Beyond the Canon: Mathematical Practice and its Practitioners in Early Modern South India By Dr Senthil Babu
Dr Senthil Babu began the talk by drawing the audience’s attention to the relatively small discipline of historical mathematics. He explained that historical mathematical practice looks at the ways in which mathematics was experienced by social groups in different time-periods and regions.
Early mathematical historians who included Jesuits, British, French and German Indologists, and Indian Nationalists studied material that was written only in Sanskrit, thus making it canonical. Other vernacular texts such as the ones in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, were largely ignored and remain, to this day, uncatalogued in the archives. Beginning from the Shulba Sutras in the Vedic Period and Aryabhata’s Aryabhatiya in 6th Cent. CE, the canonical texts include the works of Madhava, Bhaskara I, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II, Mahavira, and the Bakhshali Manuscripts. From here, the scholars jump to Srinivasa Ramanujan, overlooking the period in between. One possible reason that Dr Babu identifies for this is that the nationalists treated their immediate past, i.e. pre-colonial India, as weak and powerless, and thus consciously disregarded the existence of advanced science and instead, focused on India’s ancient wisdom.
In his research, Dr Babu critically unpacks and reconstructs the experience of mathematics as embedded in the work of artisans, accountants and teachers from Early Modern South India (15th Cent. CE onwards). He groups the mathematical practices from this period into three categories. The first is the practice of craft-centred apprenticeship. This comprised the math for measurement of land and weights and structural designs used by sculptors, artisans and boatmen. The second category takes account of non-practicing teachers who imparted rudimentary training in arithmetic in traditional, pre-European schools such as ‘paathshaala’ and ‘thinnai’. The third category is theory-centred and is attributed to the Brahmins, who owing to their ritual sanction, developed math along geometrical and astronomical lines, albeit for ritual or ceremonial purposes.
Dr Babu exemplified a particular mathematical problem that was used across linguistic cultures. Nevertheless, the above practices remained restricted to specific communities and failed to make large-scale impact. He presented examples from several texts of the Indian vernacular, like the Kanakatikaram, Ganita Kaumudi, Sara Sangraha Ganitamu, among others.
The speaker further called upon researchers to look at new ways of desacralizing mathematical texts without denigrating them, and locating them contextually. The talk was followed by a Question-Answer session.
About the Speaker –
Dr Senthil Babu is Associated Researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry, and has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He has researched and published widely on mathematics education, history and postcolonial pedagogy, as also on South Indian texts and writing in Tamil.
– By Akshay Patil.
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