Abstract
Why, asked Needham in 1971, had modern Galilean science taken birth in Pisa, and not in Patna or Peking, although for some fourteen hundred years previously the two Eastern civilizations had been ahead of Europe?1 This is a question that Asians today have to answer to themselves, but an equivalent question has been raised several times in India since the early nineteenth century, although not in precisely the same terms. Various explanations have indeed been offered, ranging from political/military (invasions, wars, and political chaos) to sociocultural (Indian philosophical concepts such as karma and maya, the hierarchical social organization of Indian society into castes), socioeconomic (Marxist ideas about the ownership of the means of production and the class structure of society), and technological (the lack of development of novel weapon systems and associated tactical and strategic thinking). There have also been suggestions that different civilizations may have different agendas; for example, Francis Bacon equated knowledge with power (of man over nature), whereas the Sāmékhya philosophers (among others) in India saw knowledge as what led to liberation (of the individual).2
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Narasimha, R. (2012). Pramanas, Proofs, and the Yukti of Classical Indic Science. In: Bala, A. (eds) Asia, Europe, and the Emergence of Modern Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031730_6
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