Science and Technology

Advancement of Science and Technology of Ancient India
Since 1858 till 1948, India has been under the British rule, the period also known as ‘British Raj’. The scientific, technological and medical developments that took place remains to be a debate till today of whether India introduced its own developments or silently borrowed from the West. But a history of science in India must also be a history of India, not merely a history of the projection of western science onto India. Over this 200-year period, there were three main elements that broadly typified science, technology and medicine in India. They are:
1) Traditions of India’s own science, technology and medicine were subject to internal variations and different historical and cultural practices, and the legacies these provided for the subsequent era of the British rule.
2) The social and intellectual impact of the nature of western science, technology and medicine as practised in India.
3) Authority of science, technology and medicine as central attributes of India’s modernity, drawing upon indigenous as well as western sources.
In astronomy, particularly in mathematics and medicine, Hindu science was considered to have been amazingly advanced well before the dawn of the Christian era and to have been the root of the discoveries such as Arabic numeral and the use of zero that were later taken up and incorporated into western civilization. However, Indian civilization was unable to maintain its achievements and failed into decline. It is believed that it happened because of ‘the rise of the Muslim power in South Asia in AD 1100’ (Arnold, 2000. P. 3). Moreover, there has been a continuous emphasis to demonstrate that India, far from existing in cultural and technological isolation, had over the centuries borrowed extensively from and contributed generously to the scientific and technological knowledge of neighbouring regions, Middle East, China, and South East Asia and in the fields as diverse as architecture, astronomy, chemistry, agriculture, medicine and textile production. It has been reasoned that science was not a property of a single society but could be truly cosmopolitan, absorbing and assimilating information and ideas from a wide variety of sources and location. Britain believed that it had a capacity to modernise and civilise India, but there was a contradiction or a sort of a belief that the Indians were unready to receive the benefits of scientific modernity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Indian scientists and intellectuals tried to construct their own brand of India modernity, particularly through the selective incorporation of Hindu ideas and traditions. British Raj, officially known as the British Indian Empire, was a historical period during which most of the Indian subcontinent (that is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) were under the colonial authority of the British Empire. Prior to 1858, Britain’s interest and possessions in India had been administered by the British East India Company. The British East India Company started in 1600 and ended in 1874. It was chartered by Queen Elizabeth 1 for trade with Asia. The Company closely regulated European access to India in order to preserve its commercial privileges. The aim of the merchants was to break the Dutch monopoly of the spice trade with the East Indies. Later in 1623, it was defeated by the Dutch and then turned to concentrate on their activities in India. At first, astronomy seemed a likely bridge between Western and Indian scientific knowledge. Europeans were employed as astronomers at Indian courts. A further stimulus to British interest in Indian astronomy was a paper by the Scots mathematician John Playfair in 1789 on ‘the Astronomy of the Brahmins’. This took up the idea, earlier put forward by the French astronomers Le Gentil and Bailly that Indian astronomy was not part of the western astronomical tradition, but that it was an entirely separate system, dating from as early as 3000 BC. In 1844, a writer in the Calcutta Review acknowledged that the Hindus had at a very early date been able to predict eclipses of the sun and the moon with ‘very considerable accuracy’ (Arnold, 2000, p.37). But it seems that, according to the writer that Indians had not only failed to advance further but actually retrograded in their knowledge of the principles of science. The nineteenth century can be seen as an age of innovative steam technologies which was developed first in Europe and then diffused to other regions of the world. India was taken as an example to exemplify the momentous scale of the process of the massive transfer of technology from the west.
There was a decline of traditional modes of textile manufacture in the early decades of the nineteenth century to competition from British cotton mills, which first cut off India’s exports and then flooded India itself with cheap goods against which handloom production could not compete. The result was to force impoverished weavers into the already crowded ranks of agricultural labourers. Consequently, this contributed to the devastating famines of the nineteenth century. The rise of India’s own mill industry after 1850 was not sufficient to provide an adequate alternative source of employment. By 1915, cotton was one of India’s leading industries in terms of the capital invested and the number of mills and workers employed. However, it was an industry plagued by technological backwardness and constrained by foreign competition. The majority of textile mills in India followed British designs and housed British machinery. More than ninety per cent of the textile machinery for cotton and jute mills imported into India between the 1850’s and 1930’s came from Britain. India gained few benefits for its own industrial technology and despite the enormous growth of the industrial sector, a machine and tool making industry had barely begun to emerge in India before 1939. Nevertheless despite the dominance of imported machinery and the presence of Europeans technicians, India’s textile mills also to some extent reflected local conditions and pre-existing work practices. For centuries before the advent of the colonial rule, India had been famous, for its textile and particularly for the quality and colourful variety of cottonwoods. Until the late eighteenth century it was ‘probably the world’s greatest producer of cotton textiles’. Domestic taste and external demand gave incentives to produce new technologies such as the spinning wheel or ‘charka’. ‘This labour-saving device helped speed up the process of spinning, thus making larger quantities of yarn available for weaving, it also produced yarn of a more even quality than could be spun by hand (Arnold, 2000, p.94). The success of the Indian textile industry lay not in machinery but in low-cost labor, in the abundance of raw cotton and the manual dexterity and knowledge of spinners, weavers and dyers. Shipbuilding was a well established craft at numerous points along the Indian coastline long before the arrival of the Europeans and was an important factor in the high level of Indian maritime activity in the Indian Ocean region. Indian ships were made from local timber and teak and because of this they were durable and well built for commercial use. European trade was initially an incentive to Indian shipbuilding just like it was with the cotton mills. Vessels built in ports like Masuipatam and Surat in India from Indian hardwoods by local craftsmen were cheaper and tougher than their European counterparts. Between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, Indian shipyards produced a series of vessels that had Indian contributions such as the treatment of planks with lime to discourage wood boring worms incorporated. A large proportion of them were built in Bombay where the Company had established a small shipyard. ‘The Britannia, a ship of 74.9 tons launched in 1778, so impressed the Court of Directors when it reached Britain that several new ships were commissioned from Bombay, some of which later passed into the hands of the Royal Navy’ (Arnold, 2000, p.102). It seems that the ships constructed at Bombay in its heyday were said to be ‘vastly superior to anything built anywhere else in the world’ (Arnold, 2000, p. 102). Like the railway locomotives in later years, few of these steamships and tugs were built in India. Prefabricated parts were sent from Britain and so Britain engineering firms were technologically and financially the principal beneficiaries. It could be argued that the decline of Indian shipbuilding was inevitable once steam-engines and iron hulls began to replace wooden sailing vessels in other words what destroyed Indian shipbuilding was British iron. But the demise of shipbuilding owed more to political influence and economic self interest than to the direct consequences of technological change. Like Indian textiles in an earlier age, the success of Indian shipbuilding amazed and alarmed British shipbuilders and shipping firms: pressure was applied through Parliament and to restrict the entry of Indian vessels into British ports and penalise their cargoes. India’s shipbuilding industry was prevented from continuing to develop, even though it had a proven ability to adapt to changing technological needs. Britain’s steam revolution was quick to display itself in India’s capital cities and through the operations of the East India Company.
Overall, one is able to see the technological and scientific developments in India and how they were contributed partially by the British colonial rule. At present, India has rapidly developed and learned many technological advances from the British and is constantly improving on it to produce a better standard of living for its citizens.

References
Arnold, D. (2000). Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Website: Encyclopaedia Britannica

References: Arnold, D. (2000). Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Website: Encyclopaedia Britannica