Why ‘national’ science has been obsessed with ancient history

Between 1902 and 1904, he published A History of Hindu Chemistry: an attempt to establish the legitimacy Indian scientific modernity in a recovered classical past. This pairing — laboratory science and archival history — was not accidental. Ray was deeply shaped by his correspondence with the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot. Berthelot’s project — tracing chemistry’s development from alchemy to modernity — made the history of science itself an instrument of national progress.

Yet when Ray sought to write an Indian history following Berthelot’s model, he was both inspired and constrained. He was inspired by the possibility of making Indian science visible through historical reconstruction yet constrained by the Eurocentric assumptions built into Berthelot’s framework: that the ‘classical past’ was the sole source of scientific spirit; that Indian alchemy must be derivative; and that experimental science was fundamentally a European invention.

A history of Hindu Chemistry written by Prafulla Chandra Ray (Amazon.com)

In colonial India, British intellectuals shared precisely these assumptions. They positioned themselves as the sole bearers of scientific temperament, dismissing the Indian mind as incapable of scientific reasoning. Ray’s contestation of Berthelot’s claim sought to prove that Hindu civilisation had invented science. By demonstrating that ancient Hindu texts contained chemical knowledge comparable to modern discoveries, Ray sought to show that Indian inferiority was not inherent but held back by colonial rule.

Yet in attempting to prove Indian priority, Ray reproduced the very move that colonialism had made — that the antiquity of science is proof of civilisational worth, and only by claiming this could Indians claim equality. This impulse — to locate modern science in an ancient national past — became a defining feature of Indian intellectual life.

Today, when NCERT textbooks assert that Brahmagupta and Bhaskaracharya developed algebra independently and before Arab scholars, they repeat a logic that has haunted Indian scholarship for nearly two centuries. Such claims are framed as historical corrections. Yet, they obscure a complex reality: the compulsion to locate science in antiquity was itself a response to colonialism.

The colonial paradox: Science as the language of rule

From the East India Company to the British Raj, science became the language of rule. Empirical rationality was deployed as both method and justification for domination. Surveys, censuses, geological studies, and botanical classification rendered India knowable, manageable, and controllable. Science functioned as an apparatus of power.

This produced profound epistemological consequences. If science marked civilisation — and science was Western — then the absence of ‘Indian’ science became proof of Indian inferiority. Colonial ideology portrayed indigenous knowledge as pre-scientific, superstitious, and mythological. Western science was introduced not merely to educate Indians in rational methods, but to civilise them.

A profound contradiction lay embedded here. Colonial rule required Indians accept the universality of Western science while accepting their own particularity—their difference, their unfitness for equality with European rulers. Science was universal yet Western; to become modern, Indians should embrace it yet recognize it as not theirs. This created the colonial paradox: to be modern meant possessing science, yet science was Western, which meant Indians could never fully be modern without ceasing to be Indian.

This paradox generated acute intellectual anxiety among Western-educated Indian elites. Their response was to deny the Western monopoly on science. Ancient India, they argued, possessed sophisticated scientific knowledge.

Rajendralal Mitra exemplified this response. An antiquarian and archaeologist who became head of the Asiatic Society, Mitra confronted James Fergusson, the leading British authority on Indian architecture. Fergusson argued Indian stone architecture derived from Greek models via Alexander and Greco-Bactrian kingdoms. Mitra countered: Indian architecture was “perfectly self-evolved, self-contained, and independent,” equivalent to Greek classicism.

Yet in defending Indian architecture, Mitra did not reject the criteria by which Greek architecture was valued. He accepted entirely that a civilization’s greatness derived from possessing a classical tradition—he proved India possessed such a tradition by measuring Indian temples against Greek standards of beauty and proportion. He did not dispute classicism as a way to measure a civilization’s worth; he merely argued India met these standards.

As comparative scholars have noted, while Mitra denied Greek influence, his Japanese contemporary Itō Chūta sought to prove Japanese architecture’s links to Greek antiquity. Both operated within identical logic: proving their civilisations’ equality by demonstrating classical traditions, using classicism — itself a European invention — as the yardstick of value.

This pattern repeated across late nineteenth-century Indian intellectual life. Reformers like Swami Dayananda reinterpreted the Vedas as repositories of scientific knowledge. In Satyarth Prakash, Dayananda reimagined the sacred fire (homa) as a scientific instrument for atmospheric purification, fragmenting matter into fine particles diffusing throughout the atmosphere. In debates with Christian missionaries and Muslim theologians, he invoked “the authority of profane sciences” to establish Vedic knowledge as true.

Medieval texts on chemistry and alchemy were excavated and reinterpreted as containing genuine scientific knowledge. Scholars argued that Indian sages and intellectuals developed sophisticated knowledge systems that had become dormant over centuries of decay, and that the recovery of this knowledge would lead to the ‘regeneration of the nation.’ All this labour pursued a single aim: to demonstrate that India had invented science, that modernity was not a Western monopoly.

Yet this defence accepted a fatal premise: that what matters is who invented science first. In doing so, Indian intellectuals reinforced the binary they sought to dismantle: Modern Science = Western; Ancient Science = Non-Western. Science was imagined as linear progress from a single origin, with the West as the present and others as the past.

A global pattern

This was not unique to India. Across the world, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, societies pursued similar strategies. This was not coincidence but structural response to European imperialism making science itself a weapon of power.

In Japan, after the Meiji Restoration, scientists framed their work within “competitive nationalism”. Physicist Hantaro Nagaoka’s work on atomic structure was rigorous and significant to the advancement of the discipline; yet the Japanese celebrated it as proof that Japanese minds could produce world-class science.

Physicist Hantaro Nagaoka’s work on atomic structure was rigorous and significant to the advancement of the discipline; yet the Japanese celebrated it as proof that Japanese minds could produce world-class science. (Wikimedia Commons)

Facing Western military conquest and Japanese expansion, Chinese intellectuals recovered and celebrated ancient Chinese scientific achievements—the compass, gunpowder, printing, papermaking—as proof of continued Chinese scientific potential. This became central to Chinese national identity. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, China presented its scientific identity almost entirely through antiquity, not modern achievements in quantum mechanics, contemporary genetics, and physics.

Nineteenth-century European intellectuals, fascinated by the preservation of Greek texts in Arabic, identified the period from roughly 800 AD to 1250 AD (Abbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Cairo, Umayyad Cordoba) as a scientific peak, and developed the concept of an Islamic “golden age”. Scholars such as Gustave Le Bon, Ernst Renan, Ignaz Goldziher and John Tyndall acknowledged Islamic scientific achievements. While they celebrated this ‘Islamic golden age’ as a genuine scientific high point that Europe later drew upon, this recognition of Islamic learning came pre-packaged within a narrative of decline. It allowed acknowledging non-European intellectual contributions while arguing that civilizations such as that of the Ottomans and Persians subsequently declined and needed Western modernization.

Mirroring the Indian case of ‘ancient science’, Ottoman intellectuals later adopted the same language defensively, invoking past centres of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine to rebut claims of Western superiority — yet still operating within a framework where scientific legitimacy depended on a lost classical peak rather than present agency.

The reality of scientific circulation

This global trap obscures how science develops, circulates, and transforms across cultures and centuries.

When medieval Arab mathematicians encountered Indian mathematical concepts — the decimal system, zero as a placeholder, and algorithmic procedures — they did not simply copy them; they integrated them with Greek geometry and Persian astronomical knowledge, developing new notational systems.

When Leonardo Fibonacci encountered mathematics as it was practised in the early thirteenth century in North Africa, he did not merely transmit it to Europe. Rather, in Liber Abaci, he translated, adapted, and introduced Arabic numerals to Western Europe, emphasising commercial and practical applications serving emerging merchant economies of medieval Italian city-states. The result was a product of cross-cultural encounter and creative appropriation.

In the early twentieth century, Japanese physicists working in quantum theory were not passive recipients but participants in a global scientific conversation. They worked in laboratories with German instruments, read papers in English and German, corresponded with physicists across continents, and offered theoretical insights. The same was true in colonial India. Meghnad Saha and Satyendra Nath Bose learned relativity and quantum theory amidst nationalist ferment. They read German scientific journals as a boycott of British gatekeeping, taught themselves the language, and then took an audacious step. Translating Einstein’s papers into English, they published The Principle of Relativity in 1920 in Calcutta. Their translation travelled back to Britain and America and reversed the usual direction of scientific diffusion. Einstein later translated Bose’s work into German, extending the circuit again.

The genealogical trap and its consequences

By insisting on unbroken genealogies from ancient mathematics to modern algebra, Indian textbooks reproduce a Eurocentric/colonial logic. Science becomes a national possession, capable of being stolen or reclaimed.

This has pedagogical consequences. When students focus on the ‘antiquity’ of science, they learn little about how it operates today in society, and about the institutions and politics that shape it. By claiming that Indians invented algebra and Arabs merely refined it, or that the Vedas contained atomic theory, students learn that what matters is the purity of ancestral claims, not the complexity of knowledge production in the past and the present.

The deeper reality is that Indian scholars were not passive recipients of Western science during colonialism; they were active participants in knowledge production. This participation occurred within radically asymmetrical power relations: indigenous contributions were frequently erased or credited to Europeans, and knowledge production benefits accrued disproportionately to colonial rulers.

Yet, the global tapestry of science demonstrates that it has never belonged to any single nation or culture. It is fundamentally a product of circulation— the movement of ideas, instruments, texts, and people across borders. This circulation has always occurred within power structures: colonial conquest, imperial trade networks, unequal exchanges, but it also created new knowledge. Knowledge, even when ‘European’, was not simply imposed. It was taken up, reshaped, and transformed by those who encountered it.

Scientists such as Prafulla Ray, Jagadish Chandra Bose, CV Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, and Meghnad Saha worked with nationalist aspirations in a colonial context; yet they are remembered for made lasting contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

The history of science is not a sequence of national inventions, but a global dialogue. It is time we taught it that way.