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5 Contextualizing Playfair and Colebrooke
on proof and demonstration in the Indian
mathematical tradition (1780–1820)
Dhruv RainaTh e social shaping of representations of so called non-Western astronomy
and mathematics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European scholar-
ship has been of recent scholarly interest from the perspective of the politics
of knowledge. 1 A principal concern has been the changing estimation of
non-Western mathematical traditions by European mathematicians and
historians of mathematics between the end of the last decades of the eight-
eenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century; that is from
the heyday of the Enlightenment to the post-Enlightenment period. While
these studies have been informed by Said’s Orientalism ,^2 they have sought
to examine the question whether the history of mathematics (the least likely
case) is also inscribed within the frame of European colonial adventure and
enterprise, as happened in the arts, literature and social sciences. 3
It has been suggested that the European scholarship on the sciences of
India reveals fractures along national lines, which in turn refl ected the
diversity of educational and institutional contexts of the world of learn-
ing.^4 Th is chapter examines the relationship between the histories of Indian
astronomy and mathematics produced by French astronomers and the
translation from the Sanskrit of works on Indian algebra undertaken by a
colonial administrator and British Indologist, Henry Th omas Colebrooke.
Th e contrast revealed the divergent disciplinary orientations of the inter-
preters themselves. Second, in elaborating upon the canonization of a very
important translation of Indian mathematical works by Colebrooke, 5 I s h a l l
argue that the standard European depiction of the Indian mathematical1 Charette 1995 ; Raina 1999.
2 Said 1978.
3 A s s a y a g et al. 1997.
4 Raina 1999.
5 Sir Henry Th omas Colebrooke was the son of the Chairman of the East India Company
Directors, and arrived in India as an offi cial of the Company in 1782–3. In India he acquired
a profi ciency in Sanskrit literature and commenced writing on Hindu law, the origins of
caste, etc. As a result he was appointed Professor of Hindu Law and Sanskrit at the College
of Fort William, Calcutta (Buckland 1908 : 87–8). His translation of texts of Bhaskara and
Brahmagupta became classics of nineteenth-century history of Indian mathematics.