08-07-2007, 01:30 AM
<b>The work is nearing completion need about 20% more or editing.. .you can check out my site periodicaly for updates.
Here is an excerpt
It is taken as largely axiomatic in the study of the History of the Indic peoples within the confines of the Indian subcontinent that the civilization that remains extant has been brought into the area by migrating races such as the Dravidians , and the Aryans. According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, within the last 3 1/2 millennia, into the subcontinent, from somewhere else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India today is vastly at variance with the puranic accounts handed down to us over several millennia. It is to state it without any embellishments, a revised history that is completely at odds with the traditional history of India. Even so great an effort as the History and Culture of the Indian people edited by RC Majumdar, with the blessings of KM Munshi of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the most famous of Indian historians at the time of Independence accepts the basic framework of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial version of history is now borne by the Indian left including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive defections from its fold and whose only common ideology is the adulation of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty . A substantial percentage of Indians now feel they have a stake in the preservation of this false history and when confronted with the reality of their acquiescence to a false and revised history of their own land by a very recent arrival on the scene, react with irrelevant responses such as âwhy blame the Britishâ (the issue is not one of blame, for after all we are in great admiration of the British for the extraordinary sagacity they displayed in prolonging their imperial rule by every artifice imaginable). One possible reason for such a stance by the Indic in our view is the so called Societal Stockholm Syndrome, which we have elaborated upon elsewhere. We have also dealt with the systematic approach that the British used to remake the weltanshcuung of the indic and to create an international image of the Indic that is much at variance with reality , and the success they achieved in the resulting internalization of these views by the Indic himself in our essay titled the South Asia File.
In this monograph we will study the motivations of individuals who made it a lifelong passion(or at least spent a substantial portion of their life) to study the Indic people and their achievements in sciences and the arts and in the process undertook a dangerous and long journey in order to satisfy their curiosity. The study is startling in that the current disdain with which the Indic is held in the post colonial era is a development that occurred mainly in the last 200 years and that for most of our recorded history the Indic has been held in high esteem by the denizens of the globe. But the pattern of spending a lifetime studying the indics for a lifetime and imbibing their knowledge and then subsequently belittling their achievements was first exhibited by the Afghan scholar Al Biruni ( a very rare instance of such behavior in the ancient and medieval world) is more prevalent in recent times. To the extent that these contributions of the ancent indics are held in high esteem by the occidentals,,, it is because it is understood that these were contributions made by the so called Aryans immediately after arrival in the subcontinent and that such a creative and inventive spark was extinguished shortly thereafter . To quote W W Rouse Ball, the historian of mathematics
âThe Arabs had considerable commerce with India, and a knowledge of one or both of the two great Hindoo works on algebra had been obtained in the Caliphate of Al-Mansur (754-775 AD)though it was not until fifty or seventy years later that they attracted much attention. The algebra and arithmetic of the Arabs were largely founded on these treatises, and I therefore devote this section to the consideration of Hindoo mathematics.The Hindoos like the Chinese have pretended that they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic architecture and sculpture) can be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan invasion. This seems to have taken place at some time in the fifth century or in the sixth century when a tribe of Aryans entered India by the north west part of their country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognized by their superiority over the races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually degeneratedâ
We remind our readers that such a sentiment was expressed as late as the beginning of the 20th century, after the renaiissance and the enlightenment.
In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote the Aryabhata group from the University of Exeter at Exeter in the UK in a paper delivered by Dennis Almeida, titled âTransmission of calculus from Kerala to the westâ
âHowever, we are aware that for some unfathomable reasons, the standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from east to west, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from west to East, but priority and definite contact never establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently. Hence we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose to test the hypothesis on the grounds of 1. motivation, 2. opportunity, 3. circumstantial evidence and 4. documentary evidenceâ
Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pingreeâs PhD thesis titled âMaterials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to Indiaâ. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that needs not to be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer in your initial assumptions and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact
We begin our story by turning our attention to the question of why India has been a subject of such intense interest over the prolonged period of at least 2 ½ millennia
Garland Cannon is the standard conventional english pov. My preference is
Mukherjee, S. N. (1968). Sir William Jones: A study in eighteenth-century British attitudes to India. London, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-05777-one should of course read both
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Here is an excerpt
It is taken as largely axiomatic in the study of the History of the Indic peoples within the confines of the Indian subcontinent that the civilization that remains extant has been brought into the area by migrating races such as the Dravidians , and the Aryans. According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, within the last 3 1/2 millennia, into the subcontinent, from somewhere else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India today is vastly at variance with the puranic accounts handed down to us over several millennia. It is to state it without any embellishments, a revised history that is completely at odds with the traditional history of India. Even so great an effort as the History and Culture of the Indian people edited by RC Majumdar, with the blessings of KM Munshi of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the most famous of Indian historians at the time of Independence accepts the basic framework of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial version of history is now borne by the Indian left including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive defections from its fold and whose only common ideology is the adulation of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty . A substantial percentage of Indians now feel they have a stake in the preservation of this false history and when confronted with the reality of their acquiescence to a false and revised history of their own land by a very recent arrival on the scene, react with irrelevant responses such as âwhy blame the Britishâ (the issue is not one of blame, for after all we are in great admiration of the British for the extraordinary sagacity they displayed in prolonging their imperial rule by every artifice imaginable). One possible reason for such a stance by the Indic in our view is the so called Societal Stockholm Syndrome, which we have elaborated upon elsewhere. We have also dealt with the systematic approach that the British used to remake the weltanshcuung of the indic and to create an international image of the Indic that is much at variance with reality , and the success they achieved in the resulting internalization of these views by the Indic himself in our essay titled the South Asia File.
In this monograph we will study the motivations of individuals who made it a lifelong passion(or at least spent a substantial portion of their life) to study the Indic people and their achievements in sciences and the arts and in the process undertook a dangerous and long journey in order to satisfy their curiosity. The study is startling in that the current disdain with which the Indic is held in the post colonial era is a development that occurred mainly in the last 200 years and that for most of our recorded history the Indic has been held in high esteem by the denizens of the globe. But the pattern of spending a lifetime studying the indics for a lifetime and imbibing their knowledge and then subsequently belittling their achievements was first exhibited by the Afghan scholar Al Biruni ( a very rare instance of such behavior in the ancient and medieval world) is more prevalent in recent times. To the extent that these contributions of the ancent indics are held in high esteem by the occidentals,,, it is because it is understood that these were contributions made by the so called Aryans immediately after arrival in the subcontinent and that such a creative and inventive spark was extinguished shortly thereafter . To quote W W Rouse Ball, the historian of mathematics
âThe Arabs had considerable commerce with India, and a knowledge of one or both of the two great Hindoo works on algebra had been obtained in the Caliphate of Al-Mansur (754-775 AD)though it was not until fifty or seventy years later that they attracted much attention. The algebra and arithmetic of the Arabs were largely founded on these treatises, and I therefore devote this section to the consideration of Hindoo mathematics.The Hindoos like the Chinese have pretended that they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic architecture and sculpture) can be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan invasion. This seems to have taken place at some time in the fifth century or in the sixth century when a tribe of Aryans entered India by the north west part of their country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognized by their superiority over the races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually degeneratedâ
We remind our readers that such a sentiment was expressed as late as the beginning of the 20th century, after the renaiissance and the enlightenment.
In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote the Aryabhata group from the University of Exeter at Exeter in the UK in a paper delivered by Dennis Almeida, titled âTransmission of calculus from Kerala to the westâ
âHowever, we are aware that for some unfathomable reasons, the standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from east to west, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from west to East, but priority and definite contact never establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently. Hence we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose to test the hypothesis on the grounds of 1. motivation, 2. opportunity, 3. circumstantial evidence and 4. documentary evidenceâ
Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pingreeâs PhD thesis titled âMaterials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to Indiaâ. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that needs not to be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer in your initial assumptions and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact
We begin our story by turning our attention to the question of why India has been a subject of such intense interest over the prolonged period of at least 2 ½ millennia
Garland Cannon is the standard conventional english pov. My preference is
Mukherjee, S. N. (1968). Sir William Jones: A study in eighteenth-century British attitudes to India. London, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-05777-one should of course read both
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