Science in India - Past & Present

A country which was built and unbuilt many times before others started to silhouette their society into shape; a country which for multiple millennia had the language, science, technology, society and culture which predated a similar Renaissance in Europe by thousands of years and still rivals present-day research in many fields; a country shrouded in mystery to the rest of the world who once looked upon its exoticism with esoteric eyes as an unearthly blend of the Lost Horizon and El Dorado. And although most records of which are either destroyed or distorted, what remains is enough to shine a beacon on mankind’s road to the future.
The oldest systems of existing medicine like Ayurveda, Siddha and Yoga were practised in India as early as 5000 BCE. Cataract and plastic surgeries were being performed in India since 2000 BCE whence it spread to China and Greece. Sushruta Samhita is among the greatest surviving medical treatises from the ancient world. In fact after fruitless attempts, scientists have recently reverted to the Charaka Samhita to treat the Black fever. The world’s first iron pillar in Delhi still captivates archeologists due to its rust-resistant composition. The astronomical and mathematical research of Aryabhatta at age twenty-three in the 5th cen. CE inspired thinkers for many centuries. Brahmagupta, the 7th century Euler of India, whose invention of the zero was just one out of his thousands of works, and Varahamihira, who is known for his ancient encyclopedia, making astrology as a part of science and propounding the idea of gravity for the first time (which was further polished by Bhaskaracharya in the 12th cen. CE, in his addition to the multi-centurial Surya Siddhanta, and described as gurutvakarshan) were among the many intellectual giants of the Golden Age of India.
As per the research of German scholar Gustav Oppert, Shukraniti by Shukracharya elucidated the gunpowder mixture and firearms very thoroughly much before the Chinese claim of its invention. But even till conclusive findings confirm it, it is certain that they were improved and used extensively in medieval India. Not to say the least, the Mysorean iron-cased ‘rocquets’ of Haidar and Tipu were the first missiles of the world carrying payloads, bemusing the ignorant British cavalry and pouring death into their ranks.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a resurgence of scientific discoveries in India, despite of and not because of the British colonialism. Recently in 1985, NASA Scientist Rick Briggs in his paper in the AI Magazine described Sanskrit as the most suitable language for Natural language processing and AI. But by the early modern times, working in Sanskrit had been made out of vogue and Indian minds, with the aid of the books and papers written mostly in English and German, containing the latest scientific expeditions of the European stalwarts of the time, germinated into a sprint with relatively little but momentous contributions. Sir JC Bose demonstrated wireless communication for the first time in the world and Sir M Visvesvaraya helped millions with his creative engineering including the invention of the block irrigation system. SN Bose with his Bose-Einstein statistics and Meghnad Saha with his Ionization equation were never awarded the Nobel. But Sir CV Raman’s ‘new radiation’ made him the first Asian Nobel Laureate in the sciences and is an invaluable tool for material analysis today. S Chandrashekhar, CV Raman’s nephew, who discovered the famous limit named after him and Hargobind Khurana who cracked the genetic code were awarded Nobel Prizes quite befittingly. Ramanujan, a poor, young, uncanny, untaught Indian whose deathbed equations are still being comprehended by the best minds today, after about a century, and getting applied to explain the behaviour of black holes, showed the sceptic otherness that he was far ahead of his time. In medicine, Rotavac vaccine and the world’s first leprosy vaccine have been developed in India recently. Also, Narinder Kapany’s work in Optic fibres and Lalji Singh’s in DNA fingerprinting are few of the thousands of names which resonate modern science.
There have been many more Indian scientists, sung and unsung, with so many accomplishments up their sleeves that far from an article, it may take many a book to merely summarize all and sundry. In the recent years, the surge of the Industrial Revolution 4.0, disruptive technologies, AI, blockchain, automation, unfamiliar diseases, resource-scarcity, new solutions and newer problems have flooded the capricious paradigm.
In 2008, India became the fourth country in the world to place its flag on the moon in the Chandrayaan-I mission, famous for its evidence of lunar water ice confirmed by NASA in 2018. It was followed by its second version in 2019 and a third one aiming to land a rover, planned for 2021. Gaganyaan, India’s human spaceflight mission and Aditya-L1, ISRO’s solar probe are the next in sight. In 2015, years of R&D culminated in the introduction of the world’s smallest combat jet, the indigenous LCA Tejas, developed by Dr. Koti and built by HAL. I guess I would do injustice to the many achievements and names I shall miss in the process of highlighting the few that presently strike my pensive mind. I leave it to the readers to mine deeper into the caverns of India’s vibrant past and present, in the ocean of scientific progress of humankind. — BY RAMAN BUTTA