Beyond the Canon: Mathematical Practice and its Practitioners in Early Modern South India

Date de début: 

28 Avril 2016 - 11:00

Type d'événement: 

  • Conférence

Publié ici : 

25 Avril 2016

Mis à jour le : 

29 Juillet 2017

Contact: 

Dr. Senthil Babu : senthil.babu [at] ifpindia.org

Mots-clefs: 

  • Indian mathematics

Zone géographique: 

  • Moyen-Orient
IFP (Inde)

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https://www.facebook.com/events/699675280175133/

Talk by Dr. Senthil Babu, Jawaharlal Nehru University/French Institute of Pondicherry:

Histories of Indian mathematics were a product of a global circulation of knowledge orchestrated by colonial encounter and nationalist history making. Here, processes by which theoretical practices in mathematics gained and acquired privilege over that of the practical, and the practitioner, in a caste society, occupied the main attention. Sanskrit mathematical texts have been the primary sources for the writing of these histories. This talk will propose a social history of mathematics as practice, as activities done by practitioners like the artisans, the accountants and the merchants in the pre-colonial knowledge traditions in India. This approach entails the study of mathematical texts in regional languages of India as records of practice. These texts have hitherto received no attention from historians as they have been considered either as mere translations of the canonical Sanskrit texts, or as those that merely applied the theories developed through the computational astronomical tradition of the Brahmins. I argue that to question and contextualize the assumptions behind such a historiography is but only a beginning in understanding the relationship between the mind and the hand in a caste segregated society.
 

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