Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India.

• Author: Pingree, David
• Position: Reviews of Books

Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. By GYAN PRAKASH. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Pp. xiii + 304. $49.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

This is a disappointing book. It is true that Prakash describes many interesting events that occurred in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India and the ideas expressed by a number of Englishmen and Hindus who lived at that time, all of which are in some way connected with "science" (a concept Prakash never tries to define). He is attempting to show the ways in which European science was used by the British to strengthen their grasp on the subcontinent, but at the same time how it challenged Indian intellectuals to beat the British either by asserting the superiority of ancient Indian science or by becoming themselves scientists in the European tradition. Both responses, he claims, led them to believe in and act for the political liberation of India from British rule.

The selected interactions between European and Indian traditional sciences referred to by Prakash are considered without any awareness of the historical roots of Indian science, which had often faced before the advent of the British many of the same questions they provoked. Thus, we are told of those who interpreted Vedic texts as precursors of modern science, but nothing about the validity of such claims, much less about the various methods employed by classical Indian scientists either to deny Vedic authority in science or to relegate it to the social world, not the physical world we actually inhabit. I think in particular of Nilakantha Somayajin's Jyotirmimamsa, on the superiority of perception over sruti in scientific endeavors, (1) and of Nityananda's restriction of divinely revealed astronomy to calendrics and astrology. (2) This is also true of the contest between puranic and siddhantic astronomy, which Prakash discusses on pp. 64-69. The example he gives--the Bhugolasara of Omkara Bhatta--is influence d by the argument presented by Kevalarama, Jayasirnha's jyotisaraja, in his Bhugolakhagolavirodhaparihara which, responding to an ancient tradition of siddhantic astronomers ridiculing the puranas that goes back to at least the eighth century, seeks to remove the contradictions. Prakash is completely unfamiliar with this historical tradition, and so misjudges Omkara's intentions. He even states that Omkara's "telling of the tale of Western expansion (south of the equator) as the story of astronomy's progress"...