230 dhruv raina
the respective interlocutors. 10 Critical studies on oriental scholarship have
sought to situate these texts in national and religious contexts and to iden-
tify the elements they share. 11 It has been argued that until the eighteenth
century it was possible to speak of a European tradition of writing about
India that diff erentiated into several national traditions by the middle of
the eighteenth century. Th e birth of a specifi cally British tradition is put
around 1765 when the East India Company was granted rights to collect
land revenues and administer civil justice in Bengal. 12 With the founding
of the Asiatic Society, British writing on India especially from the 1780s
onwards was marked by the impulse of British writers to ‘foreground the
textual nature of their activity’, in other words to anchor their writings on
India in the specifi c study of classical texts produced in India. 13
Th e French missionaries who came to India in the late seventeenth
century were the fi rst to have spoken of India’s scientifi c past. French
Indology, according to Jean Filliozat, emerged in the early decades of the
eighteenth century, when the King’s librarian requested Etienne Fourmont,
of the Collège Royal, to draw up a list of works of note from India and
Indo-China, to be purchased for the King’s library. By 1739, a catalogue of
Sanskrit works had been prepared, and copies of Vedas, epics, philosophical
and linguistic texts and dictionaries had been procured. 14 Curiously enough
there were very few, if any, scientifi c texts that were included in the cargo to
the King’s library. 15 The Jesuit astronomers were the fi rst to study the Indian
astronomical systems that Filliozat considers ‘the fi rst scientifi c or even cul-
tural achievements of India studied by Europeans’. 16 Kejariwal goes so far as
to suggest that the ‘history of French Orientalism is also the history of the
rediscovery of ancient Indian astronomy in the modern period’. 17
A fruitful approach into this archive of scientifi c texts and not just liter-
ary or religious texts is to pay attention to moments where the standard
cultural descriptions characterizing the early European writing on India are
challenged or unsettled through the textual analysis of similar and diff erent
forms of reasoning. 18 In examining these mathematical texts, it is thereby
essential for our purpose to be alert to those moments and descriptions of10 Teltscher 1995 : 2; Raina 1999 ; Jami 1995.
11 Inden 1990 ; Zupanov 1993.
12 Teltscher 1995 : 3.
13 Teltscher 1995 : 6.
14 Filliozat 1955 : 1–3.
15 Raina 1999.
16 Filliozat 1957.
17 Kejariwal 1988 : 17.
18 Teltscher 1995 : 14.