The article is supposedly on Sanskrit, but the author only cites a few
Western Indologists as he himself is not even a casual student of Sanskrit
scientific treatises. These authors that he cites are well known for being
highly biased in their views on Indian scientific tradition. Further, most
of these comments are directed against Puranas, in contrast to the really
vast literature of the Indian discipline of Ganita-jyotisha or mathematical
astronomy.
The author is notorious for his distorted narratives on the great Pallava
and Chola empires of South India. This article needs no rebuttal except
that we could send the author a list of well documented articles and
books to study before venturing to write on such serious subjects.
Sanskrit didn’t always drive innovation in ancient India. There are two
reasons
Sanskrit was seen as the language of divinity, thus the main current of
Sanskrit knowledge tended to be conservative, resistant to new developments.
Anirudh Kanisetti 29 May, 2025 12:46 pm IST
Earlier this month, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta declared that
Sanskrit, ancient India’s premier language of power and literature, is
“scientific” and “the most computer-friendly language”, according to “NASA
scientists”. This claim has been doing the rounds for over a decade,
sometimes accompanied by pseudoscientific declarations of the achievements
of ancient Indians—think flying saucers, cloning, nuclear weapons, and
whatnot.
On the strength of these claims, various NGOs and politicians have
called for Sanskrit learning to be a part of school curricula. But few seem
aware of the actual history of science in Sanskrit. As with every
scientific tradition across the world, the Sanskritic approach made
extraordinary achievements—but it also had severe limitations that took
centuries to overcome. To understand this, let’s look specifically at the
science of astronomy.
Beginnings of math and astronomy
Mathematics and geometry in the Indian subcontinent began with the
Harappans, who deployed them extensively in urban planning, construction,
and hydraulic engineering. Despite various attempts, the Harappan script
remains undeciphered. The earliest recorded Indian mathematics, then, comes
from the Vedas. Historian David Pingree studied them in his Jyoti sastra:
Astral and Mathematical Literature. Vedic priests constructed elaborate
altars of mud-brick, in the shape of hawks, herons, chariots and so on. In
order to maintain consistent designs, they used geometrical formulae,
recorded in the Sulbasutras, appendices of the Yajur Veda dating to c. 500
BCE. From this early period, Indians developed a fascination with
trigonometry, including what came to be known as the Pythagorean theorem.
In the centuries after, the trajectory of Indian mathematics is
somewhat unclear. Around the 4th century BCE, Jains were developing an
expansive cosmology, with vast distances and eras of time. Mathematician
George Gheverghese Joseph, in The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots
of Mathematics, provides some examples. “A rajju is the distance traveled
by a god in six months if he covers 1,00,000 yojanas (a million kilometers)
in each blink of his eyes; a palya is the time it will take to empty a
cubic vessel of side one yojana filled with the wool of newborn lambs if
one strand is removed every century.” This led Jains to develop advanced
concepts of infinity: infinite in one or two directions, in area, in time,
in space. Europeans, writes Joseph, only came round to this idea in the
late 1800s.
By the turn of the first millennium CE, the subcontinent’s
connections to global trade grew denser — a phenomenon we’ve examined many
times in Thinking Medieval. As Indian textiles, spices, animals and other
exotica went to the Mediterranean, mathematical and astronomical ideas
flowed in the other direction. Sanskrit learning branched out from liturgy
into new disciplines, like politics and aesthetics; the earliest Puranas
were also compiled, addressing topics of mythology, ritual, history, and
cosmology.
Sanskrit scientific writings took on a heterogeneous character.
Puranic authors insisted that the Earth was a flat disc surrounded by
oceans, supported by elephants, turtles and serpents; the planets, stars,
Sun and Moon were held to revolve in wheels above. {KR Leave time slot
opf an avivekis; where these are stated as described and why those lines
are never quoted? is that because of the ignorance or copy and paste
ascribed as compiled?} But another set of authors, composing treatises
called Siddhantas, absorbed Mediterranean conceptions such as a spherical
Earth and elliptical orbits. However, the basis for calculations and
geometry was rooted in Indian techniques. {KR How these confirmations were
brought in?} This rich exchange is visible in the work of then 23-year-old
prodigy Aryabhata in his Aryabhatiya, completed in 499 CE. According to
Joseph, the Aryabhatiya introduces the sine and versine (1-cosine)
functions, as well as methods for solving quadratic equations. Wielding
these techniques, Aryabhata made extremely accurate calculations of the
value of pi, of longitude and the position of planets over time.
Stagnation and innovation
Over the next centuries, Sanskrit writers further developed their knowledge
of trigonometry, calendrical calculations, and arithmetic. However, there
were two major challenges. As Sanskrit was seen as the language of
divinity, the main current of Sanskrit knowledge tended to be conservative,
resistant to new developments. And rather than developing ideas based on
observations, there was a tendency to emphasize theory over observation and
experimentation. Arabs, in the 8th and 9th centuries CE, were able to break
new ground in optics, hydraulics, and astronomy, both by translating Indian
ideas and verifying claims with observations. In India, meanwhile, as late
as the 12th century, Siddhanta writers such as Bhaskara II were still
rejecting Puranic notions that eclipses were caused by the demon Rahu. {KR
When Rahu and Ketu are described as shadow planets are acting as catalysts,
why the meaningful cause and effect, are meant so literally?} Prof Pingree,
in his 1978 paper ‘Indian Astronomy’, argues that medieval Indian
astronomers often miscalculated eclipses, and found that despite the
confident statements of some Sanskrit treatises, their tables of planetary
and star positions could contain errors. There are also precious few
descriptions of measuring equipment, such as astrolabes. {KR Even
today statistics of the modern science and calculations of the scientific
nature do contain errors which are regulated only long after}
How could both innovation and stagnation, dogma and genius, coexist
in the same literary tradition? Firstly, to be “learned” by medieval
standards was to have an encyclopedic command of texts, wielding
rhetorical, linguistic and logical tools to defend a metaphysical viewpoint
taught by one’s guru. Mathematical truths were developed out of curiosity,
or for better calculations. But the idea of scientific innovation for its
own sake, to profitably harness natural principles, did not exist as it
does today. {KR Is it not, the modern science is also subject to errors and
corrections and develop only slowly?}
The bigger limiting factor on Sanskrit was that it required
years of specialized study. This could only happen at elite institutions
with endowments of food and capital, such as Brahmin Agraharam settlements
or Buddhist mahaviharas. Needless to say, these institutions tended to be
open only to elite men, even if they came from distant countries. Though
many male-authored Sanskrit texts pay lip service to female and “lower”
caste devotees, barely a handful of actual texts authored by these groups
survive across Sanskrit’s millennia-long history. [KR Is there equal women
and lower tribe contributions in the modern world?} They made their own
advancements, though poorly recorded. Even as the Sanskrit astronomical
tradition floundered, as attested by Arab travelers in the 12th century CE,
the star-charts of illiterate South Indian seafarers were the most accurate
in the world. {KR Tamil cult?!}
New ideas
For centuries, Indian mathematics had led the world. But by the
1200s and 1300s, Indian writings seem to have withdrawn from the world
stage as advanced Persianate astronomical methods — often based on Indian
maths — took over. To be clear, there were still innovations, especially in
Kerala, where the Brahmin school of Madhava made substantial innovations in
circular and trigonometric functions. Bigger changes, though, came only
gradually: the Sanskrit tradition, unfortunately, had become more
interested in preserving its prestige and age-old conventions, and only
rarely engaged with new, ‘alien’ (and hence less prestigious) ideas.
As Sanskritist Christopher Minkowski writes in ‘Astronomers and
their Reasons: Working Paper on Jyōtiḥśāstra’, members of this school, by
the 16th century, were calling for the increased use of observations to
verify their methods. Somewhat later, and apparently independently, a
Brahmin at the court of Shah Jahan began to translate Persian astronomical
treatises into Sanskrit. This was controversial; 17th-century Benares was
alight with debates as to whether observation-based Muslim astronomy was
acceptable at all. But change was in the air. By 1730, the astronomer-king
Sawai Jai Singh II tacitly accepted the importance of observation, setting
up large observatories such as the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur.
Attempts to shake up the Sanskritic knowledge system continued
under British administrators. In his chapter ‘The Pandit as Public
Intellectual: The Controversy over Virodha or Inconsistency in the
Astronomical Sciences’, part of the edited volume The Pandit: Traditional
Scholarship in India, Minkowski looks at Lancelot Wilkinson, British
Political Agent at the court of Bhopal. Wilkinson commissioned a Brahmin to
write a Marathi text on the modern, Copernican system of astronomy. Within
two years, it attracted multiple critiques and commentaries from Brahmins
bashing it in Marathi, Hindi, English and Sanskrit. The text’s author was
forced to retract his assertions. But the floodgates were opened: one of
Wilkinson’s proteges, writes Minkowski, went on to teach both Indian and
European astronomy at the Benares Sanskrit college, providing a model of
the “accommodation of science and scientific rationality which still
enabled holding on to the context of traditional Sanskrit learning.”
Today, Sanskrit is no longer just a language: it has become a
stand-in for something bigger, the idea of a perfect, just, advanced
ancient Indian society that could be resurrected if only we all spoke it
again. Indeed, NGOs such as Samskrita Bharati — at whose event CM Gupta
spoke earlier this month — claim that Sanskrit was the mother tongue of all
Indians irrespective of caste, class, and religion. (Anthropologist Adi
Hastings conducted a detailed study of this organization in 2008). Since
the 1900s, led by ideologues like Dayanand Saraswathi, Sanskrit texts like
the Vedas have come to be seen as infallible, as already containing all
scientific knowledge. Praising Sanskrit orthodoxy and buzzwords seems to
have replaced Independent India’s proud traditions of serious, independent
scientific research open to scholars of all backgrounds.
But the fact is that languages are products of history: they are
not divine or perfect, but have their brilliances and their flaws.
Insisting on the superiority of a single language closes us off from
learning from the others: in my view, a mistake our ancestors have already
made. The language of science and progress is not English, or Persian, or
Greek, or Latin. Nor is it Sanskrit. It is mathematics, it is reason, it is
evidence: the common heritage of all humanity. {KR Learning from others
are never blocked at all; on the contrary only THOSE OTHERS feign
superiority over Sanskrit}
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of
Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords
of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets
@AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
K RAJARAM IRS 30525
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