17 July 2002

Some thoughts on the Indian half of Needham question

Axioms, models and algorithms

RODDAM NARASIMHA
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore

Summary

Much debate has taken place on the famous question raised at various times
during the last several decades by Joseph Needham, regarding the failure of China and
India to give rise to distinctively modern science while being ahead of Europe for
fourteen previous centuries . . . . A variety of explanations have been offered in India for
the failure mentioned in the above quote. Apart from those involving political, military
or economic factors, these explanations have ranged from an (alleged) preference for
idealist philosophies and an inward-looking, other-worldly culture, to the prevalence of a
rigidly stratified social system. It is argued in this paper that while there may be some
truth in many of the socio-cultural explanations that have hitherto been offered, they are
in the final analysis not truly convincing for three major reasons: (a) the philosophical
systems of India are diverse and not exclusively idealist, (b) at the end of the first
millennium the sciences in India were in a relatively strong position in the civilized world
of the day, and had indeed become very influential, and (c) (as the quote above from
Needham admits) India (with China) was in fact ahead of Europe for fourteen long
centuries before the European scientific revolution — and there is no evidence that the
explanations offered were not operative in that long period.

The proposal in this paper is that it would be more useful to approach the question
by looking at what happened in Europe in the 16th century and later as the manifestation
of a European miracle. In order to understand the roots of this miracle it is important to
study earlier developments in Europe, say during the 12th to 15th centuries. It is now
well known that several Eastern inventions travelled to the West during and after the
Crusades. Among these were a variety of technologies from China, and the new numeral
and mathematical inventions that went from India (both through creative West Asian
intermediaries). The renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote in 1929:
Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the Greek view and
followed a course which seems to have originated in India and which has been
transmitted, with additions, to us by the Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as
logically prior to the concepts of geometry. Indeed the history of mathematics in India
can be interpreted as indicating the occurrence of a mathematical revolution heralded by
_rya-bhat**a, and leading in the next several centuries to the development of the Indian
numeral system, algebra, techniques for solving both linear and quadratic determinate
and indeterminate equations, and the germs of the calculus. These new mathematical
techniques travelled West over the course of centuries and appeared to have played a
decisive role in the mathematization of science that was such an essential ingredient of
the European scientific revolution — in ways that still have to be more completely studied.
 The Needham question then rephrases itself to ask why the Indian mathematical
revolution did not lead to a corresponding distinctively modern scientific one. One
reason could be that it was not accompanied by the generation of new technologies — or
their absorption from elsewhere (e.g. China). (Quite possibly no social, economic or
political need was felt for them in India at the time.) But there appears to have been
another fundamental philosophical reason, illustrated by the totally different approaches
to science taken in classical Greece and classical India. By a detailed comparison of two
texts in geometry (the Indian _ulba-s_tras and the Greek Euclid) and in astronomy
(Ptolemy and _ryabhat**a), it is proposed that, in a useful over-simplification, the Greek
approach may be thought of as that of axiomatizers and model-makers and the Indian
approach as that of pattern-seekers and algorisers. The style of the Indian intellectual
approach indicates a deep suspicion of axioms and models, but great ingenuity in
handling numbers and discerning patterns (for example in the motion of heavenly
bodies). It is suggested that the European scientific revolution, which may be traced to
Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, came about in part because of a powerful fusion of the
ideas of model-making and algorithms. It is also argued that the distrust of universal
axioms and models in Indian logical systems appears to have been philosophically
justified, and may be said to have been vindicated by 20th century developments in
quantum and classical mechanics and in logic (e.g. wave-particle duality, G del s
theorems, deterministic chaos). At the same time the use of what to a classical Indian
logician will appear as a somewhat less fastidious approach in Europe towards
understanding nature led to unreasonably and unexpectedly spectacular successes in the
development of science there.

We can say that European model-making could not progress without the
mathematical tools whose roots can be traced to India, and similarly that Indian science
could not progress without the model-making abilities of the West. The distrust of
models, while not philosophically unjustified, turned out to be historically expensive for
India.

________________________________________________________________________

A good place to begin this lecture is to ask ourselves whether we now live in an
age of revolutions. We may be on the threshold of a biotech or genetic revolution. We
are in the middle of an information technology revolution (— or at its beginning or end,
depending on one s degree of technological optimism). We have had a green revolution,
but are now told that it may have spent itself — at least the variety that we had in India.
There has been much talk of the white revolution, and other similar ones of various hues
and shades.

Note that these revolutions we speak about now are so often scientific or
technological; they are no longer national or ideological, like the French, Russian or
socialist types. We are now at least as worried about the digital divide as about any
ideological divide. Here is proof, if it were needed, that science and technology now
affect our ordinary ways of living in extraordinary ways, and have become a major force
in the civilization of the planet. One may admire, or dread, what science can do; an

2
admirer may have pet technological dislikes, and a technophobe, even as he keeps busy
rubbishing technology, may cheerfully use computers and cell-phones and airplanes, and
all those other wonderful toys and tools that the technology bazaar offers him. Whatever
one s views on science, it has become impossible to ignore it, and difficult to be neutral
about it. After all, according to the Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow, half
the economic growth of a nation today is due to technical factors.

Indeed, as a scientist myself, I know that all of us tell each other how we Indians
missed the bus on revolution A, and should make sure we do not make the same mistake
on revolution B. A very good point indeed, but it would seem worth analyzing how these
revolutions have occurred, in particular the grand parents of them all, namely the
scientific and industrial revolutions.

* * *

These revolutions began in the Europe of the 16th to 17th centuries, and spread
first to North America; in the 20th century they diffused across to Asia. (For our purposes
here, a revolution in a system is a change that takes place in a time relatively short
compared to the time scales of change in that system before the revolution. I believe it
would be better to call the phenomenon a water-shed , but the word revolution has
become standard.) The first effects of these revolutions on India were historically painful:
they led to the decimation of the famed textile and metallurgical industries of the
country, accompanied by a European political domination that was supported — indeed
often driven — by superior military and civil technologies. As Headrick points out (in his
book The Tools of Empire, Oxford 1981), technology made it feasible for European
power to spread where it had earlier been impossible for it to penetrate (e.g. because of
disease, as in Africa); in other cases it made colonial expansion very cost-effective and
affordable (as in India). The net effect was that, by the beginning of the first World War
in 1914, over 84% of the world s land area was under European domination, and the
great and ancient civilizations of Asia had been reduced to formal or informal colonies
(to use Ian Inkster s phrase).

Among the first Indians to have realized that the rapid expansion and
consolidation of British power by early 19th century was not the isolated success of one
more plundering raider from across the borders, but that it represented the advent of a
new cultural force based on novel knowledge systems, was Raja Rammohan Roy (1772-
1833). This realization lay behind his deep concern about the poor state of the
mechanical arts in India (as he called them), which was coupled with his understanding
of the need for a transformation of Indian society and the importance of learning English
to gain access to the new knowledge. He had already an integrated vision of what needed
to be done in education, society and technology, and was probably the first person in
today s third world to wonder about the nature of the industrial revolution then sweeping
the West. According to Kisorichand Mitra, a younger contemporary of his, Roy went to
England (in 1830) because He longed to see . . . the country of the Lockes, of the
Bacons, of the Newtons, of the Hampdons and of the Watts . Note the conspicuous
absence in this list of the so-called empire-builders like Clive and Hastings; Roy appears
to have realized that behind the war-fighters he had seen was a world of new ideas and
thinkers in science, technology and philosophy. Elsewhere he spoke of the perfection of

3
the mechanical arts in England, and even advocated the settlement of Europeans in India
to help introduce their knowledge into the country. The questions that he raised for
himself then have since concerned the growing community of scientists and engineers as
well as political and social leaders all over the East.

The issue of the new knowledge systems that arose in Europe has now acquired a
remarkable intellectual and philosophical dimension, following the monumental work of
Joseph Needham on science and technology in ancient China. Needham has carefully
documented the extensive technological achievements of the Chinese civilization, often
pre-dating Western developments by centuries. It is enough to note here that, among the
inventions of the Chinese were not only the famous trio of the printing press, gun-powder
and compass, but innumerable others including paper, rockets, the (clock) escapement
mechanism and silk. After a meticulous survey of these and numerous other instances of
eastern inventiveness, Needham pointed out:

With the appearance on the scene of intensive studies of

mathematics, science, technology and medicine in the great non-
European civilizations, debate is likely to sharpen, for the failure of
China and India to give rise to distinctively modern science while
being ahead of Europe for fourteen previous centuries is going to
take some explaining.

And he wondered about

. . . how Galilean science could come to birth in Pisa but not in Patna
or Peking.

There have been very stimulating surveys of Indian science and technology too in
recent years, but nothing that even remotely matches the scale, scope and magnificence
of Needham s effort. Nevertheless, as I have already mentioned, the question now
associated with Needham s name has plagued many Indian scientists and leaders for
long, and there have also been efforts to explain, or analyse, why the scientific and
industrial revolutions did not (or even could not) take place in India. Some favourite
explanations, going back to P.C. Ray, the great chemist, are based on the inequities of the
caste system and the idealist philosophies of India. The Marxist philosopher Debiprasad
Chattopadhyaya, while claiming that the world s first natural scientist was Udd_laka
_run$i who appears in the Ch_nd_gya Upanishad, went on to argue that the factors that
Ray highlighted created an intellectual climate inimical to the growth of modern science.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that Needham finds it so easy to make the

parenthetical assertion about the great eastern civilizations having been ahead of Europe
for so long; late colonial historians would of course have been shocked by the assertion,
and so I suspect would the considerable number of modern Indians brought up on the
view of the likes of Macaulay and Mill. Earlier European observers, on the other hand,
would have found that Needham was only echoing a widely-held view of their own
times.

A catalogue of the various socio-cultural explanations appears in Box 1.

4
 Box 1.

POSSIBLE REASONS WHY THE S&T REVOLUTIONS

DID NOT OCCUR IN INDIA

‘Idealist’, ‘speculative’ philosophies

Inward-looking, other-worldly culture

No ‘Protestant ethic’

Social rigidity, caste system, lack of professional mobility, no
cross-fertilization of ideas

Weakness in observation, data-keeping

Relative insularity: no foreign travel

Inadequate public patronage

Conflict between science and religion

Civilizational complacency

Oral traditions, resistance to documentation, closed education
systems

Inherent cultural tendency to live with contradictions

While there is some truth in many of the explanations listed above, there are
serious difficulties as well. A major one is that the philosophical explanations in the list
do not recognize the diversity of Indian civilization, and in particular its philosophies.
Thus, while one may argue that Vedantic philosophy is idealistic or speculative, one must
remember that there were many philosophical systems in India: the S__khya, Ny_ya or
Vai_eshika systems cannot be accused of being anti-science. There was a vigorous
materialist school as well (known as L_k_yata). Similarly, while the impression persists
everywhere in the world that Indian culture is inward-looking and other-worldly
(following the German sociologist Max Weber s analysis), we must remember that this
could not have been true for the vast majority of the population. India is also the land of
Kaut*ilya s Artha-__stra and V_tsy_yana s K_ma-s_tra, and Indian merchants have been
entrepreneurial for thousands of years (from Indus Valley days, ca. 2000 BCE).
Protestant movements in India are almost part of the mainstream (!), as the ancient
history of Buddhism and Jainism shows, for example. Similarly, while it is true that the
Indian caste system has been there for centuries, survives to this day and has undoubtedly
inhibited mutual reinforcement of science and technology, it has been less rigid than is
often thought, and social stratification elsewhere in the world was not always more
dynamic or flexible than here. As for relations between science and religion, there were
clashes between rationalist and conservative views (e.g. _rya-bhat**a and Brahma-
gupta, 6th and 7th centuries CE), but the conflict never reached the intensity of Western
violence (as e.g. when Bruno was burnt at the stake for his irreligious beliefs).
Incidentally, while on this subject, we need to recall that the great star of the scientific
revolution, Isaac Newton, spent far more time and wrote far more words on theology than
he ever did on science.

The second difficulty with these explanations is that they ignore the presence of
strong scientific traditions in India at different periods in our history. For example, the
11th century Spanish-Arab astronomer Said al-Andalusi said,

5
 Eight peoples have interested themselves in the sciences: the Hindus,
the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the
Egyptians and the Arabs. The premier nation among these in the
sciences is that of the Hindus.

This comment was made only five centuries before the scientific revolution in Europe
may be said to have begun; and there were others who said similar things at the time.
One could argue that modern science dates from the 16th and 17th centuries and that it
represents such a fundamental historical departure that the pre-revolution position of
science in India was rendered irrelevant. That however would be inconsistent with the
view of many Western scholars who insist that the Greeks invented science (which for
example is the sub-title of a recent essay by Lewis Wolpert in the well-known British
magazine Nature). This statement could probably be justified if the scope of the word
science is suitably restricted. Thus we may ask: is science systematized, consensible
knowledge purporting to organize reality (as Indians and many other civilizations have
tended to think), or is science a quest for the ability to predict the behaviour of nature
with the use of the fewest possible universal principles, laws or models? If the former,
science was certainly not invented in Greece; if the latter it might have been, but then in
periods when the quest for such intellectual minimalism begins to look unfruitful — as it
must have done in the Europe of the Middle Ages — progress may become impossible.
(And pre-Darwinian biology would not be science at all.) It seems certainly true that the
Greeks had a remarkably special way of thinking about nature which characterizes their
best scientific work. However, as we shall discuss below, the Greeks often got carried
away by their philosophies and models. As Kitto remarks, Greek philosophy sought for
uniformity in the multiplicity of phenomena, and [this] desire . . . led to guess work and
neglect of fact in the attempt to frame a comprehensive theory. . . . As Daremberg says,
the philosophers tried to explain nature while shutting their eyes (The Greeks, p.190).
Francis Bacon (16th c. CE), the patron-saint of modern science, was scathingly critical of
the Greeks.

The third difficulty is that for nearly 1400 years after these fundamental
developments in Greece (as our quote from Needham recognizes), European science was
by and large barren; no great advances — certainly in terms of fundamental ideas — were
made in what in fact have come to be known in Europe as the Dark Ages. This was
incidentally a period that was a Classical Age for India — in spite of all the reasons
listed in Box 1. Many favoured explanations would seem to have been operating during
that creative Indian period as well, suggesting that we must look elsewhere to find
answers to Needham s question.

* * *

The standard explanations may thus not be convincing, but the Needham question
cannot be brushed under the rug. I would like to propose that it may be far more
rewarding to approach the question from a very different point of view. Namely, instead
of asking why India and China did not give rise to modern science, we need to ask how it
happened that Europe did so. Given the long Dark Ages that Europe went through, it is
in fact more appropriate to think of what happened there in the 16th century and later as
the European miracle (just as we have in the last fifty years come to talk about the East

6
Asian miracle, for example). What was it that triggered the great and brilliant scientific
revolution of the 16th and following centuries? To answer this question it is necessary to
look at the period immediately preceding the birth of modern science. For example Paolo
Rossi, in his book of the same name, by and large examines the period 1500-1700 (more
precisely (:2) he dates the revolution as having occurred in the period of 160 years
between the publication of De Revolutionibus by Copernicus in 1543 and of Opticks by
Newton in 1704). A far more interesting period to study from our point of view would be
the three centuries preceding the revolution, namely 1200-1500.

That of course would be a vast project on its own, and needs badly to be
undertaken right away. But there are some very interesting pointers. One such clue
regarding the precursors of the revolution is to be found in a very interesting essay by Sir
Ernst Gombrich (Daedalus 1998 Winter: 193-205, Eastern inventions and Western
response). Gombrich says that it was the Western response to the technical inventions
that reached Europe from the East that undermined and finally swept away the belief that,
in Bacon s words, excluded all theory of Progress . This event would seem to have
been an essential prerequisite to the occurrence of the scientific revolution in Europe.

One fascinating piece of evidence that Gombrich provides is a book published in

1471 by Giovanni Tortelli. As a student of languages Tortelli was concerned with words
in current use deriving from the Greek. His analysis showed that many words could not
be traced to Greek roots and so presumably came from inventions unknown to the ancient
European world. Among such (apart from the other well-known ones we have already
mentioned) were spring-driven clocks, the marine compass, the bombard, stirrups,
watermill, cotton, silk, candle, the organ, falconry, gilding and spectacles. Gombrich
also points out that several new inventions listed in one of the paintings of the period
came from China. These not only included the famous trio of compass, gun powder and
printing but also silk, possibly the watermill, the clock escapement mechanism etc.
Gombrich points out that there were two important omissions in the painted list: one was
the paper on which the list was written (which also came from China), and the other the
numerals that listed them (which came from India).

Regarding that famous trio of inventions, Francis Bacon wrote in 1620:

Consider the force and effect of inventions which are nowhere more
conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients,
namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have
changed the appearance and condition of the whole world, the first in
letters, the second in warfare and the last in navigation, and from
these there sprang innumerable changes so that no empire, sect or
star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on
human affairs than these mechanical matters.

And where did those mechanical matters come from? Here is what Samuel
Purchas was writing, as late as 1625:

Others, therefore, looke further unto the East, whence the Light of
Sunne, and Arts, have seemed first to arise to our World; and will

7
 have Marco Polo the Venetian above three hundred yeeres since to
have brought it out of Mangi (which we now call China) into Italy.
True it is, that the most magnified Arts have there first been borne,
Printing, Gunnes, and perhaps this also of the Compasse, which the
Portugals at their first entry of the Indian Seas found amongst the
More, together with Cards and Qudrants to observe both the Heavens
and Earth.

It is therefore clear that in the centuries just preceding 1500 a large number of
technical inventions came into Europe from the East, in particular from China (through
West Asia). The invention of invention that occurred in Europe around this time must
have been triggered and inspired by the technological flood from the East.

The second clue comes from mathematics. This is important, for one of the most
striking features of the scientific revolution was the mathematization of science. Galileo
used mathematics to describe his experimental findings. Newton named his great and
epoch-making book Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis: the Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy. Where did this mathematics come from?

It is here appropriate to quote from the renowned mathematical physicist

Hermann Weyl, who wrote in 1929, in the preface to his pioneering book on quantum
mechanics and group theory,

Occidental mathematics has in past centuries broken away from the

Greek view and followed a course which seems to have originated in
India and which has been transmitted, with additions, to us by the
Arabs; in it the concept of number appears as logically prior to the
concepts of geometry.

(He went on to say that, with the advent of group theory, the trend in mathematics was
returning to the Greek standpoint.) Although the Principia is couched in the language of
geometry, it appears that Newton did so because that was the proper way to do it (he
was clearly in the grip of Euclid-worship); he almost certainly derived many of his results
by quite different methods, involving algebra and equations, tools that were clearly
imported from India and West Asia — and, of course, subsequently greatly improved in
Europe. The tortuous trajectory of the spread of the Indian numeral system and
associated methods of calculation — through West Asia, Islamic Spain and Jewish
scholars and merchants to Christian Europe, involving such famous figures as Fibonacci
(of the numbers fame) — has been brilliantly described by Georges Ifrah (1998 The
Universal History of Numbers, Harvill Press, London).

We can see the impact of the key idea that Weyl puts his finger on — namely the
logical priority of number over geometry — in the work of European scholars of the time,
e.g. Descartes and his algebraic geometry. To simplify matters, one can say that, in the
Greek view, if a was a length a2 was an area (so the dimension increased from one to
two); in the Indian view a was just a number — it could be a length, but so coulda2 be: the
squaring was not necessarily a dimension-enhancing process. Once the view point has
changed, one can see that the scope for mathematization increases enormously.

8
 One can therefore argue that the long dark ages of Europe were broken with the
help of the technical and mathematical inventions imported from the East. Europe came
into contact with these through the violent conflict that took place with the Arabs during
the Crusades. It is well known that at that time the Islamic adversaries of Christian
Europe were the party more advanced in science. In fact Europe had often to rediscover
some of its own Greek scientific heritage through translations that were more easily
available in Arabic than in European languages — reminding one of what happened in
India in the 18th and 19th centuries when British scholars were able to tell us more about
Indian heritage in many areas than we Indians could remember ourselves (and to this day
most of us keep learning about it in English rather than in Indian languages).

* * *

Let us return to the question of what science really represents. Accepting for the
moment a view of science as systematized knowledge, it is clear from a reading of
eastern and western scientific literature that, at the very least, there are strong differences
between different civilizations in the style in which they accumulate that systematized
knowledge. These differences do appear to reflect deep philosophical differences in the
approach to knowledge.

To illustrate, let us compare two approaches to geometry. One comes from the
_ulba-s_tras dating perhaps to 7th or 8th century BCE, and the other from Euclid (3rd
century BCE). The former is basically a manual of ritual geometry; its objective is to
provide instructions on how to construct various fire altars that were part of Vedic
sacrificial rites. Euclid on the other hand is a set of theorems in geometry derived from
a set of axioms . Box 2 shows both the first page of the _ulba-s_tras and the set of five
axioms from Euclid. The contrast cannot be stronger. The S_tras start with a listing of
the units of length measurement, and go on to make a variety of propositions, including
the so-called theorem of Pythagoras (who came much later, in the 6th c. BCE;
incidentally it is not certain that he was in fact the original author of the famous
theorem even in Greece). The result is stated in general terms, but (significantly, I
believe: we shall return to this point) with explicit examples. No attempt is made to
prove the result; it is clearly considered a valid conclusion —a confident inference rather
than a logical deduction. The S_tras also consider the problem of how to construct a fire
altar that is twice as large in area as a basic one. We know of course that this can be done
by increasing the linear dimensions by ˆ2, for which the S_tras give the (excellent)
approximate value of 1.4142.

On the other hand Euclid begins by stating five axioms which he considers would
be widely accepted and can provide a suitable basis for deducing, purely by logic, a
variety of new results. Euclid avoids introducing measures of distance or area: in this
sense he may be said to be non-metric. But the S_tras are metric from the word go.
Euclid also states the theorem of Pythagoras, but derives it from the axioms that he
accepts at the beginning of his book. The idea of ˆ2 was a mystery to the Greeks, because
it could not be expressed as a fraction. To the Indians on the other hand the question was
one of finding an adequate approximation; there is no evidence that it caused any great
intellectual agonization.

9
 Box 2

Baudh_yana-_ulbas_tra

1.1 The various constructions of sacrificial fires are now given.

1.2 We shall explain the methods of measuring areas of their (different) figures (drawn)
on the ground.
1.3 Now the measure of an a_gula 14 anus (grain of Panicum milliaceum); according to
others, (it is) 34 tilas (sesamum indicum) placed broad side on. One small pada is 10
a_gulas each; one pr_de_a 12 a_gulas; one pr(th_ and one uttarayuga 13 a_gulas
each; one (big) pada 15 a_gulas. One _s*_ measures 188 a_gulas; one aks*a 104
a_gulas; one yuga 86 a_gulas; one j_nu 32 a_gulas; one _amy_ and one b_hu 36
a_gulas each. One prakrama equals 2 padas (30 a_gulas); one aratni 2 pr_de_as
(24 a_gulas). But there are also instances of pada, yuga, prakrama, aratni and _amy_
having different measures when these (words) are used as units of measurement. 5
aratnis (120 a_gulas) make one purus*a; one vy_ma also has the same measure (5
aratnis); and 4 aratnis (96 a_gulas) make one vy_y_ma.

* * *
1.12 The areas (of the squares) produced separately by the length and the breadth of a
rectangle together equal the area (of the square) produced by the diagonal.
1.13 This is observed in rectangles having sides 3 and 4, 12 and 5, 15 and 8, 7 and 24,
12 and 35, 15 and 36.

Euclid s Five Postulates ( Axioms )

1. Given any two points, there is a straight line containing them.

2. Given any straight line segment, we can extend it indefinitely to both sides.
3. There is a circle with any given centre and radius.
4. All right angles are equal.
5. Given a straight line and any point not in it, there is exactly one straight line
parallel to the given one and containing that point.

We might similarly compare the two great astronomers, Ptolemy (2nd c. CE) and
_rya-bhat**a (5th c. CE). Ptolemy proceeds once again with a basic physical model in
mind. The model is geocentric, and the planets move in epicycles, that is to say they trace
small circles whose centres themselves move on other, larger circles. (The circle was a
perfect figure for the Greeks, and all celestial bodies had therefore to move on circles, or
circles on circles. As an aside, I cannot resist the temptation to say that this kind of
Hellenistic perfectionalism (if one may coin that word) persists in the West to this day,
as e.g. when Dirac made the famous statement, . . . it is more important to have beauty in
one s equations than to have them fit experiment .) According to Aristotle space could
not be empty (for nature abhors vacuum , he said). There was therefore a set of layered
crystalline spherical shells each of which carries along one of the planets. (The shells had

10
to be crystalline, or a transparent solid, because one had to be able to see through to the
stars.) The universe is finite, and outside the last shell is an unmoving Mover who
rotates the shells. With these and some other hypotheses, utilizing observations made by
himself and others before him, and by geometrical deduction appealing to Euclid for
example, Ptolemy proceeds to derive an astonishing series of results on planetary
motions.

Now _rya-bhat**a also uses epicycles, but by splitting planetary motion into a
slow mean and a rapid epicyclic fluctuation superposed over it. It is very likely that the
basic idea of epicyclic motion was borrowed from the Greeks, but the interesting point is
that _rya-bhat**a does not speak of any underlying model at all. His book starts with a
small introduction which describes a system by which he is going to express numbers,
and a listing of the numerical parameters (including the trigonometric sines) needed to
perform the calculations that form the bulk of the book. The values he chooses for the
parameters are not justified in detail, but a series of instructions are provided on how to
make calculations for prediction of planetary motions. (Such sets of instructions got to be
called algorithms following the Iranian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (9th c. CE), who
transmitted many Indian mathematical ideas, along with his own very significant
additions, to West Asia.) In the process however several brilliant new mathematical
ideas are introduced by _ryabhat**a, but his objective is to make the calculations
straight-forward and rapid. We could say that he invented the subject of algorithmic
astronomy , and proceeded to present its first exposition in 499 CE.

Equally striking are the differences in style between our two authors. Ptolemy s
work is called the Almagest from the title of its Arabic translation (whence it was first
translated into European languages); and, as the title implies, the work is magisterial,
monumental (nearly five hundred pages of dense prose). It is divided into 13 books , of
which the first discusses and justifies the assumptions underlying the Ptolemaic model.
The presentation is systematic, and indeed its rhetoric can be recognized in the scientific
works written today. In contrast, _rya-bhat**a s book, called the _ryabhat**iya, is terse,
even cryptic; it is written in verse (there are a total of only 121 _l_kas), and is divided
into four sections. A hand-written version of the work available in the Oriental Library at
Mysore fills all of three sheets, and so can easily be slipped into a shirt pocket. The text
was of course written so it could be memorized. But to understand it one needs a guru or
at least a good commentary.

There are some conclusions we can draw from these comparisons. In the first
place we realize that there appear to have been scientific contacts very early on between
Greece and India, but what was borrowed or taken was extremely selective. One
fascinating puzzle is why India apparently borrowed the idea of epicycles (but not either
the underlying Ptolemaic model or its details), whereas it totally ignored Euclid, who
made no impact at all; in fact he was not translated into Sanskrit till the 18th century! I
consider this fact to be of fundamental significance, for Euclid has been virtually
worshipped in the West: his Elements are next only to the Bible in readership over the
centuries. Furthermore the Indian refusal to be impressed by Euclid survived centuries of
Muslim rule in different parts of India, even though Islamic scholars were also admirers
of Euclid. It almost looks as if the Indians took the view that (for example) the theorem
of Pythagoras was a matter of observation and inference; I fancy that they did not think

11
that its deduction from a set of axioms was either useful or interesting, because they were
skeptical about the reliability of the axioms. Similarly, although _ryabhat**a does not
say so, it would seem that he would have had great reservations (in retrospect most
justified) in accepting the physical model of Ptolemy; after all Indians had no
philosophical problems with the concepts of infinity, surds, vacuum etc., as many Greeks
did. On the other hand _rya-bhat**a finds in the epicycle a most convenient idea that
helps to discern patterns in planetary motion and make computations, and proceeds to
devise clever algorithms to carry out such calculations.

We may summarise the situation by saying that the Greek paradigm appears to
have been axioms or models _ logical deduction _ theorem or result; the Indian approach
seems to have been observation _ algorithm _ validated conclusion. (When we speak of
models , here and elsewhere in this paper, we have in mind predictive, quantitative
physico-mathematical models, not merely descriptive ones.) Contrary to popular
perceptions Indian astronomers were very good at observation; the parameters in
_ryabhat**a s algorithm were repeatedly fine-tuned over the centuries, as observation
revealed discrepancies. (So verification was very much a part of the Indian approach.)
We may also recall here the comment made by the 18th century British mathematician
John Playfair, then a well-known professor at Edinburgh, now remembered as the author
of Playfair s Axiom . (This formulated the notorious fifth axiom of Euclid in the form in
which it is most widely used today, namely as it appears in Box 2.) Playfair was so
impressed by the accuracy of Indian astronomical calculations that, in a review he
published in 1790, he contemplated (but dismissed) the possibility that some ages ago
there had arisen a Newton among the Brahmins . . . and a De La Grange . . . ; he
preferred the explanation that accurate astronomical observations had been made in India
as early as 3100 BCE. (I believe the accuracy that impressed Playfair so much was
basically due to the willingness of Indian astronomers to tune model parameters, and
their facility in carrying out such tuning. If the epicycles served only to seek and
describe patterns in the planetary motion, there did not have to be a model that was
either true or false; consequently the model was not something so sacred that its
parameters could not be altered to suit observation. In other words, model parameters
were not like e.g. the universal constant of gravitation.)

Incidentally _rya-bhat**a had a profound influence on Indian astronomy, for

almost as long as Ptolemy had on Western astronomy. And we could say that, as far as
astronomy and mathematics were concerned, there was a rapid change in India between
the middle of the 5th century and of the 7th century, i.e. between _ryabhat**a and
Brahma-gupta. If we accept the definition of revolution given earlier we can say that an
algoristic or mathematical revolution occurred in India in those two centuries, or more
precisely between the time of writing of the _ryabhat**_ya (499 CE) and the Khan(d(a-
kh_dyaka (665 CE) of Brahma-gupta.

As an aside, we may note that strong belief in models has an interesting

concomitant, namely the notion of fraud. The history of Western science is shot through
with the idea of theories and models and of fraud. Ptolemy himself has been accused of
fraud; so in more recent times have Galileo, Newton, Mendel, Millikan and a great
variety of other less well-known figures. I believe the reason for this can be traced to
faith in two-valued logic, namely the idea that answers to questions have to be yes or no;

12
models have to be true or false: there are no other options. Scientists often encounter
situations where there may be discrepancies between model and observation. If the
discrepancies are large the theory would of course be quickly rejected. But the crucial
cases are those where the discrepancies are small but not negligible. If the scientist falls
in love with the model he is tempted to ignore some of those inconvenient observations
that do not agree, as many of the names mentioned above did at one time or the other, or
stretch the model in bizarre ways (as Newton did with the speed of sound). If on the
other hand observation is the starting point and one has no great faith in any particular
physical model, which was the prevailing norm of Indian scientific thought, the question
of fraud does not arise. Indian scientists, even classical ones, do not appear to have
accused each other of fraud. This could not have been mere politeness, as they did make
charges of ignorance or even stupidity against each other (as Brahma-gupta did on _rya-
bhat**a, for example). We could say that fraud is the besetting sin of a model-making
scientific culture.

* * *

All these issues are connected with the subject often called logic. There were
several schools of logic in India, but both Indian and Western scholars seem agreed that
there was no truly formal deductive logic in India. On the other hand Indian logic seems
to have been more nearly related to inference. An excellent collection of papers by
Jonardon Ganeri (2001 Indian Logic: A Reader) gives valuable insight to the Indian
approach to the subject. For example, the well-known authority on Indian logic, B.K.
Matilal, points out In India . . . validity must be combined with truth. . . . Indian logic is
not formal logic. Similarly, Schayer comes to the conclusion that The Indian syllogism
is not a logical theorem but a combination of two rules of inference . To oversimplify
matters somewhat, we could say that in the Indian view the only reliable axioms would
themselves have to be the result of valid inference. The great Indian logician Di_n_ga
(400-480 CE) declared, There are only two means of cognition (pram_n as), I mean
inference and direct perception . . . . The Indian insistence on providing examples in any
syllogistic argument has been seen by some Western scholars as superfluous and
irrational, but the chief purpose of examples could well have been to keep the axioms
realistic. What example would the Greeks have been able to give for their assumption
that nature abhors vacuum, or that planets are embedded in crystalline spherical shells?

Some schools of logic (e.g. the Jains) went so far as to expound elaborate theories
of non-unique conclusions (an_ka-anta-v_da ) and may-be logic ( sy_d-v_da). The
Indian distrust of two-valued logic and universal axioms is related to a perceptive
comment made by Wendy Doniger O Flaherty:

Many Indian texts are troubled by contradiction; their attitude in this

may seem to us Platonic. . . . But they do not ultimately iron out the
contradictions; they alter their definitions of reality in order to let the
contradictions survive.

(An Indian logician would probably insist that the word contradictions in the above
passage must be put under quotes!) There is also the related comment of Fritz Staal that
what Euclid was to the Greeks, P_n$ini (the famous Sanskrit grammarian, 5th c. BCE?)

13
was to the Indians. For P_n$ini s grammar, the As!ta-adhy_yi, was a monumental and
creative systematization of Sanskrit grammar, carried out through a series of rules and
exceptions, all expressed once again in extremely compact language.

As time passes, it is not at all clear that this rather fastidious Indian position on
logic (to use an adjective that M Hiriyanna often applies to Indian philosophy in his
outstanding text) was either unjustified or inferior. The developments in physics and
mathematics in the 20th century would seem to vindicate the skeptical Indian
philosophical position on two-valued logic. For example Heisenberg s uncertainty
principle and the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics would not at all be
philosophically disturbing to a classical Indian mind. When G del s theorem was
proved in the 1930s and showed how a system of deductive logic had to be incomplete,
one can almost hear the applause he would have received from classical Indian logicians.
I must of course hasten to add that this does not for a moment mean that ancient Indians
had any inkling (let alone knowledge) of quantum mechanics or of the kind of
fundamental inadequacies in deductive logic that were demonstrated by G del s
technically complicated proof. All that one can say is that these 20th century discoveries
were philosophically acceptable, and even gratifyingly confirmatory, to a mind reared in
Indian systems of thought.

From the present perspective Stephen Wolfram s proposal about A New Kind of
Science (2002 Wolfram Media) can be seen as basically the approach of an algoriser
using the power of modern computer technology. (Do not our ways of thinking about
nature depend on the tools we possess?) It is known that cellular automata, embodying
the very simplest computer programs running on similarly extremely simple rules, can
lead to extremely complex behaviour. (To give an example of how simple the rules may
be, they may prescribe how, in a row of dots, the colour of each dot is changed — say
between blue and red — depending on its neighbours colours in the previous step, in an
evolution of the row in discrete time. Similarly, simple collision rules between crude
molecules populating a lattice — discretized space — can lead to a complex pattern of
wake vortices in the flow of the lattice fluid past an obstacle.) If the simplest rules of
interaction between the units of a system can lead to the complexity of nature, one begins
to wonder whether nature does not operate like simple algorithms or programs. The
correspondence between rules and programs, between behaviour and computation, would
once again not be philosophically disturbing to Indian ways of thinking. And Gregory
Chaitin (e.g. 2002 Conversations with a Mathematician, Springer) talks about
algorithmic information and the limits of formal reasoning, about the computer as a
philosophical concept, about how any given set of axioms only captures a tiny finite
amount of this [infinite] information. And that s why we re in trouble . . . that is the real
dilemma (:34); and he demonstrates that G del s proof was like LISP programming.
The power of algorithms therefore should not be underestimated, and algorizers surely
have a great deal to teach us about nature.

From this point of view what a classical Indian logician would have found most
disturbing is not the science of the 20th century but that of three centuries earlier: namely
the spectacular success of Newton in providing a physico-mathematical model that was
algorizable and so often agreed with observation or experiment to a most remarkable
degree in so many widely different situations. The power of Newtonian mechanics, both

14
terrestrial and celestial, was (very correctly) considered amazing even by his European
contemporaries; in India it would have further been considered philosophically
mysterious, puzzling and disturbing. The fact that one could go so far with just three
laws of motion and the law of gravitation was something that I believe was the result of
an enterprise that Indian scientists would not even have contemplated. (Interestingly,
however, the idea of gravitation was already present in Brahma-gupta s work (7th c.), but
there is no evidence of intellectual agonization over action at a distance.) We can say
that Indian civilization paid its ultimate tribute to the genius of Newton when the
renowned astrophysicist S. Chandrasekhar produced what can legitimately be considered
a 20th century bh_s*ya (commentary) on the Principia.

To complete the picture, however, one must note that what for long had been
considered the extraordinary predictive power of Newtonian mechanics has been
qualified and limited by recent developments in the theory of deterministic chaos. It is
now established that chaotic motion may be exhibited by special nonlinear (but strictly
Newtonian) dynamical systems whose behaviour displays an exquisite sensitivity to
initial conditions, and which consequently possess only a limited predictability horizon.
Such systems are by no means a small or singular class, and include such classical
archetypes of predictability as the pendulum, the string and even heavenly bodies.
Intimations of this limited predictability (and the accompanying weak causality) of
Newtonian systems were heard already around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, but it
is only in recent decades that the roots of the phenomenon have been fully understood.
Sir James Lighthill, occupant of the same prestigious Cambridge chair that Isaac Newton
had held three centuries earlier, went so far as to render a public apology on behalf of the
scientific community of mechanicians for having misled the world at large into such a
fundamentally incorrect perception of Newtonian dynamics. But the point for us here is
that these recent discoveries of the 20th century once again would be philosophically
gratifying to the classical Indian mind.

* * *

On the whole the Indian approach to scientific problems seems to have been
severely practical. The classical Indian scientist would have applauded what some
Western scientists have recently said about models being useful lies and mathematics
being like botany; if and when they turn out to be more it should legitimately be
considered astonishing. But then this fastidiousness of Indian philosophy and logic have
been historically very expensive for the country. Thus, while there are philosophical
reasons why modern science did not emerge in India, these are (in the present view)
deeper and not unsound, compared to the ones normally offered.

This analysis leads to an interesting aside on modern Indian science, which

(during the first hundred years or so of its emergence) has very largely followed the
Western style, and can claim some very significant contributions. But model-making still
does not appear to come naturally to us. From this point of view it would seem that the
truly exceptional scientist in India was S N Bose, whose formulation of a new statistical
model for the kind of particles that have now come to be known as Bosons was very
much high science in the Western spirit. (Paradoxically, though, the Bose model was
really the outcome of a counting exercise — but based on what at the time were seen as

15
very unusual rules. Was this a fusion of Western model-making with Indian passions for
counting procedures?) But the very rarity of this kind of achievement shows the enduring
power of culturally determined patterns of thought. So does the work of the
mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who discovered brilliant new results but could
rarely provide proofs for them.

* * *

There is no time to go through other related arguments in detail, so let me

summarise the position as I see it by stating a few paradoxes about Indian science.

• There have been few physico-mathematical models originating in India.

• The philosophical liberalism and pluralism of India did not give birth to a
modern science here. (There is the distinct possibility that the pluralism was
actually a hindrance, not a help.)
• Twentieth century physics not only did not produce philosophically disturbing
thoughts in India but in fact may be said to have confirmed ancient Indian
suspicions about the nature of logic and model-making.
• The Indian preference for inference over deductive logic seems ultimately to
have been justified.
• The classical Indian scientific tradition is, if anything, over-pragmatic. Thus
there was never any truly pure mathematics in India. There was brilliant
mathematics, but this was usually inspired by astronomy, commerce or some
similar application.

We must of course admire the power of a scientific approach that has been so
effective in self-correction during four centuries of continuous achievement, and
continues, apparently triumphantly, on its universalist quest. We must at the same time
admire also a set of philosophical views that, in spite of apparently strong refutations at
various times, appear to have been fundamentally sound.

* * *

While the great mystery, therefore, is how Newtonian science got so far, using
deductive logic on the basis of a model with four laws, we can also see that it was not
completely successful: relativity and quantum mechanics upset the Newtonain apple-cart.
It is now a common-place to say that science is only tentative; as the British physicist J J
Thomson once said, science is policy, not creed. It may not be able — ever — to give us
the truth, whatever that may be, but we must admit that it has been extraordinarily
successful. Modern science seems to have acquired — perhaps by fortunate accident —
the property that the great Buddhist philosopher N_g_rjuna called pr_pakatva: i.e. it
delivers what it promises; it may not be Truth, but it is honest.

I believe it is this success of modern science that Einstein had in mind when he
talked about how the greatest mystery about the world is that it is comprehensible (and
when in fact he went so far as to suggest that the scientific revolution was a fluke).
Something similar must have been at the back of Eugene Wigner s mind when he
wondered at the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in our attempt to understand

16
nature. Is it possible that the great pragmatic civilizations of the East misjudged how far
the quest for truth might go based on what they considered logically shaky foundations?
Were our rules of inference too stringent — our pursuit of Truth so demanding — that we
missed the power and insight that could be gained from what we considered a less
fastidious approach to knowledge — which (again mysteriously) turns out not only to be
often correct (as e.g. with the heliocentric theory), but also to lend itself to such
systematic but astonishing enlargement of its scope?

I want to conclude by saying that the view one takes may well depend on the
physical and intellectual tools one has. If the phenomenon is too complex and
complicated (e.g. meteorology, biology, social science), one may be forced to resort to
data analysis to infer patterns, without the aid of axioms or models; if on the other hand
the phenomena are simpler (physics, chemistry, aerospace science), it seems worthwhile
to try to construct suitable minimalist models or to discover the most parsimonious set of
axioms; i.e. axiomatization becomes a worthwhile goal, a feasible approach. I presume
modern science will go ahead pursuing both paths simultaneously. It is, in the final
analysis, a question of choice of the most appropriate strategy (Thomson s policy ) to
tackle any given problem with the physical and intellectual tools that we happen to
possess at a given point of time — as we continue with the long history of mankind s
attempt to organize the reality of nature.

* * *

Till now I have scarcely mentioned the industrial revolution. There is not enough
time (or space) to consider it here at length. But we must note that, although the pioneers
of this revolution like Newcomen, Watt and Stephenson were by and large not highly
educated people, their attitudes to their life s work were undoubtedly influenced, to a
considerable extent, by the changed intellectual climate in England that followed the
scientific revolution. To the extent that this revolution did not occur in the East, the
chances that an industrial revolution of the European kind would occur here were also
lower.

However it must be clearly understood that, at the times we are speaking of, the
East in general did not feel the need to change the prevailing global order, i.e. it was
generally content with the status quo, whereas Europe was the economic underdog that
wanted change. The reason for this was the relative prosperity of the East. The wealth of
India was noted by the many foreign travellers who came here, and was sung about in
English poetry. After all, India was the destination of Columbus on his voyages. Close
to home, Domingo Paes wrote (ca. 1520) of the Vijayanagar Empire, What I saw . . .
seems to me as large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight. . . . This is the best
provided city in the world. Andre Gunder Frank has made a detailed study of India in the
world economy between 1400 and 1750 (1996 EPW 27 July PS-50; Re-Orient, Vistaar
Publications). He notes that some eighty per cent of the world s GNP in the centuries
before 1750 came from China, India and West Asia; indeed Europe at that time suffered
from a chronic balance of payments problem. The core regions, especially of industrial
production, were in China and India, which were also the primary centres of
accumulation of capital in the world system. Europe was not a major economic force as
far as Eastern countries were concerned. The common global economic expansion that

17
started around 1400 benefited Asian countries earlier and more than it did the rest of the
world. Interestingly the Europeans pursued policies in the 17th and 18th centuries that
were very similar to those that Asian economies adopted around 1950: namely
encouragement of import substitution and then of export promotion. However the
introduction of labour-saving and power-generating technologies in Europe slowly began
to favour West over East. Indeed the same Indian industries that were so strong till the
middle of the 18th century, namely textiles, iron and steel etc., were virtually wiped out
in the first few decades of the 19th century.

* * *

In summary, therefore, the present proposal is that, apart from the various factors
that have been extensively discussed, there are two that played a major role in why the
scientific and industrial revolutions did not take place in India.

First, the Indian scientific and logical tradition was weak on devising
physical/mathematical models for nature, in part because there was strong philosophical
skepticism about the validity of such models. Although from a fundamental point of
view this skepticism was not unjustified, in the three centuries between 1600 and 1900 it
was discovered in Europe that spectacularly successful models could be devised. This
effort in Europe would not have been possible without the injection of Eastern inventions
— major technical ones from China and brilliant mathematical ones from India, both
through the creative mediation of West Asia. These inventions were married to an old
Greek faith in universal principles, also served up with a new fragrance by West Asians,
in a remarkably creative episode of cultural exchange, transfer and fusion. The resulting
synthesis, cooperating with a technology-enabled experimental method, turned out to be
unreasonably successful, and revived science in Europe after a long period of nearly 1500
years of stagnation.

Second, from an economic point of view, the East in general was strong and
prosperous, the status quo was comfortable and there was no great internal pressure to
change the global order. Although this issue has not been the major subject of analysis
here, it seems to be an essential part of the overall explanation. A few more comments
however may make the argument clearer. We begin by noting that India s tropical
productivity in agriculture was so high that land revenue was a sufficient source of
income for government, because the country was largely (although not solely) a thriving
sun-and-water economy. So there was no great pressure to promote foreign trade, but in
spite of this India s trade balance was in general highly favourable. Europe had to pay for
Indian goods in silver because India would not accept — i.e. did not need— anything else;
and the silver that was discovered in the Americas came in very handy for the purpose.
Furthermore Indian rulers had no ambitions to subdue countries beyond their border
lands, if only because our immediate neighbours on the other side had perforce to live in
desert, high mountain or dense jungle. (The only attractive neighbourhood was South
East Asia, where Indian influence did indeed spread in the second half of the first
millennium, but (it is important to note) not through the sword.) On the other hand to
West Asians India must have seemed like a subcontintental oasis, to Europeans like a
subcontinental hot house. Here may lie the roots of Western dominationism, and Indian
accommodationism.

18
 It is of course not the intention to suggest here that the factors we have
highlighted explain everything — the failure of India that Raja Rammohan Roy
recognized and Joseph Needham so extensively articulated, as well as the roots of what
an Indian might see as a European miracle. These historical events are surely very
complex. But it is hoped that the present argument will lessen the mystery surrounding
these issues.

From the present point of view, the interesting question is whether the turbulent
encounters between East and West that have marked the last few centuries of the
political, economic, social and intellectual histories of these ancient civilizations might at
some time lead to anything significantly different and new. Only the future can tell.

19