Historia Regni Graecorum Bactriani; GR Kaye Hindu astronomy, 1924, reprinted by Cosmo Publications, New Delhi, 1981, p.1. Euler is the culprit who named Pells equation erroneously after Pell, after he had access to Indian texts and was clearly aware that Pell was not the progenitor of this topic. 55 http://web.nickshanks.com/history/sixthousandyears/ 56 Pingree, David, Zero and the Symbol for Zero in Early Sexagesimal and Decimal Place Value Systems in The Concept of nya a collection of essays edited by AK Bag and S R Sarma, published by the Indira Gandhi International Centre for the arts, INSA, ryan Books international, 2003 57Kosla Vepa, http://www.scribd.com/doc/12314897/The Pernicious Effects of the Misinterpreted Greek Synchronism in Ancient Indian History Paper presented at the ICIH 2009 India International Centre, January 9- 11,2009, also available as part of the Souvenir Volume of the conference 58 See Macaulays minute on Education. Reproduced in my Book The South Asia File Published by Originals, DELHI, 2009 59 C K Raju Cultural Foundations of Mathematics, Centre for Studies in Civilizations (PHISPC), Pearson Education, 2007, page 313. It is my opinion that this is a landmark publication on the Civilizational uniqueness of the Indic contributions, juxtaposed with the philosophy of the history of science. It should be read in entirety by every educated person interested in these matters and particularly by the Indic population 60 David Pingree, Census of the exact Sciences in India , Series A, in 5 Volumes, American Philosophical Society, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Under a grant of the National Endowment of the Humanities, 1994 61 To give an idea as to the quantity of literature in the CESS, there are 26 pages of citations on Bhskara II alone, CESS, Series A, Volume 4, pp.299-326.Note the census is organized alphabetically by author (according to the Devangari alphabet) 62 David Pingree The recovery of early Greek Astronomy from India, JHA, vol. vii (1976), pp.109-123. However, one of those civilizations that was profoundly influenced by Greek culture has preserved a number of texts (composed in the second through seventh centuries CE) that represent non-Ptolemaic Greek astronomy. This civilization is that of India, and the texts are in Sanskrit It is certain that Greek astronomical texts were translated into Syriac and into Pahlavi, as well as into Sanskrit, but of the former we still have but little, and of the latter almost nothing; and in both cases we must rely for much of our knowledge on late accounts in Arabic. The Sanskrit texts, however, though often either incorrectly or not at all understood by those who have transmitted them to us, formed the basis of a scientific tradition that only in this century has been destroyed under the impact of Western astronomy.p.109 These techniques as preserved in the Sanskrit texts were certainly not invented in India, which lacked the astronomical tradition necessary for their development. Nor were they introduced directly from Mesopotamia since they first appear, in a crude form, in the Yavanajtaka, which is based on the translation of a Greek text made three- quarters of a century after the last dated cuneiform ephemerides was inscribed.p.111 63 David Pingree Bija corrections in Indian astronomy JHA, vol. xxvii, (1996), pp.161-172 64 C K Raju, ibid 65 Constance Reid A long way from Euclid, New York, 1963 We have no copy of the original work. Oddly enough we have no copies made even within one or two centuries of Euclid's time (circa 200 BCE). Until recently, the earliest known version of the Elements was a revision with textual changes and some additions by Theon of Alexandria in the 4th century CE, a good 6 centuries after the nonexistent Euclid purportedly compiled it in Alexandria. The traditional text book version of the Elements almost completely until very recently without change was based, of course on the
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text of Theon. . when we say Euclid says. we are speaking of a compiler much closer to us than the original compiler of the Elements 66 MacDonell, 1900, p.11 67 Goswami, B N., Ed., The word is Sacred , Sacred is the word, The Indian Manuscript tradition, National Mission for Manuscripts, ISBN 81-89738-22-4,January 2007 68 Gupta, S.K, Siddhntic Astronomy , affiliation TIFR (citation ? ) 69 Saliba, George, 1994, A history of Arabic Astronomy, New York University Press, New York, NY 70 CK Raju, ibid, PP.197 71 Prof Shivaji Singh Contending Paradigms OF Indian History; Did India lack Historical agency, published in Souvenir Volume of ICIH2009. 72 ryabhayam, Golapdah, Chapter 4,9, ryabhaa 73 Ibid, Chapter 4, 10 74 George Polya How to solve it . In my view George Polyas (who was a colleague of Srinivasa Ramanujan at Cambridge ) approach is a Pramparic successor to the epistemology of the Veda, and then , it does not surprise me that I thought of the word heuristic when I came across the solution to the planetary problem as visualized by Nilakanta 75 MD Srinivas 2008, see Primary and other sources in Appendix G 76 We will use the term interior planet in the rest of the book, rather than the inferior planet used in the west, since there is nothing inherently inferior about Venus and Mercury, other than the fact that they have smaller orbital radii than the rest of the planets. 77 Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, 2005 78 Nilakantas contributions to the progress towards a heliocentric paradigm as elaborated by Ramasubramanian in Ramasubramanian, K., Srinivas, M.D. and Sriram, M.S., Modification of the earlier Indian Planetary theory by the Kerala Astronomers and the implied heIiocentric picture of planetary motion, Current Science, 66, pp. 784-790. May 1994. 79 Evans, James, the History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, Oxford University press, 1998, ISBN 0-19-509539- 1. The curious aspect of this book which is an excellent account of the history of western astronomy, is that, there is not the slightest curiosity, expressed in the book as to the contributions of the Indics 80 History of Astronomy: An Encyclopedia (Garland Encyclopedias in the History of Science, Volume 1) (Library Binding) by John Lankford (Author) "American astrophysicist and science administrator..." 81 Hoskin, Michael, "The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy, Ed. By, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 1999 82 Yjnavalkya in the atapatha Brhmaa. 83 Gutas , D, Greek thought, Arabic Culture, the Greco Roman Translation movement in Baghdad and early Abbasid society (2nd to 4th, 8th to 10th centuries), Routledge , London, 1998 84 Albrecht Heefer The Reception of Indian Mathematics by Western Historians Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium 85 Russell Bertrand, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, New York and London, 1919, p.71 86 James Fennimore Cooper in Last of the Mohicans, is a piece of historical fiction by an American author set in 1757 during the peak of the Anglo French Rivalry Chingachgook is portrayed as a Noble and highly principled warrior chief of the Mohawk, part of the 6 nation confederacy that allied with the British against the Huron who allied with the French. 87 Siddhanta Darpana, Eng. tr. by Arun Kumar Upadhyaya, Nag Publishers and Ancient Indian Astronomy and Contributions of Smanta Chandra Sekhar by L. Satpathy (ed.). Narosa Publishing House, New Delhi. 2003. 88 My interest in the history of Mathematics extended eventually to other areas of history including a broad range of topics that could be construed as the History of the Indic civilization 89 I am reminded of the Parable of the Lost Coin. This is the story of the man looking for a lost coin in a well lighted area, when he knows he has lost it in a darker area of the garden. When asked why he was looking for it where he
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certainly couldnt find it, the man replied But it is better lighted here and I can see what i am looking for. Clearly the Parable of the lost coin is entirely apropos here 90 We assume he is referring to 600 BCE, when the Golden Age of Greece began with Thales of Miletus, Aristarchos, and Hipparchus.
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The Āryabha A - Nīlaka A - Sāmanta Evolution

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THE

RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

Kosla Vepa PhD

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA NLAKAA- SMANTA EVOLUTION

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

3. THE CALENDAR AND ASTRONOMY

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

4. THE PREMISE BEHIND THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

5. IS THE CALENDAR A WORTHY OBJECT OF SCHOLARLY ATTENTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLDS FIRST HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE20

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

8. OTTO NEUGEBAUER AND THE HEGELIAN HYPOTHESIS

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

9. THE PROBLEM WITH THE OCCIDENTALIST CHARACTERIZATION OF OTHER CULTURES

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

10. THE FAITHFUL TRANSMISSION OF THE COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

11. GREEK AND ROMAN DIFFICULTIES WITH ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

13. THE INTEREST IN GERMANY IN INDOLOGY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

FIGURE 5 MODIFIED EUROCENTRIC MODEL OF THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

FIGURE 7 J OSEPHUS J USTUS S CALIGER

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

FIGURE 8 T HE C OPERNICAN M ODEL

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

17. GEOCENTRIC AND HELIOCENTRIC MODELS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

18. INDIAN INFLUENCE ON CHINESE ASTRONOMY

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

HOW THE INDICS SHAPED THE ORIGINS OF ASTRONOMY

19. THE PARADIGM SHIFT FROM A KINEMATIC MODEL TO A PHYSICS MODEL

THE RYABHAA - NLAKAA - SMANTA EVOLUTION

21. ANCIENT INDIC MATHEMATICAL ASTRONOMY HAD A UNIQUE CHARACTER.