The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths Behind the Zero and Other Glories

Author: Sidin Vadukut

• The problem, I suppose, was not with what Justice Katju said but the fact that he said it. A retired Supreme Court judge. A man of broad and deep scholarship. A man who should know better than to resort to made-up statistics and punditry. What were journalists for, then?

• As Abraham Lincoln once famously tweeted: ‘You can’t make this stuff up.’

• Publishing dubious potted history on your blog is one thing. But reading out the most hackneyed email forward in Independent India’s history in Parliament, and thereby recording your inability to tell fact from froth in perpetuity, is a completely different, hilarious thing.

• Publishing dubious potted history on your blog is one thing. But reading out the most hackneyed email forward in Independent India’s history in Parliament, and thereby recording your inability to tell fact from froth in perpetuity, is a completely different, hilarious thing. Especially if you’re a minister of state.

• One of the biggest Hindi film hits of 2007 was the Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif starrer Namastey London. The film grossed some $15 million internationally, and told the story of a British-Indian girl who is forcibly married off to a lovable country bumpkin from Lassi Road, Bumpkinpur, North India.

• A little ignorance is admissible in even the highest circles of government. In fact, it is often advisable.

• This is when you begin to wonder: How far does this rabbit hole of instant jingoism go? How many policies are made, positions are taken and decisions are executed in complete ignorance of historical truth?

• I noticed a massive poster on the wall emblazoned with a quote: ‘Be the change you want to see.’ Underneath was printed the name of the utterer of these immortal words: Mahatma Gandhi. Unfortunately, Gandhi actually never said those words.

• Why are we so easily swayed by facts forwarded by email? Why do so many Indians believe that the Taj Mahal was originally a temple called Tejo Mahalaya?

• The first periodical in the world to call itself a ‘magazine’ was The Gentleman’s Magazine founded in London in 1731.

• In 1794, at a time when European surgeons were still struggling with grafting skin from one place of the body to another, Cowasjee had had a nose job done.

• The Sushruta Samhita is one of ancient India’s greatest texts of any kind. Along with the Charaka Samhita, it forms one of the two canonical texts of Ayurveda.

• The first hurdle in his path is the origin of the Sushruta Samhita itself. The version we have today is the end product of at least one major revision of a pre-existing version. That revision and restructuring of the Sushruta Samhita was carried out by the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Therefore it is nearly impossible to tell how much of the current text is original.

• After much cross-referencing and analysis, Bhishagratna finally suggests that the Sushruta Samhita was written two centuries before the birth of the Buddha. Which implies that the author of the first edition of the Samhita lived around 800 BCE.

• By several accounts, the Bower Manuscript is the earliest recorded mention of Sushruta the surgeon and physician in a dated document.

• By several accounts, the Bower Manuscript is the earliest recorded mention of Sushruta the surgeon and physician in a dated document. We can now say with some confidence that at least by 650 CE the ancients knew the teachings of Sushruta, if not Sushruta himself, well enough to quote them in medical compendiums and manuals.

• Fine. The Cowasjee process was known in India centuries ago. But was it invented in India?

• All roads, as it were, leads back to a particular Indian scientific environment that gave rise to the Samhita.

• For about two and a half centuries, one of the greatest empires in Indian history, and one of the most overlooked in global history, reigned from what is now a tiny village in Tamil Nadu. Eighty kilometres away from Thanjavur, Gangaikondacholapuram is today a small dot on the map known mainly for a spectacular Siva temple—part of a triumvirate of Chola temples that together form a UNESCO World Heritage monument.

• Gangaikondacholapuram is quite a mouthful. But it becomes easier to say it once you know what the name stands for: ‘The town of the Chola who acquired the Ganga’.

• The earliest Chola kings we know with any certainty can be dated back to around 300 BCE.

• Historian Eraly says that our primary source for information on South India of this early period is primarily Greek. Much of this, in turn, was hearsay from traders and merchants. The Greeks referred to the region as Damirica, possibly a corruption of the word Tamizhakam—abode of the Tamils—and had some interesting notions about South Indians.

• The Chola Empire vanished into the mists of history around 1300 CE, when the last king, Rajendra Chola III, was defeated in battle the arch-rival Pandya dynasty.

• The Chola Empire vanished into the mists of history around 1300 CE, when the last king, Rajendra Chola III, was defeated in battle the arch-rival Pandya dynasty. Which gives the Cholas a historical span of 1,600 years. Perhaps this will help put this longevity into perspective: You, my reader, live closer in time to Rajendra Chola III than he did to the first Chola kings.

• Perhaps this will help put this longevity into perspective: You, my reader, live closer in time to Rajendra Chola III than he did to the first Chola kings.

• But why should this matter to Sceptical Patriots like you and me, you ask? This is because the time has come for us to investigate yet another ‘India fact’. It is a popular one. And it is the idea that India has never colonized another country in 10,000 years.

• Each of the newly designed high value notes was decorated with the picture of an important historical monument. The 10,000-rupee note was decorated with an image of India’s national emblem, the Lion Capital of Ashoka; the 5,000-rupee note had a picture of the Gateway of India in Mumbai; the smallest of the three, the 1,000-rupee note, had a picture of Thanjavur’s Brihadeeswara Temple.

• Had the note been of a smaller denomination, the temple may have found more widespread mileage. Unfortunately, 1,000 rupees was an astounding sum of money in the 1950s, and it seems unlikely that many Indians noticed the marvel on their big money.

• When the 1,000-rupee note was reintroduced two decades later, it was as part of the new Mahatma Gandhi series. Because, you know, we don’t have enough Mahatma Gandhi going around.

• It is also considered extremely unlucky for politicians to visit the temple—both Indira Gandhi and M.G. Ramachandran died shortly after visiting the complex.

• The only other figure that comes even close to emulating Gandhi’s ubiquity is the great emperor Ashoka. Obviously we don’t see portraits and statues of Ashoka everywhere. Instead, his presence looms over India in the form of the Lion Capital of Sarnath.

• In six weeks, James Prinsep had cracked the Ashoka code. In his fascinating book, India Discovered, John Keay explains how this discovery completely rewrote Indian history:

• The temple at Thanjavur was commissioned during the reign of Rajaraja I, the first great emperor of the Cholas.

• These inscriptions dated to around 1033 CE. They were copied down and published over eight and a half centuries later, in 1891, by Hultzsch. Enough time, surely, for all these places of Cholan conquest—Kedaram, Sri Vijaya, Pannai, Malaiyur—to have been identified, chronicled and excavated.

• It would take another two decades after Hultzsch’s original discovery and translation before someone could conclusively identify these places. But when they were identified, their location stunned historians. It not only made everyone reassess the ambitions of the Cholas, but it also helps us debunk one of the most oft-quoted ‘India facts’.

• And that flip side is this great ‘India fact’: India has never invaded another country in 10,000 years.

• Now, there is plenty to quibble over here. The ‘police action’ against the State of Hyderabad in 1948, or the invasion of Goa in 1961, have all been referred to as acts of territorial aggression and annexation by certain aggrieved parties.

• Centuries before that, our old friends the Cholas invaded Sri Lanka. Not once but several times. Some of these invasions were brutal affairs complete with rape, pillage and desecration of Buddhist temples.

• Coedes’s greatest contribution to the better understanding of the history of this part of the world was his discovery of Sri Vijaya.

• Coedes’s research led him to believe that the long list of unknown names in the inscription all referred to places in Burma, the Nicobar Islands, the Malay Peninsula and Java. According to the inscription, Rajendra I had conquered all these places. Coedes went on to say that the Chola navy had not only raided these places but also effectively ruled them as vassals for close to a century.

• But various theories for the Chola attacks have been floated. Sri Vijaya controlled the trade routes between India and China. Some historians suggest that the Sri Vijayans may have got too greedy and strangled the shipping routes with taxes and levies. Irate Chola traders may have coaxed the government into action.

• Yet, even the Chola grandeur was transient. For all their administrative prowess, trading expertise and naval ambition, they were soon brought crashing to the ground by wars on the Indian mainland.

• India’s claim to the invention of the zero is perhaps the most widely used—and abused—‘India fact’.

• A December 2012 news article on the Scientific American website about the 125th anniversary of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, was subtitled: ‘India, home of the number zero, ends a year-long math party in unique fashion’.

• Inscribed in 876 CE, this inscription is the oldest text anywhere in India in which the zero is used in exactly the way we use it today.

• There is broad agreement amongst researchers that the inscription at the Chaturbuja Temple in Gwalior is one of the earliest records anywhere of the modern zero.

• Gladstone was also a Homer fanatic. He read, reread and re-reread works by the great Greek epic poet, first as a student of the classics, and then just for the pure awesome heck of it. Then, suddenly, during yet another reading of the Greek epics, Gladstone noticed something strange. In all of Homer’s work, not once was there a reference to the colour blue. Not once. Never. Despite several mentions of seas and skies and other things we would normally associate with the blue colour, Homer never actually used the word ‘blue’ in his work.

• The German philosopher Lazarus Geiger took Gladstone’s analysis and extended it further, across several other great epic poems and religious texts of many other religions around the world. Geiger made a stunning discovery: Blue scarcely made an appearance anywhere.

• I first came across all this analysis by Gladstone and Geiger on an episode of Radiolab, my favourite radio show/podcast in the whole world. Produced by a New York public radio station, Radiolab explores one topic each episode through the medium of fascinating stories. The whole Gladstone bit came up during an episode called ‘Colours’.

• Let us assume, for a moment, that the Greeks actually didn’t have a real word for the colour blue. Does this mean that they never saw the sky or noticed its colour? Absolutely not. Unless the Greeks didn’t have a sky, or had one but in purple. This seems unlikely. Awesome, but unlikely. So did someone have to invent blue for them? Think about it. (I am trying to.) Blue was all around them all the time. They just didn’t have a name for it. Or find the need to. Until one day somebody decided that the colour of the sky deserved a name. And that name would be: blue.

• But would it make any sense to call this bright individual the inventor of blue? After all, it is not like the stuff wasn’t around till he/she came along and decided to call it something. It was there all along. All our inventor managed to do was to give it a name and an identity.

• When we talk about the ‘invention’ of zero, we’re faced with a similar problem. How do you invent a number?

• One of the best, most concise histories of the zero I’ve read anywhere is an online essay titled, would you believe it, ‘A History of Zero’, written by two professors of mathematics at the University of St Andrews.

• So let us start, then, at one of the earliest systems of writing in the world: the Babylonian cuneiform. Did they have a sophisticated understanding of mathematics? And if so, how and when did they start representing zeroes in their texts?

• So how did the Babylonians indicate numbers like, say, 602? In the beginning, they did this by just leaving an empty space between the symbols for 2 and 600 to indicate that there was nothing in the ‘ten’s place’.

• According to this tablet, dated between 1800 and 1600 BCE, the Babylonians calculated the square root of 2 as 1.41421296. I just punched in square root of 2 on my laptop’s calculator and I got 1.41421356. Almost 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians could calculate the square root of 2 to within five decimal places of modern computers!

• In fact, it seems a pity that the Aryabhatiya isn’t more widely read, not so much for its didactic value but for the sake of curiosity and enjoyment. It is a remarkably short work. Clark’s extremely accessible translation is around eighty-two pages long, and anyone with a decent school education in mathematics should be able to make most of their way through it.

• The Aryabhatiya is, however, at least partly responsible for the global use of the base-10 system. Developed to a certain fullness in India, the system was later taken by the Arabs, along with Indian numerals, and propagated throughout the world.

• Early researchers tended to call the kha Aryabhatta’s version of the zero numeral. But this view seems to have changed since then. Instead, credit for pushing the idea of zero even further than Aryabhatta is given to another ancient Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, who lived around a century later.

• In the twelve years since Emperor Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Mughal throne had already seen seven occupants. Just in 1719, the year of Muhammad Shah’s elevation, the empire had enjoyed the services of four emperors.

• One thing led to another led to Nadir Shah. ‘He conquered India, you know,’ my friend said. ‘He defeated the Mughals. And then he came back to Iran. Otherwise…who knows…we may both have been speaking Farsi.’

• I still have no idea why he hates Malayalis. But having spent many years with other Malayalis, I can understand the sentiment.

• In 1732, after placing a puppet emperor on the throne of Persia, Nader Shah announced that as commander of the army he would soon ‘throw reins around the necks of the rulers of Kandahar, Bokhara, Delhi and Istanbul’.

• On 16 May 1739, Nadir Shah marched out of Delhi at the head of a logistics operation comprising 30,000 camels and 24,000 mules, all laden with treasure. There is really little point in trying to estimate the exact value of all this eye-watering booty. How do you even sit in 2013 and estimate the worth of bales of Mughal textile made in the eighteenth century? The consensus is that the Persians went back with seventy crore rupees worth of plunder in 1739 money. Axworthy suggests that this is equivalent to almost £90 billion today.

• The Peacock Throne, Kohinoor diamond and Daryanoor diamond were all taken away. Jewels were transported by the bagful. Some of this plunder can still be seen to this day, as part of the Iranian Crown Jewels display at the Treasury of National Jewels in Tehran.

• From the perspective of the Sceptical Patriot, the Battle of Karnal has two important legacies. The first is that it forms part of the context for that famous question: What if India had never been colonized?

• On the other hand, what if Nadir Shah had decided to stay and never leave?

• References to this ‘India fact’—books, blogs, emails and the Wikipedia entry for ‘Economic History of India’—all feature variations of the assertion that India was the largest economy in the world shortly before the British established colonial overlordship. And almost all of them—at least the ones that bother to point to source material—refer to Maddison’s landmark 2001 publication, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective.

• A few years after freedom, in 1950, India’s share of the world’s GDP has shrivelled to a measly 4.2 per cent—about the same as France but with countless times the population.

• How do you even measure the GDP of India in 1 CE or 1700 CE? Given that the Government of India can’t even measure last month’s GDP accurately?

• And, more importantly, what does GDP or GDP share really mean?

• The idea of a nation’s Gross Domestic Product, in the way we talk about it today, is only eighty years old. It was an idea born out of the US government’s struggle to manage the Great Depression.

• In 1971, Kuznets was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. He won the honour ‘for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development’.

• There is just one problem. GDP numbers don’t always imply wealth or social well-being.

• Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.

• What other metric could we use to measure the economic welfare of the residents in pre-colonial India?

• Thankfully for us, Angus Maddison has a chart of historic per capita GDPs as well. Browse through this one, and suddenly things look different.

• The narrative as told by per capita GDP numbers is simple. India was reasonably wealthy around 2,000 years ago, but not exceptionally so. In the decades before the advent of the East India Company, India had already begun to lag behind several albeit smaller economies. And then colonialism delivers a crushing blow.

• The rest of his analysis for India’s economic growth from 1500 to 1850 CE is based off suggestions made by other researchers. The suggestions are, to put it mildly, conjectures more than estimates. And

• The rest of his analysis for India’s economic growth from 1500 to 1850 CE is based off suggestions made by other researchers. The suggestions are, to put it mildly, conjectures more than estimates.

• And then, on page 259, Maddison drops what I think is a moderate-sized bombshell. ‘In all cases,’ he says, ‘GDP is derived by multiplying the per capita levels by the independently estimated levels of population.’

• So the primary reason why Maddison’s data shows India to have the largest GDP in the ancient world is…India’s population.

• So, the next time a trip to see the Crown Jewels in London, or maybe Tehran, tugs at your Indian heartstrings, chillax. They never really made that much of an economic difference anyway.

• Angus Maddison’s work throws up plenty of interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive ideas about the British impact on the Indian economy. For instance, he suggests that the British mildly reduced income inequality and vastly improves the reliability of agriculture. Explore with an open mind if possible.

• Dr Crippen is believed to be the first ever criminal to be apprehended by means of a device that, at the time, was something of curious invention—the wireless radio.

• The fact that electric discharge could generate some sort of signal that could then be detected with a receiver was only discovered in 1879.

• And one of the strongest claimants to the title of ‘inventor of the radio’, though perhaps he did not claim so with any vigour in his own life, was the great Indian scientist, teacher and pioneer Jagadish Chandra Bose.

• The onus of converting Maxwell’s theory and Hertz’s experimental work into a booming, international business empire fell to Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian man with a great aptitude for science but an even greater ability for application.

• Marconi’s genius was his ability to see the big picture. While other scientists worked on individual pieces of the radio puzzle, Marconi simultaneously began to drop each piece into its rightful place. Along the way, he also became something of a patent troll.

• When Marconi achieved his coup de grace of all demonstrations, a transatlantic transmission in December 1901, from Poldhu Wireless Station in Cornwall, England, to Signal Hill in St John’s Newfoundland, Canada, Tesla claimed that the achievement piggy-backed on at least seventeen of his own patents.

• Benito Mussolini was the best man at Marconi’s wedding. And when he died, he received a state funeral in Rome.

• That quote from Bose’s letter to Tagore that I included above is quite popular with Bose aficionados and India fact enthusiasts, for obvious reasons.

• Despite my best efforts, however, I have been unable to trace it to an original source. Even though the quote appears in numerous books, they all seem to refer to each other or to other versions of this quote, but never the original source

• Despite my best efforts, however, I have been unable to trace it to an original source. Even though the quote appears in numerous books, they all seem to refer to each other or to other versions of this quote, but never the original source itself.

• Also the timing of the letter seems a little odd. Bose’s lectures at the Royal Society in 1901 had nothing to do with radio communication. By this point, he had switched his interest to the world of plants.

• He was one of a handful of pivotal figures in the history of wireless radio. Yet, he was not the sole inventor or the only father. Neither was Marconi.

• An excellent overview of the history of NLP is an October 2001 paper by Karen Sparck Jones of the University of Cambridge, titled ‘Natural Language Processing: A Historical Review’.

• Researchers began to wonder…if only there was a ‘street’ language that already had a strong set of rules that machines could parse immediately. And that is exactly what Rick Briggs suggested in his 1985 AI Magazine paper titled ‘Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence’.

• The First Sanskrit Commission was organized in 1956.

• And for all these reasons—fertility, civilization, brutality—this northwest passage into India has the most intriguing history of any region in the subcontinent. Everyone who was anyone came this way. The Greeks, the Persians, the fearsome Central Asian tribes, the British, the Afghans…

• Persepolis, far away in modern-day Iran, was once the capital of the largest empire on the planet. Today, it is one of the world’s great historical sites, some 550 miles from Tehran in Iran’s Shiraz province.

• At the high point of their might, some people estimate, the Achaemenids who built Persepolis ruled over approximately half of the world’s population.

• And more than one empire that came after them directly and indirectly adopted Persian methods of imperial command and control. Indeed, the modern word ‘satrap’, meaning a local ruler subservient to a greater power, was coined and popularized in Persia. A ‘satrap’ is what the Achaemenids called their local governors.

• The extremely Eurocentric nature of Christian art and scripture might give you the impression that Jesus was a gorgeous chestnut blonde with milky-white skin who spoke in flawless Latin. But in reality, he was probably a sunburnt chap, roaming around a sunburnt land, speaking Aramaic, the lingua franca of the time.

• In wondrous Persepolis, their great capital, the Achaemenids decided to flaunt the expanse and wealth of their empire in a unique way. On the walls of the great palaces and tombs at Persepolis, they not only inscribed lists of names of their conquests but also did something entirely different: They sculpted in figurative representations of the native peoples of these far-flung lands.

• Wilber writes: Group 18 shows the Hindush (Indians). All but the leader are bare-chested and barefooted and wear the familiar dhoti. They bring baskets containing vases, carry axes, and drive along a donkey.

• These figures appear more than once across Persepolis. They are all citizens of the twentieth satrapy, or province, of the Achaemenids—the satrapy they called Hindush but more modern writers call Sindh or, to be more specific, Takshashila.

• Along with Pushkalavati and Purushapura (modern Peshawar), Takshashila was one of the three main cities of this region known as Gandhara.

• On the final day, I had a row with a senior partner about some HR policies that had both of us fuming. ‘If you don’t like how we do things, why don’t you just quit?’ he screamed. So I did. (But not before I had to go back to my business school campus for one last presentation as an employee. I told a classroom full of students why they should all join the company. This happened literally as the guys back in the office were drawing up my full-and-final pay cheque. It is, perhaps, the least honest thing I’ve done in my whole life.)

• Irrespective of how we tackled this history, and whatever sources we used, it always had its roots in one of two concepts. The first was India’s great guru-shishya tradition, a tradition of wholesome mentorship that is referenced widely in our history, religion and epics.

• The second anchor concept was one of primacy. The fact that in the form of Takshashila, Nalanda, Kashi and other ancient cities, India was home to the oldest universities in the world.

• The University of Bologna, established in 1088, is widely noted as the earliest modern university.

• In 1883, Max Mueller published a collection of lectures he had previously delivered to candidates for the Indian Civil Service at the University of Cambridge. This quote is from the first of those lectures, titled ‘What India Can Teach Us’.

• Macaulay’s observations on the past and the future of Indian education later culminated in the English Education Act of 1835, a set of reforms that gave weightage to education in English over that in the native languages.

• When you’re writing fiction, your motive, at its basest, is merely to tell a good story. Perhaps you want to evoke certain emotions in the reader. In the case of my first three books, I wanted readers to laugh a lot and think a little.

• And the average Indian does not need the expensive equipment or complex education of a genetic scientist to appreciate this lack of identity. He or she just needs to look into his or her lunchbox.

• The potato, tomato and green chilli are all vegetables that originated in South America and were brought to Europe by Spanish conquerors as part of what is now known as the ‘Columbian Exchange’—a process by which South Americans gave the world a number of culinary treasures, and in return got enslaved and murdered.

• The great food historian, K.T. Achaya estimates that tomatoes only got adopted by Indian cooking sometime in the 1880s, or even later.

• History is not a manifesto for action, a list of crimes to be avenged, a litany of positions to be reversed or a collection of rights to be wronged.

• All these high points in Indian history occurred in societies that were open, turbulent but peaceful, well-administered and curious.

• Perhaps, we need more state support of institutions that foster enquiry, criticism and scepticism.

• But most of all, we need a society that refuses to conform, that refuses to put up social, political and ideological borders.

• Maybe then, we will stop harking back to our glory days and a long list of dubious ‘India facts’, and create a few new ones.