History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c39.s2.10

v1.c39.s2.10

Chattopadhyaya conveniently ignored the scientific (and even agnostic) spirit of the Nāsadīya Sūkta (*RV*. 10.129.1-7) which raised the issue of the created world and wondered whether any intellect is in possession of all the knowledge about the created world. The Vedic world-view started with the spirit of enquiry and search for the truth. Ofcourse theological fundamentalism and the evils of casteism and priestcraft crept into the Indian society, ‘but we should not forget that the entire phenomenon took place more than three millennia before the public humiliation of Galileo before the Inquisition. We have endorsed Chattopadhyaya’s basic thesis of a dialectical struggle between reason and anti- reason in the Indian thought-world with the rider that this struggle existed in all civilizations, and exists even to-day down to the psychological plane of an individual (Biswas and Biswas, 1989).