256 dhruv raina
On reading of the early responses from a French savant to the work of
Colebrooke, it is possible to discern that Delambre for one uses a very fi ne
comb in rebutting several of the points taken up by Colebrooke. While
Colebrooke himself does not draw a very fi ne distinction between the use
of the terms ‘proof ’ and ‘demonstration’ in his reading, he does distinguish
between algebra and analysis; and as mentioned earlier he specifi es wherein
the Indian tradition could be characterized as an algebraic analysis. A study
of the reception of Colebrooke’s translations of the works on Indian arith-
metic and algebra is a matter for a separate study. Th e curious question to
be examined by such a study is that despite its canonical status in Western
scholarship on the history of Indian mathematics and algebra, neither
Colebrooke nor Davis ever insinuated that it was a tradition devoid of
proof or demonstration. And yet, as the nineteenth-century historiography
of Oriental mathematics evolved, a theory of the absence of proof would
become one of its salient elements. Th e strong criticism of Colebrooke’s
work at the time was possibly provoked by Colebrooke’s method of taking
up those demonstrations from Indian mathematics for which equivalents
existed in eighteenth-century European mathematics. Th is would have viti-
ated both the claims of novelty and originality, both very important features
of the new sciences. Second, up to the end of the eighteenth century British
Indologists still believed that they could discover the origins of an Indian
geometry and the later work of the Indologist G. Th ibaut may be seen to be
in continuity with that tradition. But by the end of the nineteenth century
the binary typologies of the history of mathematics, that portrayed the West
as geometric and the East as algebraic, were well in place in the standard
p i c t u r e.Acknowledgements
I thank the participants at the Workshop on the History and Historiography
of Proofs in Ancient Traditions, Paris, for their questions, comments and
suggestions, and more recently Karine Chemla for a very close reading of
the text. Th e usual disclaimer applies.Bibliography
Assayag , J. , Lardinois , R. and Vidal , D. ( 1997 ) Orientalism and Anthropology:
From Max Mueller to Louis Dumont. Pondy Papers in Social Sciences.
Pondicherry.