Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c3.15

c3.15

The general effect of Dharampal’s work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However, conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades. Dharampal never trained to be a historian. If he had, he would have, like them, missed the wood for the trees. Despite having worked in the area now for more than four decades, he remains the quintessential layman, always tentative about his findings, rarely writing with any flourish. Certainly, he does not manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their ‘facts’ but their assumptions as well. But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence, at the conclusion that Indians were technologically primitive or, more generally, how were they unable to discover the historical documents that he, without similar training, had stumbled on so easily.