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History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c39.s4: (D) Five Centuries After Christ

History of Technology in India, Vol. I: From Antiquity to c. 1200 A.D. v1.c39.s4

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English

(D) Five Centuries After Christ

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The Christian era started in India with the transition from the Greek to Roman and Graeco-Roman influences. Whereas the Greek (and then Scythian, Parthian, Kuṣāṇa and later Hun and Muslim) intrusions were land-based and came through the West and North-West of the sub-continent, the Roman contact was sea-based and initiated in the southern and western part of the Deccan.

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Several centuries earlier, the Mauryas had taken iron plough-share to the South and initiated large scale agriculture and urbanization. Patañjali of the Suṅga era described how the crude beryl mineral was being mined in he Valavaya mountains and brought to the city of Vidura (near Mysore) for processing (*Mahābhāṣya*, on Aṣṭadhyāyī 4.3.84). Mathura had acquired special celebrity for its manufacture of śataka, a special kind of cloth, but it was yet to become a transit centre for silk goods to be transmitted to the south and west Deccan and then to Rome.

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The Roman empire had an abiding interest in the Chinese silk and the Indian spices, precious gems, steel etc. but the Parthians of Iran provided considerable obstacles for the direct Roman trade. This barrier was removed when Hippalos discovered (before 14 A.D.) monsoon trade wind for direct trade with south India; the Buddhist Kuṣāṇas and Śātavāhanas (of Andhra Pradesh, also ruling over the western Deccan) collaborated with the Romans and allowed a new silk route through Mathura, Ujjaini and the port of Barygaza. Mathura rapidly became a transit trade centre, also promoting various new crafts like silk weaving, sculptural arts, brass casting and so on. The diamond mine of Eastern Malwa were exploited by the Kuṣāṇas and later the Scythians during the Ist-2nd century A.D. (Mukherjee, 1970). Though invaders, they gradually integrated themselves into the cultural mainstreams in India.

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The south Indian empires (the Colas, Ceras etc.) engaged in profitable trade on precious stones with the Romans. Pearl, sapphire, carnelian, ruby, beryl were some of the gems processed and exported by India; coral, emerald etc. used to be imported. Naturally gemmology was developed as a subject in several scholarly texts of this era and the art of jewellery promoted by a widespread and vigorous trade.

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The present author has discussed elsewhere (Biswas, 1994) how beryl and emerald trade played significant roles in the history of ancient India; very significantly, many hoards of Roman gold coin have been unearthed near the beryl-producing sites.

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Following the Maurya traditions, the Śātavāhanas of the Deccan levied taxes on different crafts being organised by respective well-formed guilds. The empire gave considerable land grants to the Buddhist monasteries. Both the guild and monastery establishments assisted the royal administration in many ways (Ray, H.P., 1986). Nagarjuna, the famous Buddhist monk and alchemist, introduced to the Satavahana empire during the end of the second century A.D., the then brass technology which existed in Rajasthan and Gujarat (Biswas, 1993). Nagarjunakonda became the capital of the Ikṣvākus during 225-330 A.D. and patronised diverse arts and crafts. Many excavated sites on the Krishna delta of this period showed urban dimensions and Buddhist association. The town of Satanikota on the Tungabhadra used burnt brick and patronised a flourishing bead industry.

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There were two active textile centres in the Central Deccan, namely Tagara (Ter) and Paithan (Pratiṣṭhāna, the Sātavāhana capital). Excavations at Ter have yielded a number of vats for dyeing cloth. Similar vats were found at Arikamedu (near Pondicherry, Tamilnadu). A brick-built dyeing vat has been unearthed at Uraiyur a suburb of Tiruchirapalli town in Tamilnadu. These structures belonged to the Ist-3rd centuries A.D. and signified vigorous national and international trades.

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Chakravarti discussed (Chakravarti, 1991, pp. 305-350) the process of urbanization in south India during this period, and admitted that the existence of agricultural surplus in the neighbourhood was a necessary but not sufficient condition. The emergence of a strong political power such as the Sātavāhanas and the opening of trade routes were also crucially important in urbanization and the growth of technology. The coastal towns could not grow to such large proportions without the Indo-Roman trade. Such a port was known to the Romans as emporion or ‘an oriental market-town on the sea-coast’. There developed a cluster of emporia such as Barygaza or Bhrigukaccha (Broach), Muziris (Cannanore), Kaveripattinam, Poduce (Pondicherry) etc. Graeco- Roman merchants were present in these sites witnessing production of polished stones, bead, imitation glass, jewelleries and textile products. Many of these manufacturing centres dwindled after the collapse of the Indo-Roman trade.

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The southern and northern cities of the era were mostly terminal and transit trade centres. Sirkap establishment in Taxila and Ahicchatra in the Bareilly district flourished as trade centres with improved road communication. The 2nd-3rd century A.D. edition of the epic Mahābhārata mentioned (2.28.49- 50) ‘trade links with Rome through Bhrigukaccha’!

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R.S. Sharma has discussed the trends in the economic history of Mathura up to the period of 300 A.D. (Sharma, 1983, pp. 170- 183). One of the best cities in the sub-continent during its time, Mathura grew essentially as a transit trade centre during the Scytho-Parthians and the Kuṣāṇas, and under the umbrella of Buddhism rather than the Kṛṣṇa-cult which flourished later under the Guptas. Its strategic position on the trade routes connecting the east, the north-west and the south-west contributed to its development as the centre of many technologies - cotton-weaving (śāṭaka), silk-weaving, sandstone, spice, sculpture, glass, metalsmith industries particularly iron, steel and brass, goldsmith, NBP ware, baked tile, lime-mixed brick concrete etc. During the first five centuries of the Christian era the money economy was in full swing in India, as evident from the gold coins of the Romans and the Kuṣāṇas, the Kuṣāṇa copper, Sātavāhana lead coins or potin and lastly the Gupta era gold coins.

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The Gupta period was the second golden age in ancient India after the Mauryas. Although it spanned nearly one and half century (Candragupta I's ascension on the throne 320 A.D. and the end of Skandagupta's reign 467 A.D.), the kingdom was not as widespread as the Maurya empire. The first seventy years of the reign were spent in fighting with the Scythians (who were finally defeated by Candragupta II in 388 A.D.), and the empire ultimately collapsed with the second Huna invasion in 495 A.D.

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The fourth to fifth centuries A.D. witnessed the compilation of the encyclopaedic works on materials, metals, minerals, gems, textiles and other industrial products. The texts such as Aṅgavijja, Amarakosa, Bṛhatsaṃhitā of Varāhamihira, the various Ratnaśāstra texts, etc. were compiled during this period, bearing witness to the prolific diversification of the crafts and trade.

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Much of the glory of the material cultures during the Maurya, Sātavāhana and the Gupta eras were due to the Graeco-Roman contacts which not only promoted trades and crafts but also enlightened the Indians through inflow of novel and at times scientific ideas. The Sanskrit words kastira (tin) and arakuṭa (brass) were derived from the Greek cassiteros and oreichalkos respectively. The Persians, Greeks and Romans were the first patrons of Indian iron, steel and brass. There was considerable Greek influence bearing upon the post-Christian era sculpture (on stones and metals) in India.

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Yavaneśvara was a contemporary of the Scythian king Rudradaman. His Greek book (150 A.D.), translated into Sanskrit one century later, discussed various dhātus: dhāmya (bright) and adhāmya (dull) (Pingree, 1978). Significantly, the first category included steel, and the second rasaka or zinc ore, both of contemporary importance. While postulating the geological theory of the origin of gems (Bṛhatsaṃhitā or BS. 80.3) and demolishing the age-old Rahu theory of eclipses (BS. 5.13), Varāhamihira acknowledged the wisdom of Graeco-Roman scholars (BS. 2.32). Many Greek words were assimilated in the Indian texts on mathematics and astronomy. At the same time, Āryabhaṭa showed his original mathematical prowess a millennium before Newton.

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(E) The Issue Of Medieval Decadence -

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The transition between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘medieval’ period has been tentatively placed at 1200 A.D. The choice is however rather arbitrary; it has been suggested that one could think of medieval decadence having set in with the collapse of the Gupta empire (467 A.D.), death of Harṣavardhana (647 A.D.) the Muslim conquest of part of India (10th century) or its consolidation (1200 A.D.). While R.S. Sharma prefers the earlier dates (Sharma, 1983), H.C. Ray insists on the later dates (Ray, H.C., 1931-36).

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As a matter of fact, there is no single sharp transition date. The forge-welding tradition, exemplified in the Delhi Iron Pillar (fourth century A.D. Gupta Period), was continued for many centuries afterwards - vide the Orissa iron beams at Bhuvaneswar (7th century), Konarak (9th century), the famous Dhar (near Indore) pillar of King Bhoja (1000-1055 A.D.), ‘the largest in the ancient world’ etc. The brass technology of ancient India was invigorated in the 13th century Zawar (near Udaipur, Rajasthan). The bronze technologies of Bengal and Bihar (8th-9th centuries) and of Tamilnadu (9th - 13th centuries) were linked with the supply of tin and gold from, and extensive trade contacts with South-East Asia. The glory of the Indian mathematics and astronomy, hailed by Severus Sebokht (662 A.D.), had been initiated by Āryabhaṭa (born 476 A.D.) and Brahmagupta (598 A.D.), and later sustained by Lalla (748 A.D.), Mañjulā (932 A.D.), Śrīdhara (1020 A.D.), Bhāskarācāryya (born 1114 A.D.) etc. In other words, the flame of ancient Indian science and technology never died, it went on flickering.

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On the other hand, some decadence had set in, and although Sharma puts the ‘transition’ at the demise of the Gupta empire, many symptoms of decay had been evident much earlier. The Śuṅgas and the Sātavāhanas had introduced the system of land grants to the Brahmanic and the Buddhist world respectively. This practice was continued during the Gupta era. The late Gupta kings and the Vākāṭaka kings (5th century A.D.) not only gave away whole villages to the brahmans, but also surrendered the rights for administration and underground mineral resources. The feudal land-lords indulged in lease cultivation through landless exploited labourers. Often the cultivable lands were further fragmented and there was no effort for more efficient large-scale or collective farming. With the irresponsible middlemen in between, the state loosened its control over the masses and their welfare. The new feudal class could exploit the masses but had no responsibility to better their lot. Unlike Europe, India did not have a sharply defined class of feudal barons organised in councils and assemblies (Sharma, R.S. 1983, pp. 145-157, Section on Feudal Beginning).

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Ever since the Manu Saṃhitā period of the Śuṅga dynasty, the caste system became gradually more repressive. After the third century A.D., the land grant system further accentuated it. The brahman landowners inducted tribals and śūdras for tilling and thus created deep tension with the vaiśya community who had the monopoly of agriculture during the earlier periods (Sharma, R.S., 1983). Many castes and sub-castes were invented.

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The insular attitude in India resulted in over- compartmentalisation of technology. The Hindu law-makers distinguished between metal-workers and smelters (Sharma, R.S., 1983). Only specific tribes (later equated as castes) like muṇḍās practised iron-making (hence the term muṇḍaloha), bhils zinc- making, turis gold and diamond-washing, kansaris bell-metal trading and so on. The different castes, practising different aspects of trade, rarely exchanged informations, only which could result in a faster growth of science and technology in India.

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Basham has described the post-Gupta era in ancient India as ‘the twilight of Hindu independence’, the history of the centuries after the Gupta era being ‘a rather drab story of endemic warfare between rival dynasties’ (Basham, 1954). Sharma describes this age as ‘the period of military camps or ‘jayaskandhavāras’, with marketisation reaching a low ebb, money- supply dwindling and continuing decay of urbanism and technology.

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*Social Factors Underlying the Decay of Ancient Indian S & T*

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The present author had discussed this issue in detail elsewhere (Biswas, 1969, first two chapters, Biswas, 1988), and recorded his major agreements and disagreements with Chattopadhyaya’s paradigm (Chattopadhyaya, 1986).

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Chattopadhyaya had shown in his famous book *Lokāyata*, how much theoretical materialism there had been in ancient India, and how it had been systematically obscured and vilified by the theologians (Chattopadhyaya, 1959). He extended his thesis ably, by explaining what is living and what is dead in Indian philosophy (Chattopadhyaya, 1976), and then making an incisive study on ideology and counter-ideology in the ancient Indian science (Chattopadhyaya, 1977). P.C. Ray attributed the decline in the scientific spirit in India to the entrenchment of casteism in the society and the stranglehold of the priestcraft and anti-materialist philosophy (Ray, P.C., 1902-03, pp. 192-197). We have supported this analysis earlier (Biswas, 1969; Biswas, 1988) as well as in this paper.

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The present author has 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; Biswas, 1988). Thus Brahmagupta calculated the diameter of the moon in order to explain its eclipsing the sun, and yet gave tacit approval to the Rāhu theory of eclipses. The *Rasa-Ratna-Samuccaya*, a 13th century A.D. text, strongly endorsed accurate and careful experimentation, and yet strangely endorsed the view that free diffusion of knowledge was not desirable.

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We disagreed (Biswas and Biswas, 1989) with Chattopadhyaya’s paradigm (Chattopadhyaya, 1986) when he grossly undervalued the Vedic tradition, subscribing to the myth of Aryan intrusion into India, and suggesting that the credit for early science in India goes to the Indus valley people rather than the Rgvedic culture - as if the two were not contemporaneous and not part of a wider civilization. In the two volumes of his recent work (Chattopadhyaya, 1986; Chattopadhyaya, 1991), his consistent thread of argument has been that all the reason in ancient Indian science was borrowed or derived from non-Vedic sources and the Vedic literature had the monopoly of anti-reason. His Marxist protest against the extreme and oft-uttered expression ....‘the Vedas contain all knowledge’ was carried to the opposite extreme position and is untenable. Even Joseph Needham cautioned in his Foreword to the book by Chattopadhyaya (1986) that one ‘must beware of pouring out the baby with the bath-water’.

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To counter the biased and one-sided view of Chattopadhyaya, we may cite the balanced opinions of Mahadevan (1969) and Pande (1969). Mahadevan asserted that the orthodox systems such as Nyāya-Vaiśesika, Sānkhya-Yoga did make use of scientific concepts without defying the Vedic tenets. Caraka accepted scientific methodology (including observation and logic) as well as *Īśvara* (God); so did Newton. The Vedic orthodoxy might have extinguished Lokāyata literature (as alleged by Chattopadhyaya) but was not that powerful to curb the two others, almost equally old, heterodox anti-Vedic systems — Buddhism and Jainism. How could the decline of Indian science be attributed to the Vedic orthodoxy alone? Pande (1969) concluded that none of the Indian philosophies - orthodox or heterodox - were anti-reason or anti- science. Of course, the intellectual philosophers (even the proponents of Lokāyata) contributed more to speculation rather than mechanical inventions and technology. Yet there was no obstacle against the phenomenal growth of medicine, metallurgy, mathematics and astronomy in ancient India.

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In his masterly treatments on history of science and technology in ancient India, Chattopadhyaya often jumped into the *modern* period castigating ‘Hindu revivalism’, and the phoney proponents of Vedic science in the modern era (Chattopadhyaya, 1986, pp. 17-20, 24-25, 398-402; Dasgupta, A. 1987)² - entirely by-passing the medieval period, the millennium of Muslim invasion, colonialism and fundamentalism. Such an act of omission and commission emboldened a British reviewer of his latest book (Chattopadhyaya, 1991) to hold Hindu obscurantism to be solely responsible for the decline of Indian science (Robert Temple, 1991)³.

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A much more balanced picture was presented by Āl-Bīrūnī, the brilliant Muslim scholar of the eleventh century (Sachau, Reprint, 1983) quoted in one of our earlier books (Biswas, 1969, pp. 20-22). While criticising the Hindus to be ‘haughty and foolishly vain’, Āl-Bīrūnī was full of praise for the mathematical and scientific abilities of the Hindu scholars, some of whom were ‘enjoying the help of God’ or ‘inspired by God’. According to him, the Hindus preceding his era had been broad-minded. Again, in his own words :

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‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust, scattered in all directions. The Hindu sciences have fled to places where our hands cannot yet reach. Their scattered remains cherish of course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims’.

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The barbarity of the early Muslim invaders in India shocked even the Arab and Persian intellectuals. Shaikh Bu Ali Sina, a respected physician and biologist, refused to come to India with Mahmud, whose plunder and loot, he felt, was destroying Indian science. These facts were ignored by P.C. Ray and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, while commenting on the decline of the Indian science, even though their predecessor Pramatha Nath Bose had deliberated on the Muslim as well as the British colonialism affecting the scientific performance of the Indians, and the Hindus in particular (Bose, P.N. 1975)⁴.

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Although our narrative ends with the demolition of the Odantapuri monastery and its library by the Muslim invaders in 1199 A.D., we cannot help recording that the earlier Indian (Hindu) science and technology survived very well beyond 1200 A.D. The iconoclasts burnt the books but could not destroy knowledge, destroyed and melted the icons but could not annihilate the arts and science of the icon-making tradition. It has been internationally recognised that the Hindu India was not only the first in the world to produce pure zinc by distillation, but also the first to produce it (and high quality brass) on a large manufacturing scale at Zawar, Rajasthan (Biswas, 1993). The Muslim invaders could not gain access to the well-guarded secret or the technical know-how regarding zinc for many centuries. We expected that Chattopadhyaya would have considered these points and ‘his views might have come closer to ours (Biswas and Biswas, 1989, p. 198)⁵.

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In our early treatise we identified that political instability, lack of ideological motivation and necessary political will to transform and modernise a society, and gross socio-economic inequality had largely contributed to the stagnation of scientific progress in many developing countries including India (Biswas, 1969; Biswas and Biswas, 1989, p. 198). In conclusion, we may assert that there was nothing radically different or wrong in the ethos of ancient India. Whenever the natural intellectual talent of the Indians received nourishment from the conducive socio-political factors - such as economic challenges and opportunities, ideological motivation, political stability, contact with the outside world, stimulating but not overwhelming etc.-the Indian science and technology prospered. The vitality of this ancient tradition is attested by the fact that it could not be totally extinguished either by the Hindu obscurantism, Muslim fanaticism or the British colonialism.

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1. In pages 27 and 52 of "History of Science and Technology in Ancient India", Chattopadhyaya has unkindly criticised "Concise History of Science in India" (INSA publication) as providing 'a false model of catalogue-making'. One should understand the importance of collecting, collating and cataloguing newly emerging facts which might alter earlier paradigms.

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2. Dasgupta (1987), one of the reviewers of this book, wrote in the Statesman, that "perhaps we may have been spared the careful consideration of the views of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi".

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3. Robert Temple (1991) reviewed the latest work of Chattopadhyaya and wrote:

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"Chattopadhyaya shows that the history of Hindu obscurantism has suppressed the rise of science in India through the ages - the implications for the present are clear... The smug self- satisfaction of the devout - and they nearly won a recent election - has put a wet blanket over generation after generation of brilliant men of science".
Contrasted with Al-Biruni's balanced analysis, this is indeed high politics and low scholasticism.

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4. Vol. III 'Intellectual Conditions' ("A History of Hindu Civilisations during British Rule", by P.N. Bose) deals with the influences of the Muslim invaders (pp. 33-38, 128-135), the British rule etc. on Indian Science, among other topics.

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5. Our expectation could not be fulfilled on account of Chattopadhyaya's untimely death in May 1993.

Cites (10)