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By : Justice Markandey Katju, Judge, Supreme Court of India Speech delivered on 13.10.2009 in the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore |
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Friends, It The topic which I have chosen to speak on today is
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foundation of India culture is based on the Sanskrit language. There is a misconception about the Sanskrit language that it is only a language for chanting mantras in temples or religious ceremonies. However, that is less than 5% of the Sanskrit literature. More than 95% of the Sanskrit literature has nothing to do with religion, and instead it deals with philosophy, law, science, literature, grammar, phonetics, interpretation etc. In fact Sanskrit was the language of free thinkers, who questioned everything, and expressed the widest spectrum of thoughts on various subjects. In particular, Sanskrit was the language of our scientists in ancient India. Today, no doubt, we are behind the Western countries in science, but there was a time when India was leading the whole world in science. Knowledge of the great scientific achievements of our ancestors and our scientific heritage will give us the encouragement and moral strength to once again take India to the forefront of science in the modern world. The word `Sanskrit’ means “prepared, pure, refined or prefect”. It In this talk I am confining As already stated above, there is a great misconception about The remaining 95% has nothing to do with religion. In particular, Sanskrit was the language in which all our great scientists in ancient India wrote their works. Before proceeding further, I may take a under discussion. In fact, I will be taking several digressions during the course of this talk, and initially you may think that this digression has nothing to do with the subject under discussion, viz. Sanskrit as a language of science, but at the end of the digression you will realize its intimate connection with the subject. The first digression is to ask what is India ? Although we are India is broadly a country of immigrants. People migrate from uncomfortable areas to comfortable This is natural because everyone wants to live in comfort. Before the coming of modern industry there were agricultural societies everywhere and India was a paradise for these because agriculture requires level land, fertile soil, plenty of water for irrigation, temperate climate etc. which was in abundance in India. Why should anybody living in India migrate to, say, Afghanistan which has a harsh terrain, rocky and mountainous and covered with snow for several months in a year when one cannot grow any crop? Hence, almost all immigrations and invasions came from outside into India (except those Indians who were sent out during British rule as indentured labour, and the recent migration of a few million Indians to the developed countries for job opportunities). There is perhaps not a single instance of an invasion from India to outside India. India As the
Who were the original inhabitants of India ? At one time it was believed that the Dravidians were the original inhabitants. However, the generally accepted view now is that the original inhabitants of India were the pre-Dravidians aborigineswhose descendants are the speakers of the Munda language who presently live in forest areas of Chota Nagpur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal etc., the Todas of the Nilgiris, and others known as Adivasis. Their population is only 5 to 7% of the total population of India. The remaining about 95% people living in India today are descendants of immigrants who came mainly from the north-west. Even the Dravidians are now believed to have come from outside, probably from the present Pakistan and Afghanistan areas, and this theory is supported by the existence even today of a Dravidian language called Brahui which is spoken by 3 million people in Western Pakistan (see Brahui on Google). In this connection one may also see ‘Cambridge History of India, Vol. I. There are a large number of religions, castes, languages, ethnic is tall, somebody is short, some are dark, some are fair complexioned, with all kinds of shades in between, someone has Caucasian features, someone has Mongoloid features, someone has Negroid features, etc. There are differences in dress, food habits and various other matters. We may compare India with has a population of about 1.3 billion whereas our population is roughly 1.15 billion. Also, China has more than twice our land area. However, all Chinese have Mongoloid features; they have a common written script (Mandarin Chinese) and 95% of them belong to one ethnic group, called the Han Chinese. Hence there is broad homogeneity in China. On the other hand, as stated above, India has As already for agriculture as it has level land, fertile soil, plenty of water, temperate climate etc. It is only in agricultural society that culture, arts and science can grow. In the preceding hunting stage these cannot grow because man has no free time in the hunting stage, and he has to devote all his time to get his food by hunting animals etc. The struggle for existence compels him to do this from morning to night leaving him no free time for doing free thinking. It is only when agriculture begins that man can get some free time for thinking. Since India was a country ideally suited for agriculture, people had free time here to do thinking. In ancient India there was a lot of intellectual activity. In our literature we read hundreds of instances of Shastrarthas, which were debates in which the intellectuals freely discussed their points of view in the presence of a large assembly. Thousands of books in Sanskrit were written on various subjects, though perhaps less than 10% have survived the ravages of time. I have made this Before dealing with
As
regards the first point mentioned above I will have to make another digression and go a little deeper and must tell you a little about the development of the Sanskrit language. In call Sanskrit today is really Panini’s Sanskrit, also known as Classical Sanskrit or Laukik Sanskrit, and this is what is taught in our schools and universities today, and it is in this language that all our scientists wrote their great works. However, there were earlier Sanskrits too which were somewhat different from Classical Sanskrit. The earliest Sanskrit work is the Rig it was subsequently continued from generation to generation by oral tradition, and had to be memorized orally in the Gurukul by the young boys by repeating the verses chanted by their Guru. The Rig Veda is the most sacred of Hindu literature, and it consists of 1028 hymns (richas) to various nature gods e.g. Indra, agni, surya, soma, varuna etc. Language changes with passage of time. For instance, it is difficult Similarly, the thereafter no further changes in Sanskrit were permitted except slight changes made by two other great grammarians, namely, Katyayana who wrote his book called ‘Vartika’, and Patanjali who wrote his commentary on the Ashtadhyayi called the ‘Maha Bhashya’. Except for the slight changes by these two subsequent grammarians, Sanskrit as it exists today is really Panini’s Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit. What Panini did was that he studied Thus Panini made Sanskrit a highly developed and powerful vehicle of expression in which scientific ideas could be expressed with great precision and clarity. This language was made uniform all over India, so that scholars from North, South East and West could understand each other. I am not going into the In the English language the alphabets from A to Z are not Thus, for example the vowels, a, aa, i, ee, u, oo, ae, ai, o, ou I venture to say that no language in the world has its Panini’s Sanskrit is called Classical Sanskrit, as I have may now be permitted another digression here to tell you about the meaning of the word ‘Veda’, but that digression is again necessary to understand what Panini did. The word Veda (also called `Shruti’) consists of four parts
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above four, namely, the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyaks, and the Upanishads collectively are known as Veda or Shruti. The Brahmanas were Similarly, the Aranyaks were written subsequent to the Brahmanas, and, the Sanskrit of the Aranyaks is slightly different from that of the Brahmanas. The last part of the Veda is the Upanishads, and the language of the Upanishads is different from that of earlier Vedic works for the reason that the Sanskrit language kept changing over the centuries, as already stated above. The Sanskrit of the Upanishads is closest to Panini’s Sanskrit. After Panini wrote his Ashtadhyayi the entire non-Vedic grammar (except some words called apashabdas). The Vedic literature is To illustrate, Even such parts of the Mahabharata were altered and made in accordance with Panini’s grammar. Thus today all of the Sanskrit non-Vedic literature is in accordance with Panini’s grammar, except a few words and expressions, called Apashabdas or apabhramshas (as Patanjali has described them) which for some reason could not be fitted into Panini’s system, and hence have been left as they were. However, it was not permissible to Thus the Vedic literature is not in grammar, including all the great scientific works. This provided for uniformity and it systematized the language so that scholars could easily express and communicate their ideas with great precision. This was a necessary requirement for the development of science. The spoken language no doubt As Hence I am making another digression. The generally accepted view is that The non classical (unorthodox) systems are Buddhism, Jainism and Charvak. The Shatdarshanas are given below, with a brief mention of their Shatdarshana or six classical (orthodox) schools of
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is said that the classical and non-classical system of philosophy differ in that the former accept the authority of the Vedas while the latter do not. However this does not seem to be correct as a close examination shows that the first 4 classical systems do not really accept the authority of the Vedas (though some of them pay lip service to it). It is the last two, the Purva Mimansa and the Uttar Mimansa, which certainly rely on the Veda. I need not dilate on all these systems and it is only is acceptable unless it is in accordance with reason and experience, and this is precisely the scientific approach (see in this connection D.P. Chattopadhyaya’s ‘What is Living and What is Dead in Indian Philosophy’ which is a seminal work on Indian Philosophy). Vaisheshik is the atomic (parmanu) theory, which was the physics of ancient India. Originally Nyaya and Vaisheshik were regarded as one system, but since physics is the most fundamental of all sciences, the Vaisheshik system was later separated from Nyaya and made as a separate system of philosophy. It may be added here that the Sankhya However, the Sankhya philosophy certainly seems to have given the materialist ontological foundation on which the later Nyaya-Vaisheshik scientific philosophy was built, and hence we can broadly call the Indian philosophy representing the scientific approach as the Sankhya-Nyaya-Vaisheshik system. However, in brief we are calling it the Nyaya-Vaisheshik system, since we know much more about Nyaya and Vaisheshik then we know about Sankhya. The Nyaya Vaisheshik system is This is in contrast to Advaita Vedanta of Shankaracharya which is monastic and regards the world as illusion or maya in the ultimate analysis. The word ‘pluralistic’ is in contrast to the word ‘monistic’. The word ‘monistic’ means that there is only one entity in the world. Shankaracharya’s Advaita philosophy says that there is only one entity in the world i.e. Brahman whereas the various objects like table, glass, pen, room etc. are not different from each other, and their difference is only an illusion. On the other hand, the Nyaya Vaisheshik systems says that there are several real entities and the world comprises of not just one entity, but a large number of entities which are different e.g. table, book, room, human bodies etc. Hence the Nyaya philosophy is pluralistic and not monistic. In this tell you something about philosophy. The two most important branches of In other words, in ontology the questions asked are what really exists? Does God exist? Does the world exist or is it illusion (maya)? What is real, and what is only apparently real? Epistemology is the study of the means of valid knowledge. For instance, how do I know that this object in front of me exists? The answer is that it is Pratyaksha? I can see it with my eyes Pratyaksha is the knowledge which we derive from the five senses, and pratyaksha pramana is regarded as the pradhan pramana or the most basic of all the means of valid knowledge. However, there are other Thus, much of scientific knowledge comes from anuman pramana. For instance, Rutherford never saw an atom with his eyes, but by studying the scattering of alpha rays (which are positively charged helium ions) he used anuman praman (inference) to deduce that there was a positively charged nucleus around which negatively charged electrons were orbiting. Similarly, black holes can not be know by pratyaksha pramana (since light cannot escape from them), but we can infer their existence by the movement of some nearby heavenly bodies on which an invisible body (the black hole) is exercising a gravitational pull. The We often accept such statements to be correct, even though we may not understand the proof, because the person making it has a reputation of an expert. For instance, we accept that e=mc2 as Shabda pramana since Similarly, we accept what our doctor tells us about our ailment, as he is an expert. There is another pramana called upama (analogy) in the Nyaya As already stated above, the This is also the approach of science because in science we largely rely on observation, experiment and logical inferences. It may be mentioned that If we rely only on Pratyaksha Pramana we would conclude that the sun goes around the earth. However the great mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata in his book Arybhatiya wrote that the same visual impression will be created if we assume that the earth is spinning on its axis. In other words, if the earth is rotating on its axis it will appear that the sun rises form the east and sets in the west. Hence along with Pratyaksha Pramana we have also to apply reason, as observation alone may not always lead to truthful knowledge. It may be mentioned that Thus the Nyaya philosophy gave great support and encouragement to science in ancient India. It must be mentioned that the Nyaya philosophy is one of the Shat Darshanas i.e. one of the six orthodox systems in Indian philosophy, and not an unorthodox system like the Charvaks. Hence our great scientists could not be persecuted by the orthodox people since they could say that they were relying on an orthodox philosophy, namely, the Nyaya. This was unlike in Europe where some of the greatest scientists like Galileo were persecuted by the Church for preaching ideas inconsistent with the Bible. In ancient India there were everywhere debates or Shashtrarthas gathering. Such freedom of thought and expression led to great development of science, since science also requires freedom, freedom to think, freedom to express one’s ideas, and freedom to dissent. The great scientist Charak has mentioned in his book Charak samhita that debating is necessary for the development of science, particularly debating with one’s mental equals. In the earliest Nyaya text, which is the Nyaya Sutras of Gautam, several categories of debate are mentioned e.g. vad, jalp, vitanda, etc These were further developed by the subsequent writers of Nyaya Having MATHEMATICS It is accepted now that these numbers came from India and they were copied by the Arabs from us. I would like to illustrate the revolutionary thousand times. In the Roman numerals there is no single number greater than M, which stands for one thousand. To write 2000 we have to write MM, to write 3000 we have to write MMM, and to write one million one has to write M one thousand times. On the other hand, under our system to express one million we have I am not going into details about the The 100 lacs is called one crore, 100 crores is called one arab, 100 arabs is called one kharab, 100 kharabs is called one neel, 100 neels is called one padma, 100 padmas is called one shankh, 100 shankh is called one mahashankh, etc. Thus one mahashankh will be the number 1 followed by 19 zeros (for further details you may see V.S. Apte’s Sanskrit English Dictionary in Google). On the other hand the ancient Romans could not express any number larger than one thousand except by repeating M and the other numerals again and again. Take another illustration. According to the Agni Purana, the Kaliyuga in which we are living consists of 4, 32, 000 years. The preceding Yuga is known as the Dwapar Yug and is twice as long as the Kaliyuga. Preceding the Dwapar Yug, is the Treta Yug which is thrice the duration of the Kaliyuga. The Yuga preceding Treta Yug is the Satyug which was said to be four times longer than the Kaliyuga. One Kaliyuga, one Dwapar Yug, one Treta Yug and one Satyug are collectively known as one Chaturyugi (or 43 lacs 20 thousand years). Fifty Six Chaturyugis are known as one Manovantar. Fourteen Manovantars is known as one Kalpa. Twelve Kalpas make one day of Brahma. Brahma is believed to have lived for billions or trillions of years. When It is said that we are living today in the 28th Chaturyugi in our present Manovantar, that is to say half the Manovantar of our Kalpa is over, but the remaining Manovantar is yet to be completed. We are living presently in the Vaivasvata Manuvantar. One may or may not believe the above system, but one can only marvel at the flight of imagination of our ancestors who could conceive of billions or trillions of years in history. Aryabhatta in his famous I am not going into ASTRONOMY He also considered the motion of the planets with respect to the sun (in other words there was a hint in Aryabhat’s system of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, though there is a debate about it). The other famous astronomers of that time were Brahma Gupta who headed the astronomical observatory at Ujjain and wrote a famous text on astronomy, and Bhaskara, who also was a head of the astronomical observatory at Ujjain. Varahamihira presented a theory of gravitation which suggested that there is a force due to which bodies stuck to the earth, and also kept the heavenly bodies in their determined places. I am not going into detail into these MEDICINE Sushruta is regarded as the father of Indian surgery and he invented cataract surgery, plastic surgery etc. many centuries before it was invented by the westerners. In his book Sushruta Samhita he has mentioned in great detail about the medicines and surgeries, including dozens of instruments used in surgeries, details of which can be seen on the internet in Google. Sushrut said that to be a good surgeon one has to have a good knowledge of anatomy. Charaka Samhita is an ancient Indian ayurvedic text on internal medicine written by Charaka and it is central to the modern day practice of ayurvedic medicine. Both Sushruta Samhita and Charak Samhita were written in Sanskrit, details of which also can be seen in the internet in Google. In this connection it may be mentioned that in the London Science Museum in one floor relating to medicine, there is mention of the various achievements in medicine in ancient India including the surgical instruments used by Sushruta. It is thus evident that India was far ahead of all countries in ENGINEERING The principles developed by this institute e.g. sloped roofs were applied to structures built in Kerala, eastern Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu. I The attitude of the British Rulers towards Indian The first phase was from about 1600 AD when the British came to India and established their settlements in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta as traders upto 1757 when the Battle of Plassey was fought. During that period the attitude of the British was totally indifferent towards Indian culture because they had come here as merchants to make money and they were not interested in Indian culture at all. The second phase was from 1757 to In 1757 the Battle of Plassey was fought after which the Diwani of Bengal was granted to the British by the Mughal emperor. This transformed the Britishers from merchants to rulers, after which the entire province of Bengal (which included Bihar and Orissa) came under their rule. A ruler has to know about his subjects in order to properly administer their territory. Hence, from 1757 to 1857, the Britishers carefully studied Indian culture and made some important contributions, particularly with respect to spread of knowledge of Indian culture to the West. The third phase begins with the After 1857, the British were determined that there should not be any such outbreak against their rule. For this purpose they did two things (a) they increased their army in India and particularly the number of Europeans in the Indian Army, and also placed the artillery completely in the hands of Europeans artillery and (b) they started a policy of deliberately demoralizing the India people by spreading the propaganda that Indians were only a race of fools and savages before the British came into India and there was nothing worthwhile in Indian culture as it was the culture of fools and savages. This was deliberately done so that the Indian people may themselves start believing that they were an inferior race and should gladly accept the Britishers as their masters. It is because of the third phase that we had forgotten the great achievements of our ancestors, including their achievements in science. It is the second Among such Sir William Jones was born in 1746 and he was a child prodigy who had mastered several languages such as Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew etc. at a very young age. He had studied at Oxford University and had also passed his Bar examination to qualify as a lawyer. When he came to India he was told that there was an ancient Indian language called ‘Sanskrit’ and this aroused his curiosity and he became determined to study it. Consequently, he enquired and found a good teacher called Ram Lochan Kavi Bhushan – a poor Bengalee Brahman who lived in a dark and dingy room in a crowded locality in Calcutta. Sir William Jones started going to this person to learn Sanskrit. He has written in his memoirs that when the daily lesson was completed he would glance behind and saw the Bengalee Brahmin washing the floor where Sir William Jones sat to learn his lessons as he was regarded as a Mleccha. However, Sir William Jones was not insulted by this as he was a scholar and hence thought that one should accept the customs of the teacher. Having mastered the Sanskrit language, Sir William Jones established the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and also translated many of the great Sanskrit works e.g. Abhigyan Shakuntalam into English. This work was brought to the notice of the great German scholar Goethe who greatly praised it. Sir William proved that Sanskrit was very close to Greek and Latin. In fact, it was closer to Greek than to Latin because Sanskrit has three numbers – singular, dual and plural as is the case with Greek, whereas Latin has only two numbers – singular and plural, like in English, Hindi and many other languages. Thus, Sir William Jones established that Sanskrit, Greek and There were several other British scholars who did Suffice it to say that these scholars were Condition of Science in Scholars from Arabia and China would come to India to learn from us in our great universities at Taxila, Nalanda, Ujjain etc. as our disciples. However, it must be regrettably stated that today we are lagging far behind the West in modern science. We have no doubt produced great scientists & mathematicians like CV Raman, Chandrasekhar, Ramanujan, S.N. Bose, J.C. Bose, Meghnad Saha etc., but these belong to the past. However, that is not because of any inherent Hence, it is not due to any inherent inferiority that India has not progressed as much as Westerners in science in modern times, but due to certain other reasons. We have a powerful scientific heritage and knowledge of it would give us the moral courage and strength once again to come in the forefront of science in the modern world. A question which arises is why did we later fall To my mind the answer to this question is that necessity is the In India we have a relatively To |