Sham Lal on DD Kosambi

Braveheart reads Sham Lal's writings on DD Kosambi.

That night when I flipped through the pages, I saw how the high and mighty in the world of ideas and politics had been made into mince meat in the books. I vividly remember reading the acidic remarks on Marxist historian D D Kosambi's book - Introduction to the Study of History:

"We need not dilate too long on the slant or the bias in Kosambi's judgments. All that he wants to tell us is that all we have is the earth. The sky is there, but its deep blue is a fiction... Those who look for the heartbeats of an age not in its wage bills and sale deed but in its art and religion may at times get impatient with Kosambi...Those who look for poetry in history itself will search in vain."

India Invented Part 2

Kosambi on the Role of Gita

Aniruddha Kulkarni, while reading The Last Mughal thinks that the controversy behind calling the events of 1857 as a Mutiny or the first War of Indian Independence is meant to hide the
suffering of the ordinary people during those days.

Therefore, you wonder if D D Kosambi amongst all is closest to the truth when he says: “It seems to me that Gita philosophy, like so much else in India’s ‘spiritual’ heritage, is based in the final analysis upon the inability to satisfy more than the barest material needs of a large number”

There could be many Quixotian solutions to this. Use politically correct language. Stop calling poor, poor! Stop calling third class compartment, third class. That is what Indian Railway did when one day they just erased one line from III to make it II!

Essay on 'Indian Feudalism'

Read DD Kosambi's essay on 'Indian Feudalism' at google books (in Rural Sociology in India by AR Desai).

Indian Feudalism differs so much from its European counterpart, at least as regards superficial manifestations, that the very existence of feudalism in India has sometimes been denied, except to describe the Muslim and Rajput military hierarchies.

A bivariate extension of Fisher's Z-test

The paper A bivariate extension of Fisher's Z-test in .pdf format

Inventing India: A Documentary based on the works by Kosambi

Arvind N Das, who died seven years ago at a tragically young age at 52, nevertheless packed a lot in his intense life. A product of the "Spring Thunder over India" in the late 1960s, he was part of the brilliant team at the Times of India in the late 1980s which is when one became acquainted with his insightful writings.

Trained as a historian, he moved, first to print journalism and then to the medium of TV setting up Asia Pacific Communications to produce a nuanced documentary on the history of India. In the documentary, as in his writings, he showed himself as a student of DD Kosambi to whom he dedicated the documentary that appeared in 13 parts on Doordarshan. He remained an engaged social historian in the tradition of DD Kosambi and EP Thompson.

In his book "India Invented", he made the observation that India is not something waiting to be discovered, as Jawaharlal Nehru had treated it in his Discovery of India, but something that is to be constantly invented in the process of understanding it- that was his statement of praxis.

The first part of the documentary is now available at google videos. It is also available from Asia Pacific Communications and can be ordered, I believe, from the address given at the google videos site.



Link to Google Videos

Needless to say, it is a very ennobling, and educative experience to be able to watch this documentary once again. One of the best in the series is the one where Das delves into the emergence and decadence of Buddhism (part 5), though this one doesn't seem to be available online as yet. DD Kosambi had himself written very insightfully on the decline of Buddhism in India in his collection of essays Exasperating Essays.

Cross posted here

Technorati Tags: India, Kosambi, History, Buddhism

Doing Business for the Lord

Doing Business for the Lord: Lending on Interest and Written Loan Contracts in the Mulasarvastivada-Vinaya by Gregory Schopen; The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 114, 1994, makes a reference to Kosambi's insight on the importance of Chinese records to understand Indian history.

Scholars working on China have in fact very often been the first to introduce and make available important Indian material bearing on the institutional and economic history of Buddhism, but this material rarely, or never, makes it into Indian studies. References to Gernet's Les Aspects economiques du bouddhisme, for example, are extremely rare in works on Indian cultural and economic history. D. D. Kosambi long ago referred to Gernet when he raised the "fundamental question" of the extent to which Buddhist monks and monasteries in India participated directly in trade. "The documentary evidence" for such participation, Kosambi said, "exists at the other end of the Buddhist world, in Chinese records and translations," of the sort presented by Gernet.(7) But few have followed this up.

J.D. Bernal: A Centernary Tribute

Arjun Patel, an experimental scientist, pays a tribute to JD Bernal and recalls his association with DD Kosambi.

The other episode relates to Kosambi. Bernal introduced A.R. Vasudev Murthy (a chemist and sanskritist) of Indian Institute of Science to D.D.Kosambi (Bernal uses Kosambi’s characterization of science as the ‘cognition of necessity’ in Science in History) during the Indian Science Congress in Poona in 1950. Kosambi told Vasudev Murthy that he intended to make a study of Indian history on the lines given in Engels’ “Origin of the family, private property and the state”. It was in this way that Kosambi’s collaborations with the scientific community in Bangalore began and stimulated them in lively debates on the social functions of science and the culture and civilization of ancient India, the outcome being Kosambi’s widely read monographs on the subject.

India's Lopsided Science

Dhirendra Sharma on India's lopsided science program makes a reference to Kosambi's tenure at TIFR

In 1962, Prof D.D. Kosambi was removed from the senior fellowship at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, for questioning high expenditures on atomic energy research and development. Kosambi made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to take up where Saha left off, trying to maintain an open and participatory system. It is difficult to find critics of Kosambi's stature in Indian science today.

Tamil Traditions on Subrahmanya­-Murugan

Kamil V. Zvelebil : An Introduction to the Tamil Traditions of Subramanya- Murugan

On the other hand, one must be careful not to succumb to the "habitual failing of the philologist whose learned candour leads him to infer that all things have their beginning from the time of their first mention in the texts."[10] We must avoid the 'tunnel vision' (D.D. Kosambi) of armchair Indologists who avoid any disagreeable contact with fieldwork - with anthropology, sociology, folklore, or reality at large. The long and exclusive concentration of such scholars on written, particularly Sanskrit, rahmin-produced documents seems to have impaired their ability to distinguish between myth and reality.