Saquib Salim

“They forget that there exists in India, under circumstances which prove a very high antiquity, a philosophical language which is one of the wonders of the world, and which is a near collateral of the Greek, if not its parent form. From those who wrote in this language, we derive our system of arithmetic and algebra which is the most powerful instrument of modern analysis. In this language, we find a system of logic and metaphysics: an astronomy worthy of comparison with that of Greece in its best days; above comparison, if some books of Ptolemy's Syntaxis be removed. We find also geometry, of a kind which proves that the Hindoo was below the Greek as a geometer, but not in that degree in which he was above the Greek as an arithmetician.”

A Slice Of History

This is what Augustus De Morgan, an 18th-century English mathematician, wrote about the scientific development in ancient India. Whoever has attended school in India is familiar with De Morgan’s Theorem which they study in mathematics. Rarely do people know that not only was Morgan an Indian by birth but he was also an admirer of the Indian civilization.

Morgan was born to Lieutenant-Colonel De Morgan, an English East India Company (EEIC) officer, in Madurai in 1806. His father and grandfather were both born and served in India. His family moved to England when he was only seven months old but his admiration for India remained a lifelong affair.  

Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, wife of Augustus De Morgan, recalled later, “The ancient grandeur and simplicity of the East at once excited and satisfied his imagination. He sometimes said that India with its skies and mountains 'might be really worth looking at,' whereas he never saw scenery in England than which he could not picture to himself something infinitely grander. He was proud of his birth in the sacred city of Madura, and at one time longed to visit his native country, and fancied that everyone had the same instinctive desire.”

Love was not only confined to India as a land but extended to the people who inhabited it. Within his limits, he tried to help the Indian cause. General John Briggs, an uncle of Morgan and officer of the EEIC, was a scholar of Indian science, history, and philosophy. To his credit, Briggs translated Tarikh-i-Ferishta and Mir Ghulam Husein Khan’s Siyar-ul-Mutakherin. Both books dealt with the history of the Mughal period. His compilation, Letters on India, was supposed to be a must-read for every English coming to India to serve the Empire.

Morgan assisted his uncle Briggs in bringing out one of the earliest criticisms of the English misrule in India in the form of a book, The Present Land Tax in India, published in 1830. The book asked the English Government, “Under our government, they (Indians) hoped for some relief: they anticipated justice and respect for their rights, and relief from private tyranny. How have we merited this confidence, or justified those expectations? Although we have everywhere confessed that the heavy pressure of taxation was the most cruel injury they sustained, we have in no instance alleviated that pressure.

"So far from it, we have applied a false measure for fixing the impost, that of money instead of produce: we have pretended to abolish minor taxes on other classes, but have laid the amount on the land-holder; and, by minute scrutiny into every individual's concerns, have, under the plea of justice to ourselves, in many instances deprived the cultivators of the means they enjoyed of paying the heavy taxes from which they sought relief under us, till, by rigid exactions, we have increased our revenue, and reduced the people to the condition of mere labourers. This is the professed maxim of our rule, the certain and inevitable result of taking the whole surplus profit of the land.”

The close association of Morgan with Briggs and other relations serving in India was pointed out by Sophia as well. She writes, “My husband's interest in his birthplace had always been kept alive by intercourse with his many relations there, some of whom were in the Madras army, some in the Civil Service.”

In 1850, Morgan received a few copies of work by an Indian science teacher Ramchundra sent from India by his friend Drinkwater Bethune. In these papers, Morgan found A Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima solved by Algebra. He decided to introduce it to the Western world.

In the introduction to the book, Morgan wrote, “On examining this work I saw in it, not merely merit worthy of encouragement, but merit of a peculiar kind, the encouragement of which, as it appeared to me, was likely to promote native effort towards the restoration of the native mind in India.”

He wanted Europeans to know that the Indians are not inferior in science. When asked by the officials how Ramchundra should be rewarded he said, “I conceived the question to be, not merely how Ramchundra could be rewarded, but how his work might be made most effective in the development of Hindoo talent, I recommended the circulation of the work in Europe, with a distinct account of the grounds on which the step was taken.”

There was this belief in Morgan that the Indians needed to cultivate themselves in science. He declares his intent, “The greatness of Hindoo invention is in algebra; the greatness of Greek invention is in geometry. But Ramchundra has a much stronger leaning towards geometry than could have been expected by a person acquainted with the Vija Ganita; but he has not the power in geometry which he has in algebra. I have left one or two failures - one very remarkable - unnoticed, for the reader to find out. Should this preface - as I hope it will - fall into the hands of some young Hindoos who are systematic students of mathematics, I beg of them to consider well my assertion that their weak point must be strengthened by the cultivation of pure geometry. Euclid must be to them what Bhascara, or some other algebraist, has been to Europe.”

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India, as a civilization, has every potential to rise again and lead the world, was a dearly held belief of Morgan. He wrote, “The Hindoo became, to speak of the highest and best class, the teacher of results which he could not explain, the retailer of propositions on which he could not find thought. He had the remains of ancestors who had investigated for him, and he lived on such comprehension of his ancestors as his own small grasp of mind would allow him to obtain. He fed himself and his pupils upon the chaff of obsolete civilization, out of which Europeans had thrashed the grain for their own use. But the mind thus degenerated is still a mind, and the means of restoring it to activity differ greatly from those by which a barbarous race is to be gifted with its first steps of progress.”