fter going through a recent article titled “In Britain, we are still astonishingly ignorant: the hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West,” published in The Guardian on September 1, 2024, as well as numerous books by European and Western scholars on Hindu mathematics, I have come to a compelling conclusion that mathematics and astronomy were the gift of ancient Bharat. There exists a substantial body of research published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal that clearly demonstrates how the transmission of knowledge, particularly in mathematics and astronomy, from ancient India to Europe has been largely overlooked by historians both in India and abroad. Despite the work of British scholars such as Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) and George Rusby Kaye (1866-1929), the contributions of our ancestors remain largely unrecognized.
Ancient India possessed advanced knowledge in mathematics and astronomy, but this wisdom was suppressed during a millennium of foreign and British rule. As a result, we were kept in the dark about the vast intellectual heritage of our past. While many Commonwealth countries have shed their colonial mindsets post-independence, India (Bharat) has struggled to do the same.
Successive governments in independent India failed to revive and celebrate this ancient wisdom. Instead, the works of both British and Indian scholars were often neglected, and it took nearly 75 years for this knowledge to be reintroduced into our education s.