Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s3.33

c6.s3.33

At the time of the European onslaught, the indigenous tendencies in India seem to have been in a state of slow resurgence. The resurgence, while it restored a measure of confidence, weakened at the same time the political and military structure. With the beginning of European dominance in India, the resurgence got transformed into depression and unimaginable disorganisation. Foreign aggression and dominance was not wholly unknown in India before the resort to it by Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. But the Europeans of this period belonged to a wholly alien world in relation to India. They were not only armed with the concepts and hierarchical institutions of a long feudal European past, but had also been preparing for the occasion for two to three centuries. The subsequent application of their concepts and values completed the destruction of Indian science and society which had been started by the political and military defeat of India at their hands.