History of Science and Technology in Ancient India- Formation of the Theoretical Fundamentals of Natural Science (An Old and Rare Book)

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Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (b. 1919-d. 1993) is MA, D Litt of the Calcutta University, D. Sc honoris causa of the Academy of Sciences of Moscow and the Brst Indian Member of the German Academy of Sciences, Berlin. Professor Chattopadhyaya taught Philosophy in the "City College, Calcutta for about three decades. He was a visiting Professor at several universities in India and abroad. I He is about the only contemporary Philosopher and writer of India whose works are extensively translated almost in every major Indian and foreign languages including German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese etc His published works in Bengali and English total over 56 or more including some of the extraordinary books for children and poems written by him, besides his prodigious editorial work like that of Rgveda in Bengali, Lama Taranatha's History of Buddhism in India in English, the Indological quarterly Indian Studies: Past & Present (since 1959) and the two volumes of Studies in the History of Science in India, etc Besides being elected 'National Fellow of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, member of the National Commission of the History of Science in India, Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi.

The present work is a sequel to my History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings (Calcutta 1986, with a Foreword by Joseph Needham). It may be convenient specially for those who have not gone through it to introduce the main theme of the present volume with a brief recapitulation specially of two points sought to be discussed in the earlier one.

The first of those is concerning the broad and revised periodisation of the history under review. The second one is about the nature of the earliest science.

With the archaeological excavations beginning from the third decade of the twentieth century, the need was felt for a radical revision of the general framework of the history of the ancient Indian subcontinent. The earlier historians were under the necessary obligation of beginning practically every aspect of this history with what they could read in the Vedic literature, for no other data were then available to start with. But the archaeologists' spade has dismantled this limitation. It dug up the out- lines of an imposing earlier civilization with a considerable number of flourishing cities. This is conventionally referred to as the Indus Valley civilization, reaching its peak long before the making of the Vedic literature. Its more prominent centres came to their end roughly in 1750 B.C. for complex reasons the nature of which the archaeologists are still trying to ascertain. However, they are agreed that this civilization represented the period of our First Urbanization. Its end was followed by a technologically fallow period stretching over about a thousand years a period of 'reverting to the preliterate peasant communities'. Hence archaeologists often call it the Dark Age or the Dark Period. Then, roughly from 700 or 600 B.C. was foreshadowed a new turn towards building up the city life again, which soon took a clear shape and hence is characterized as the turn to the Second Urbanization.