Can the Indian Knowledge Systems be defended from pseudoscience?

Last summer, I taught a course called Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Thinking. Much of it was focussed on the history of mathematics in India: numbers in the Vedas, the geometry of the Sulbasutras and the work of Pingala, Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskaracharya, and Ramanujan.

Teaching this course was among the pleasures of my year.

It was also difficult. A large part of what I did in that classroom was not teaching what Indian mathematicians had achieved, but separating it from what they did not.

We read SG Dani’s Myths and Reality: On ‘Vedic Mathematics’ to see why a set of arithmetic shortcuts compiled and published in 1965 has nothing to do with the Vedas, and Rick Briggs’s Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence to trace where the claim that Sanskrit is “the language of AI” or the most logical programming language ever, came from – and to see that the paper itself says no such thing.

We worked through why a genuine theorem from the Sulbasutras is not made truer, or more Indian, by attaching to it claims it does not support.

Teaching topics in Indian Knowledge Systems meant defending it from pseudoscience. The boundaries between science, culture, belief and pseudoscience are narrow, and a lot of work in this field involves keeping them clear and separated.

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