Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c3.16

c3.16

Dharampal’s unmaking of the English-generated history of Indian society has in fact created a serious enough gap today in the discipline. The legitimacy of English or colonial dominated perceptions and biases about Indian society has been grievously undermined, but the academic tradition has been unable to take up the challenge of generating an organised indigenous view to take its place. The materials for a far more authentic history of science and technology in India are indeed now available as a result of his pioneering work, but the competent scholar who can handle it all in one neat canvas has yet to arrive. One recent new work that should be mentioned in this connection is Helaine Selin's *Encyclopaedia of Non-Western Science, Technology and Medicine* (Kluwer, Holland) which indeed takes note of Dharampal's findings. Till such time as the challenge is taken up, however, we will continue to replicate, uncritically, in the minds of generation after generation, the British (or European) sponsored view of Indian society and its institutions. How can any society survive, let alone create, on the basis of borrowed images of itself?