Continued from Integrating India’s Heritage in Indian Education – Part 1
Rather than deal with theoretical principles, let us give a few simple examples, keeping in mind that at this stage, the teacher’s task is no more than to provide the student with a glimpse of India’s advances in various fields. In the present state of our educational syllabus, that is all we can hope for, but it is enough to paint a very different—and fairer—perspective of Indian civilization.
Mathematics
This is probably the field in which striking facts can most easily be introduced. • Every child starts with numbers. Today, no one disputes that the so-called “Arabic” numerals as well as the place-value decimal system of numeral notation originated in India, so why not begin by explaining this to the children? Just one attempt to add or multiply Roman figures will be enough to impress a child on the greatness of the decimal system, one of India’s most remarkable gifts to science, without which mathematics could not have developed. (Indeed Ifrah devotes many pages to this discovery, which persistently eluded the Mesopotamian and the Chinese.) • When coming to the Pythagorean theorem, why not mention that we first find it in Baudhayana’s Shulba-Sutras, probably several centuries before it appears in Greece? • Or that Aryabhata’s value for (Pi = 3.1416) is among the best approximations of those times?1
Madhava of Sangamagrama ( c. 1340 – c. 1425), mathematician and astronomer.
• Or that his concise table of sine values from 0 to 90° is always correct to three or four significant figures, which means a high degree of precision? • India’s love affair with huge numbers, which Ifrah again documents so well, deserves a mention when we reach the notation of powers and exponents: multiples of 10 up to the power of 145 had specific Sanskrit names! The teacher could explain that by contrast, the ancient Greeks only went up to the “myriad,” i.e. 10,000; numbers beyond were nameless.
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