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... [continues]

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