Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s1.23

c6.s1.23

H.T. Colebrooke’s dissertation on ‘Hindu Algebra’, resulting from all the preceding investigations by men like R. Burrow, F. Wilford, S. Davis, Edward Strachey, John Taylor, etc., and from his own considerable knowledge, is a learned survey and comparison of the developments in Europe and India. But the conclusion that Indian Algebra, etc., may have had an independent development proves difficult for him to digest. Reversing the speculations of Burrow, he comes to the conclusion that the ‘Algebra of the Greeks’, imperfect though he admits it to be, ‘was made known to the Hindus by their Grecian instructors in improved astronomy.’ (The reviewer of ‘Algebra, with Arithmetic and Mensuration’, in *The Edinburgh Review* (November 1817) however thought differently and stated that it ‘could not have been derived from Greece.’ Commenting on Colebrooke’s opinion he added: ‘Mr Colebrooke, after demonstrating the excellence of this algebra, and comparing its more perfect algorithm and its superior advancement with the Greek algebra, as explained in the work of Diophantus, seems nevertheless willing to admit, that some communication about the time of the last mentioned author, may have come from Greece to India, on the subject of the Algebraic Analysis. Of this we are inclined to doubt; for this simple reason, that the Greeks had nothing to give on that subject which it was worth the while of the Indians to receive. Mr Colebrooke seems inclined to this concession, by the strength of a philological argument, of the force of which we are perhaps not sufficiently sensible. It seems however certain, that the facts in the history of Algebraic Analysis, taken by themselves, give no countenance to the supposition.’ But wishing to be gracious and charitable, he infers that ‘by the ingenuity of the Hindu scholars, the hint was rendered fruitful and the algebraic method was soon ripened from that slender beginning to the advanced state of a well arranged science.’20