Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.9

c6.9

The widespread prevalence (no less amongst the learned and scholarly) of European ethnocentric bias is dramatically demonstrated by the post-1780 writings on Indian astronomy and the observatory at Benares. It comes through even in the very learned review (p.48-93) which Prof John Playfair, professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, an academician of distinction, did of the then accumulated European knowledge on Indian astronomy. After a detailed examination, he arrives at the conclusion that the Indian astronomical observations pertaining to the period 3,102 years before Christ appeared to be correct by every conceivable test. Such correctness of observation was possible either through complex astronomical calculations by the Indians or by direct observation in the year 3102 B.C. He chooses the latter explanation. The reason for the rejection of the explanation that these could have been arrived at by the Indians through astronomical calculation would have implied that ‘there had arisen a Newton among the Brahmins, to discover that universal principle which connects, not only the most distant regions of space, but the most remote periods of duration, and a De La Grange, to trace, through the immensity of both its most subtle and complicated operations.’⁴ It became intellectually easier for him to concede this astronomy’s antiquity rather than its sophistication and the scientific capacities of its underlying theories.