Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s1.17

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Reuben Burrow’s unpublished paper (Chapter III) was addressed to the British Governor General Warren Hastings soon after Burrow had come to India to take up his new job at Calcutta. It is highly speculative and in a way is more in line with the contemporary intellectual tradition of the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. (The tradition has, in fact, continued well into the present time; only as time passed, however, it has become more and more Eurocentric. The late 19th century dictum, ‘Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin,’ enunciated by Maine (one-time Law Member of the Governor General’s Council in India) was merely an intellectual and scholarly expression of the mounting Eurocentric character of this speculativeness.) Though in itself it does not provide much factual data, and perhaps comes to even several erroneous conclusions as we would see them today, its very speculativeness seems to have provided inspiration and stimulus to a number of subsequent enquiries about Indian sciences, particularly mathematics. The article ‘A Proof that the Hindus had the Binomial Theorem’ by Burrow himself, and the later dissertation by H.T. Colebrooke on ‘Hindu Algebra’ (given as introduction to his translation of ‘Algebra with Arithmetic and Mensuration’ of Brahmagupta and Bhascara) decidedly follow such speculativeness. Acknowledging Burrow’s contribution, particularly in bringing Indian Algebra to the notice of Europeans, the article on ‘Algebra’ in the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* (8th edition) stated: