The Many Careers of D.D
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The Many Careers of D.D. KOSAMBI The Many Careers of D.D. KOSAMBI Critical Essays Edited by D.N. Jha First published in October 2011. LeftWord Books 12 Rajendra Prasad Road New Delhi 110001 INDIA www.leftword.com LeftWord Books is a division of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Individual essays © 2011, respective authors This collection © 2011, LeftWord Books ISBN 978-93-80118-06-2 Printed at Progressive Printers A 21 Jhilmil Industrial Area Shahdara Delhi 110095 Contents Preface 6 A Scholar Extraordinaire D.N. JHA 7 What Kosambi has Given Us IRFAN HABIB 28 Kosambi and the Frontiers of Historical Materialism PRABHAT PATNAIK 39 Some Observations on Kosambi’s Medieval India EUGENIA VANINA 54 Appendix: A Talk with a Friend I.D. SEREBRYAKOV 77 Kosambi and the Religious Histories of India KRISHNA MOHAN SHRIMALI 86 Kosambi on Caste SUVIRA JAISWAL 130 Kosambi on Sanskrit KESAVAN VELUTHAT 151 Kosambi the Mathematician C.K. RAJU 164 Contributors 203 Preface The birth centenary of Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi was celebrated in 2007 by several universities and other academic institutions in India. In the following year the Economic and Political Weekly brought out a special issue containing articles by scholars who attempted to asses Kosambi’s work in different areas of Indology. But some of the assessments, far from being impartial and objective, were unduly critical and one of them bordered on vitriol and vituperation. The present volume, however, brings together articles by scholars who are neither allergic to nor adulatory about the work of Kosambi but seek to present a balanced and critical appraisal. Although they have focused on specific aspects of his work, a certain amount of overlap is unavoidable in a collection like this. Of the eight essays included in this collection seven deal with his Indological writings and one discusses his engagement with science, and assesses his contribution to mathematics. The first two essays, written by me and Irfan Habib are revised versions of the papers originally published in the Kosambi Centenary issue of the Marxist (XXIV, 4, October-December, 2008). The paper by Prabhat Patnaik is a reprint from the same issue of the Marxist and the last essay, by C.K. Raju, has been reproduced from the Economic and Political Weekly of 16 May 2009 (XLIV, 20). The referencing style of the individual contributors has been retained as far as possible. D.N. Jha A Scholar Extraordinaire D.N. Jha I Born on 31 July 1907 at Kosben in Goa, Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi was the son of Dharmanand Kosambi, the reputed Buddhist scholar who taught at Harvard for several years and from whom Damodar Kosambi, known as Baba to his friends, inherited his passion for learning, his sharp versatile intellect, and above all his humanism. After some schooling in Pune he accompanied his father to the United States and studied at the Cambridge Latin School until 1925. In 1929 he graduated with brilliant results from the Harvard University, where he showed special interest and proficiency in mathematics, history and several languages, especially Greek, Latin, German and French. During his stay at Harvard, Kosambi was in contact with distinguished mathematicians such as George Birkhoff and Norbert Wiener. On his return to India in 1929 Kosambi joined the mathematics faculty of the Benares Hindu University. Before long he emerged a mathematician of outstanding ability and was invited by the Aligarh Muslim University, where he taught for a year. In 1932 he decided to settle down at Pune as professor of mathematics at the Fergusson College, where his father had taught Pali for several years before he went to Harvard. During the fourteen years that Kosambi taught at the Fergusson College he incessantly tried to master various fields of knowledge and established himself as a great scholar and thinker of modern India. In 1946 he was offered the chair of mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, a position that he held till 1962. There he was able to interact with scholars of equal calibre from all over the world. 8 THE MANY CAREERS OF D.D. KOSAMBI II D.D. Kosambi specialized in and taught mathematics during most of his teaching career, and his contribution to this area has been acclaimed by many experts including the famous British scientist J. D. Bernal, who as much lauded his scientific works as his role in the world peace movement. The present writer is in no position to assess the importance of his researches in the sciences; but he certainly broke traditional disciplinary boundaries and made valuable, lasting and socially relevant contributions to genetics, statistics and other branches of knowledge. In genetics his work on chromosome mapping (1944) was believed to be an advance on the prevalent chromosome theory. In statistics he developed a technique called Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) in 1943, before Karhunen (1945) and Loeve (1948) – a technique which was applied to such diverse fields as image processing, signal processing, data compression, oceanography, chemical engine- ering and fluid mechanics. At the invitation of the Academia Sinica, he visited Beijing where, in his discussion with Kuo-Mo-Jo and Chou En-Lai, he suggested statistical methods for the forecasting of Chinese food crops and quality control in industry. At home, he forcefully argued against the arbitrary location and construction of dams and suggested statistical methods for the purpose. Similarly his study of the seasonal death rate proved that at least 500 lives could be saved annually in the city of Bombay alone by concentrating on anti-typhoid work about three weeks before the onset of the monsoon. He also suggested to the then Bombay government that a motorable all-weather road for Naneghat would be far more economical than the proposed expensive funicular. Kosambi was far from being an ivory tower scholar. His intellectual activity was deeply rooted in and greatly inspired by the needs of the people around him. Not surprisingly, he expressed himself fearlessly on issues of national and international importance. For example, more than half a century before the Indian government mortgaged its sovereignty to the USA by signing a nuclear agreement with it, he asserted that India ‘is too poor a country to throw money away A Scholar Extraordinaire 9 on costly fads like atomic energy merely because they look modern’ and was passionately pleading for solar rays as an alternative source of energy.1 III Often described as a man of truly ‘Renaissance versatility’ D.D. Kosambi applied his abstract mathematical methods to the study of various branches of social sciences. He thus extended the statistical method to the study of punch-marked coins and, by weighing nearly 12,000 coins (including 7,000 modern ones), he laid the foundation of scientific numismatics in India.2 He established a link between the king-lists in the Pali Buddhist works on the one hand and the marks on the punch-marked coins on the other and ascribed them to the rulers of Magadha and Kosala. His method of dating the coins was seriously inhibited by his disregard for their archaeological stratigraphic context, but, proceeding on the assumption that every coin bears the signature of contemporary society, he tried to fix the chronology of punch- marked coins and postulated the relevance of the two famous Taxila coin hoards (dominated by the Magadhan issues) to the economic history of Taxila as well as Magadha. Unlike the numismatists who wrote before and after him, Kosambi not only rescued numismatics from the coin collectors’ purely antiquarian interest but also emphasized its importance for the reconstruction of the social and economic history of India. Accordingly he was the first to refer to the paucity of coinage and to its linkage with the decline of trade and the emergence of the self sufficient village economy in the post-Gupta period. The quantitative method which he applied to the study of the earliest Indian coins has not had any takers, but more or less at the same time as he published his paper on scientific numismatics, R.S. Sharma pointed to some of its limitations, made a strong case for the study of early Indian monetary history,3 and himself undertook in-depth studies of the paucity of coinage, the decline of trade and urban centres, and the growth of the self-sufficient village economy, all these later becoming the building blocks of his model 10 THE MANY CAREERS OF D.D. KOSAMBI of ‘Indian feudalism’ and the characteristic features of what is now known as the early medieval period in Indian history. IV From the examination of ancient coin groups, Kosambi proceeded to ask who issued them. Struck by ‘the shocking discordance’ of the written sources (e.g., the Puranas, Buddhist and Jain records) which ‘give different names for the same king’, he decided to go to the original texts himself, for which he needed a mastery of Sanskrit. Despite his uncharacteristically modest statement that he ‘absorbed Sanskrit only through the pores without a regular study’,4 he appears to have turned almost instinctively to his Sanskrit inheritance and acquired unquestionable proficiency in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit through having worked with his father, and in association with V.S. Sukthankar. His grasp over Sanskrit was indeed remarkable; it ranged from his interest in the search for manuscripts to their editing and publication. His critical editions of Bhartrihari’s Shatakatraya (1942), Chintamani- sharanika of Dashabala (1949), Vidyakara’s Subhashitaratnakosha (1957), as well as his writings on the Parvasamgraha of the Mahabharata (1946) and the text of the Arthashastra (1958) are lasting testimony to Kosambi’s mastery of Sanskrit as well as his attainments in the field of text literary criticism.