Essay:
Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray:
An epitome of scientific attitude and human values
By Soumitro Banerjee

Prafulla Chandra’s unique contribution: The history of chemistry in India

From his childhood, Prafulla Chandra was interested in history, and as a chemist it was natural to be curious about the history of chemistry. In studying this aspect from books by European authors, he noticed that they wrote about the developments in chemistry in ancient Egypt, Syria, Arabia and China, but there was almost no mention of India. From his knowledge of the history of ancient India, Prafulla Chandra knew that there had been many significant developments in chemistry in India, but at that time there was hardly any systematic research to find out exactly what was known in what period in the Indian history.
Prafulla Chandra decided to take up that gigantic task.

Today it may be difficult to figure out how difficult the task was. The ancient manuscripts that might contain concrete information of this aspect are mostly destroyed; some were still there, but are hidden moth-eaten somewhere in the personal collections of wealthy Rajas and zamindars; some were there in the collections of Euro- pean museums. It was a Herculean task to collect these, which Prafulla Chandra did over a long period of about 12 years. He had to learn Sanskrit and Pali to read these (he also took help from scholars of ancient Indian languages like Acharya Brajendranath Sil and Pandit Nabakanta Kabibhusana). But a bigger challenge lay somewhere else. At that time the learned community was divided into two poles in their views of ancient India. The anglophiles belonged to one camp, which were all praises of the language, literature, culture, and science of the British and could see nothing good in ancient India. In the other camp were those who, out of their nationalistic sentiments, sang praises of an imaginary glory of ancient India. For them, the mention of “pushpak vimana” was an incontrovertible proof of the discovery of aeroplane at the time of Ramayana; the mention of the word “taranga” made them believe that electromagnetic waves were discovered in India millennia before Maxwell. In such a cultural atmosphere it was very difficult to do a proper analysis of India’s scientific heritage.

This is exactly what Prafulla Chandra did in his book “The History of Hindu Chemistry” (Vol. I was published in 1902, and Vol. 2 in 1908). In this book he showed, from an unbiased scientific standpoint, how much the knowledge of acids, alkali, metals, and alloys proceeded in different
epochs of Indian history. He showed that, the science of metallurgy and of medicine had advanced significantly in ancient India; when Europe was practising alchemy, India was not far behind. In doing so, he had to face the question: Why did science in India decline and disappear, so that there was no cultivation of science after Bhaskara?

Acharya Ray identified three causes behind this. The first was the introduction of the caste system. “The caste system was established de novo in a more rigid form. The drift of Manu and of the later Puranas is in the direction of glorifying the priestly class, which set up most arrogant and outrageous pretensions”, wrote Acharya Ray. “The arts being thus relegated to the low castes and the professions made hereditary, a certain degree of fineness, delicacy and deftness in manipulation was no doubt secured, but this was done at a terrible cost. The intellectual portion of the community being thus withdrawn from active participation in the arts, the how and why of phenomena—the coordination of cause and effect—were lost sight of, and the spirit of enquiry gradually died out among a nation naturally prone to speculation and metaphysical subtleties, and India for once bade adieu to experimental and inductive sciences. Her soil was rendered mortally unfit for the birth of a Boyle, a Descartes or a Newton and her very name was all but expunged from the map of the scientific world.”

The reason for the decline of the rich culture of medicine and surgery (of Charaka and Susruta tradition), according to Acharya Ray, was the introduction of the code of conduct by Manu . Acharya Ray writes, “According to Susruta , the dissection of dead bodies is a sine qua non to the student of surgery and his high authority lays particular stress on knowledge gained from experiment and observation. But Manu would have none of it. The very touch of a corpse, according to Manu , is enough to bring contamination to the sacred person of a Brahmin. Thus we find that shortly after the time of Bhagavata , the handling of a lancet was discouraged, and anatomy and surgery fell into disuse and
became to all intents and purposes lost sciences to the Hindus.”

The third reason identified by him was the spread of the Vedanta philosophy among the educated section: “The Vadanta philosophy, as modified and expanded by Samkara , which teaches the unreality of the material world, is also to a large extent responsible for bringing the study of physical science into disrepute.” Science asks questions about the material world, and seeks the answers. Acharya Ray felt that if one believes that the material world itself is unreal or “maya”, it is impossible for him to harbour curiosity about it, let alone seeking truth about it.

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