Indian science has a very long history and is fortunately
well documented. It has been traced back to about
2500 B.C., and through the following centuries
produced a vast number of specialized works
written chiefly in Sanskrit. Even after the systematization of
the vernaculars about the 2nd century
A.D., Sanskrit continued to be used for scientific
writing, just as Latin was used in the West, but
there are also scientific scripts in Tamil, Pali, and
Ardha-magadhi (the sacred language of the
Jains).
Medicine and hygiene were well advanced in
the Indus valley even before the invasion by the
Vedic Aryans. Many medical and physiological
phenomena were described in the Vedas and the
Brahmanas, and in special appendices to the
Upunishads. In these works attempts were made
to explain the diversity of phenomena by simple
natural laws, and the older passive submission
to 'fate' was already abandoned. A notion of
biological evolution contained in the Laws of
Manu (1st century A.D.) has been traced back to
earlier writings and traditions, and may have been
already ancient in 1500 B.C. Atreya, the most
celebrated Indian physician of antiquity, flourished
about 500 B.C. He performed several successful
operations for hernia and cataract, and kept 700
herbs in his dispensary.
The Vedas contained a catalogue of stars and
divided the year into 12 months and 360 days.
The deficiency of 5 days was made up by the
addition of an intercalary month every five years.
About 1400 B.C. Hindu astronomers were recording the
motions of the Moon with an accuracy
not surpassed in the West until the 17th century
A.D. The great astronomical texts, probably written
between 300 B.C. and 300 A.D., included the Astronomical
Element of Knowledge, Understanding
the Sun, and Understanding the Moon. Their
teaching shows the influence of Babylonia and
Persia.
Later, Grecian astrology appears to have come
to India through Persia, though no astrological
beliefs can be found in any Vedic, Buddhist,
or Jaina texts before the Christian era.
The early centuries A.D. saw the appearance
of the five Siddhantas ('Solutions'), of which only
the Surya Siddhanta or 'Solution of the Sun' survives.
It contains the oldest known table of
sines, and the first discussion of cosines and
the versed sine. It dealt with the equinoxes,
solstices, eclipses, planetary orbits, the inclination
of the ecliptic, etc., and in the penultimate
chapter introduced the astrological idea of 'evil'
conjunctions. The final chapter was on the calculation of
calendars and involved elaborate mathematics.
The precession of the equinoxes was
recognized, the estimated motion of 54 seconds
per year being much closer to the truth than
the 36 seconds of Hipparchus, though it was
derived from a mystical rather than a scientific
computation.
The cosmology of the Surya Siddhanta placed
a spherical Earth divided into four equal continents
at the centre of the universe. The stars
and other heavenly bodies were supposed to revolve
about Meru, a cosmic mountain whose peak
was the Pole of the Earth's axis; they were sup-
posed to be driven by a cosmic wind. That the
orbits of the five known planets are not perfect
circles was recognized, and the planets were
personified as they were in Greece.
Most notable among the Indian astronomers
were Aryabhata (c. 500 A.D.) and Brahmagupta
(c. 630 A.D.). Aryabhata taught the rotation of
the Earth and developed the theory of epicycles
to explain the planetary motions. He also made
great advances in mathematics. Brahmagupta was
considered by the Arabs as the greatest of the
Indian astronomers, though he rejected Aryabhata's
teaching of the rotation of the Earth. He
wrote books on astronomical observation and
calculation, and his work may be considered as
marking the close of the classical period in India.
Thereafter Arabic science spread into India,
Indian mathematics was taken west by the Arabs,
and there was a general fusion of eastern and
western science during the medieval period.
Indian mathematics had already made great
advances. One of the great classics was the
Sulva-Sutra or 'Rules of the Thread', the earliest
supposed date for which is 800 B.C. It expounded
methods of surveying land by rectangles, and
contained a curious formula for calculating the
ratio of the diagonal of a square to its side, giving
a result which is in error by only 0-000002.
India was the first country to use a complete
decimal system with a place-value notation. It
was used by Aryabhata in the 6th century, and
appears in inscriptions in 595 A.D. At first an
empty place was probably left for the zero, but
by the 9th century a point was in use, and this
later became a small circle (our 'nought'). The
Indian decimal system was taken into the Arab
world in the 9th century by al-Khwarizmi, and
farther west by his translators, whence the
notation, now universally used, is commonly
called 'Arabic'.
In algebra, Brahmagupta in the 7th century A.D.
was able to solve indeterminate equations of the
second degree, and Indian mathematics reached
its highest level in the work of the 9th-century
Jaina master Mahavira of Mysore. His Brief Expla-
nation of the Compendium of Calculation defined
all mathematical terms and dealt with fractions,
proportion, areas, and volumes. It showed how to
calculate shadows and the volumes of excavations,
and gave scores of problems with their
solutions, such as are found in any modern school
text-book. Important works on arithmetic (using
the decimal notation) and algebra were written by
the Hindu Bhaskara Acharya about 1150. He
applied mathematics to astronomy, developing the
theory of epicycles, but retained the cosmology of
the Surya Siddhanta.
Indian science thereafter made little original
progress, though in the 16th century, during the
reign of the Mogul Emperor Akbar, a series of
books were written to summarize Indian science
in a sort of encyclopedia. In the 17th century there
was a revival of observational astronomy, inspired
by the West, and from 1680 to 1730 a series of
large observatories were built at Jaipur, Delhi,
Jjjain, Mathura, and Varanasi. The instruments
were built of stone on an enormous scale, and
enabled much more accurate observations to be
made than was possible with portable instruments
of brass. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the
increasing infiltration of European science and
technology, and the approach to modern science
in which India has had many distinguished workers.
Compiler: C.K.Mohamed/Tellicherry