Meera Kosambi on DD Kosambi

Thanks once again to the indefatigable Arvind Gupta, here is a link to Dr. Meera Kosambi's speech on her father. The best part of the speech is at the very end, so do listen to the full speech. The speech was delivered at the Goa Festival of Ideas, 2007.

Dr. Meera Kosambi on DDK

(alternate link at Arvind's site)

(I am unable to convert the audio from .wav format to .mp3, hence the absence of an embedded player as in the previous speech by Prof. Thapar).

Romila Thapar's Speech

Prof Romila Thapar gave the last D D Kosambi Memorial Lecture in Pune on 31 July 2008. Two days earlier on 29th July she gave this wonderful speech at IUCAA / Pune.

Note: The speech begins after about 55 seconds into the audio below.

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The speech covers the historiography of ancient India. There is no direct reference to DD Kosambi as such except that DDK's major contribution to Indian historiography was to the ancient period.


Thanks to Arvind Gupta for sending the link to the speech.

Kosambi and the Early Indian Coins

Kosambi and the Early Indian Coins by BD Chattopadhyaya

(Source: EPW). Since EPW link will not be freely available after 3 weeks of going online, you can download it from this alternate location.)

Kosambi and the discourse of civilization

Kosambi and the discourse of civilization (Link via Radical Notes)

Kosambi and the discourse of civilization

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

The polymath’s most enduring and wide-ranging contribution to the interpretation of Indian history was his approach to the idea of India as a civilization.

D.D. Kosambi … remembered today chiefly for his work as a historian.

***

D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966) was a polymath who made original contributions in diverse areas including pure mathematics, quantitative numismatics, Sanskrit studies, and ancient Indian history. But he is remembered today chiefly for his work as a historian. That is not without reason. That is where he made an enduring impact even if some details of his findings and observations may be open to question in the light of later research. If we try to situate his contribution to the interpretation of history, the most enduring and wide-ranging in significance appears to be his approach to the idea of India as a civilization.

When he wrote in 1965 his last major work, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, he gave a central place to the notion of civilization. He began with the question: what unifies Indian civilization amidst cultural diversities within? He goes on to ask: what explains “the continuity we find in India over the last three thousand years”? He underlines the importance of the “material foundation for Indian culture and civilization” and, in the concluding chapter, explores the reason why, in his judgment, the ancient civilization was destined to stagnate.

In posing such wide-ranging questions about the civilization in India, Kosambi differed from the general run of academic historians of his times for they rarely engaged in the discourse of civilizations. He was swimming against the current. The specialised and fragmented view in the academic historians’ professional writings did not usually add up to that vision of totality that the notion of civilization demands. The fact that Kosambi was never given his due by them in his lifetime can be, arguably, ascribed to their disdain for a non-professional who was not only an avowed Marxist, but also given to talking about a dubious entity called ‘civilization.’

On the other hand, when Kosambi talked about the Indian civilization, he entered a discourse of civilization that was developed by some of the most creative minds of twentieth century India, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The questions that engaged such minds were roughly the same as those Kosambi grappled with. What kept India together as a civilization through the millennia? Was it a Hindu civilization, as some would have us believe? Is it possible to discern a continuity in this civilization from the prehistoric to colonial times? How does a notion of an ‘Indian civilization’ accommodate the immense diversities in the constituent communities and cultures? Is it necessary, even if it were possible, to talk of an ‘Indian civilization’? How did Kosambi’s intervention relate with the nationalist discourse of civilization?

It is interesting to recall that about two years after the birth of Kosambi (July 31, 1907), M. K. Gandhi, not yet the Mahatma, published his very first political tract, Hind Swaraj (1909). It was an unusual political tract in that it was mainly about India’s civilization. “It is my deliberate opinion that India is being ground down not under the English heels, but under that of modern civilization” (chapter VII). In a chapter entitled ‘What is civilization’ Gandhi poses a choice between what he considered to be true Indian civilization and the ‘materialistic’ civilization of Europe, for that choice would determine the outcome of the clash between the two. Gandhi virtually subordinates the political agenda before India to the cultural agenda and goes so far as to say our goal was not the expulsion of the English: “We can accommodate them. Only there is no room for their civilization” (chapter XIV).

Gandhi’s denunciation of Europe and idealisation of the non-materialistic tradition in India was, of course, distant from Kosambi’s emphasis on the material basis of India’s attainment of a high level of civilization. On the other hand, consider the fact that throughout the text of Hind Swaraj Gandhi never talks of a Hindu civilization. He talks of an Indian civilization. And the seminal notion of syncretism as the key to comprehending Indian civilization is already there in this very first piece of political statement by Mahatma Gandhi. He speaks of India’s “faculty of assimilation.”

Between this approach and Kosambi’s there are close parallels. Kosambi begins his treatise on The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India with the statement that India displays “diversity and unity at the same time.” And he deploys the notion of syncretism in Indian civilization in explicating the absorption of peripheral tribal groups into the mainstream, “their merger into general agrarian society,” in terms of the accommodation of their religious belief systems within the Brahmanic scheme of things. He saw a “process of syncretism” in the absorption of “primitive deities,” a “mechanism of acculturation, a clear give and take,” which allowed “Indian society to be formed out of many diverse and even discordant elements” (chapter 7).

The idea of a syncretism in the construal of India’s civilizational unity was of crucial importance in the nationalist discourse. The absence of the European concept of nationhood in the pre-colonial past, despite the substantial evidence of the existence of an indigenous notion of patriotism at the regional and sometimes also at the supra-regional level, was undeniable. The intellectual response to this perception was the idea of India’s civilizational unity, cutting across and over-riding all diversities.

Shortly before Gandhi wrote famously of India as a civilization, Rabindranath Tagore articulated the idea of syncretism in some less-known essays. “We can see that the aim of Bharatavarsha has always been to establish unity amidst differences, to bring diverse paths to a convergence, and to internalize within her soul the unity within severalty, that is to say to comprehend the inner unity of externally perceptible differences — without eliminating the uniqueness of each element.” Tagore wrote thus and much more in that vein in 1902 in an essay, ‘History of Bharatvarsha,’ which was reproduced many times during the Swadeshi agitation in Bengal from 1905. More prominent in the public mind were of course the pronouncements of the nationalist leadership.

While Kosambi shared this perception, while he underlined the unity within apparent diversity, he went on to make a point that was not often made in the nationalist discourse of civilization. “The modern Indian village gives an unspeakable impression of the grimmest poverty and helplessness,” he writes in 1965 in the book cited earlier (chapter 1). “The surplus taken away from people who live in such misery and degradation nevertheless provided and still provides the material foundation for Indian culture and civilization.” This evaluation was a radical departure from the oft-heard paeans of praise of the civilization.

Another new note struck by Kosambi was that stability of a civilizational unity was secured at the cost of stagnation and subjection to a regime of superstition and primitiveness. In this regard he follows Marx’s tendency of thought and at one point he even quoted Marx on ‘the idiocy’ of rural existence. Kosambi argues that syncretism allowed the admission of many a “primitive local god or goddess” and religious beliefs into the ancient Brahmanic system, along with the merger of different social groups with their own belief-systems and cultures. But he adds: “Brahmanism thus gave some unity to what would have been social fragments without a common bond. The process was of crucial importance in the history of India, first in developing the country from tribe to society and then holding it back, bogged down in the filthy swamp of superstition.”

His notion of the ‘primitive’ and the implicit idea of progression to ‘higher’ stages may be open to question today. In fact that approach is not so pronounced in his earlier essays on this theme, for example Myth and Reality (1962). However, the point for the present is that, contrary to the usual nationalist position with regard to the virtues of syncretism, he was critical of the consequences in terms of the obscurantism that enveloped the Indian mind.

The most famous exposition of the theme of the unifying Indian civilization in Kosambi’s lifetime was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946). Nehru commences with the question, “what is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects?” (p.36) He goes on to hazard a bold generalisation: in India’s past “disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to attempts to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization.” He returns to this theme through the entire work time and again. He ends the book with reflections on the same question: India is “a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads…She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive” (p. 378).

The idea that India was held together by bonds of unity rooted in the past of Indian civilization was not of course new. What was new was its assertion at a time when that unity was threatened by a communal divide that was soon to bring about the Partition of 1947. In the face of the threat, Nehru speaks of a dream of Indian unity. In early 20th century that unity appeared as an undeniable reality to Gandhi or Tagore; to Nehru in 1946 it was a dream, although it was in some ways also a reality. To Kosambi that unity possibly appeared as an enduring fact of history.

But when Kosambi reviewed this book, in Science and Society, he did not comment upon this aspect of it. Actually he found Nehru to be a poor historian so far as ancient India was concerned; he added however that he was “an admirer of the author” and he could see how difficult it was for Nehru, sitting in jail, to get the sources he needed. His critique was directed mainly against Nehru’s failure to attempt class analysis in understanding modern developments in India (Exasperating Essays, 1957). In this regard Kosambi was consistent in that he made class analysis the basis of his analysis of changes and continuities in Indian civilization when he turned to that theme in 1965.

That raises finally another question. What explanatory weight is to be assigned to Kosambi’s Marxian method in our effort to understand and contextualise his approach to the civilizational discourse? In a letter to his old friend Daniel Ingalls, an Indologist at Harvard, he wrote in 1953: “The world is divided into three groups: (1) swearing by Marxism, (2) swearing at Marxism, (3) indifferent, i.e. just swearing…I belong to (1), you and your colleagues to (2).” Perhaps Kosambi’s adherence to Marxism was to its use as a method, not as a source on par with empirical sources of knowledge.

He allowed that in some respects there was a poor fit between Indian history and the classical Marxian scheme. But he consistently used Marx’s method as a tool. Hence his scorn for ‘theological’ tendencies in Marxism. In his Introduction to Exasperating Essays he writes: “Indian Official Marxists hereafter called OM” were often displeased with him but he could not but protest their “theological emphasis on the inviolable sanctity of the current party line, or irrelevant quotations from the classics.” In using Marxist method in his own lights, in his effort to construe the civilization in India, in the convergences and divergences between his approach and the nationalist discourse of civilization, D.D. Kosambi has left much for us to try and understand and evaluate.

(Dr. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research and a former Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. This article is based on his Kosambi Birth Centenary Address at the University of Mumbai.)

In Kosambi's Memory: Time for Introspection

C. K. Raju’s Blog » Blog Archive » D. D. Kosambi: in memoriam

This is surely an occasion for historians to remember, because of Kosambi’s stature as a historian. His as-yet unmatched knowledge of languages and Indian culture (both “high” and “low”) gave tremendous depth to his pioneering account of Indian history from a Marxist perspective, which was refreshingly free of jargon, and so robustly down-to-earth.

However, Kosambi’s primary job was as a mathematician. So, this is also an occasion for other academicians in India—particularly mathematicians and scientists—to introspect. The recognized big names in Indian science (Ramanujam, S. N. Bose, K. S. Krishnan/C. V. Raman, S. Chandrasekhar) did their work in the pre-independence era. Why so few science achievers in post-independence India? Has science changed so that there are no more any individual achievers? That cannot be true, for there are post-independence science achievers of Indian origin, but they mostly did their work abroad.

So, could it be that it is our post-independence science policy that is at fault? that our science and technology management has gone seriously wrong? This question has been waiting far too long to be asked.

So, Kosambi’s centenary is also a time to reflect on the post-independence decline in Indian science. There are two key aspects here: (a) the systematic exclusion of talented and knowledgeable people, and (b) the complete lack of public accountability of the top science managers who are regarded as demigods (like godmen) in a scientifically illiterate society which is gullible to boot.

How was someone as obviously talented as Kosambi thrown out of the system and practically left to starve? How odd that this has never been publicly discussed by any academic in India in the last half-century! Why has no one else commented on the peculiar science policy of post-independence India, in which control of key state-funded research institutions was handed over to private capital by appointing as their heads the scions of industrial families?

What were the consequences of this policy? In contrast to Kosambi, whom he threw out, who were the people whom Bhabha encouraged? Insecure with Kosambi, and seeking to sideline him, Bhabha first promoted K. Chandrasekharan. A former director of TIFR provided an interesting thumb-nail sketech of the two. “Kosambi was a great intellect, but K. Chandrasekharan’s boast was that, as deputy director, he could meet the director without a prior appointment!”

The result of this pitiable attitude was that K. Chandrasekharan pitched for the the sort of mathematics that would fetch social approval from the West—which was what Bhabha craved. No one bothered that this mathematics had no practical value whatsoever but was funded under the false pretence of being useful for atomic energy. This method of persistently fooling the taxpayer of vast sums of money remains one of the well guarded secrets of our atomic energy programme!

There are other matters that need to be enquired into. While Bhabha looked the other way, Chandrasekharan also spread the poison of casteist and regional biases, which poison has now percolated to many of our leading national institutions in mathematics. Even Andre Weil, a member of the Bourbaki group, who spent time in Aligarh as a refugee Jew during the second war, has commented on this in his autobiography. How come no one in the last half a century has discussed these managerial blunders whether for mathematics or for atomic energy?

Again, in contrast to Kosambi, whom he sacked, Bhabha encouraged Raja Ramanna, who could publicly try to bluff (in response to my question) that “every matrix has a diagonal—even a rectangular matrix has a diagonal”. (See the cartoon at http://ckraju.net/ppthtml/img77.html and http://ckraju.net/ppthtml/img78.html.) This point concerns not only our science managers, but also our scientists: this piece of nonsense was received in abject silence by the rest of the house which included some top scientists from our leading institutions. Their silence was an admission that the truth—even the most elementary sort of truth—often has no place in the Indian system of science management.

Has the Indian science manager become just another sort of politician who tries to con the society to “pocket considerable research grants”, as Kosambi said? If so, it is easy to understand why knowledgeable and upright people, like Kosambi, have no place in the Indian system, which systematically promotes incompetence as the means to protect the lifelong power of the science manager. Those critics who are not linked to the West, and resist exile, howsoever talented they may be, have nowhere to go, like Kosambi.

How come we are still pumping vast resources into atomic energy despite half a century of consistently failed promises of cheap and plentiful energy? Kosambi was sacked for publicly raising questions about the real costs of atomic energy: where the money for the research came in, who benefited, and what would be the long-term costs in terms of cleaning up the mess of radioactive and genetic fallout.

Those questions still remain unanswered. So should we abandon atomic energy and shift to solar energy as Kosambi advocated? Our “experts” do not engage in such debates. Instead, like the mafia, they silence critics. As Kosambi said, “in a stagnant pond it is the scum that rises to the top”.

But why should we trust “experts” who lack moral fibre? Because of total dependence on cliques of experts, science in India lacks public accountability even more than the judiciary or the police. The truth is simply what the experts say it is whether the opinion originates from self-interest or ignorance or any other reason. Is this acceptable? Think of the huge amounts that are spent on research?

Isn’t it important to check both the ethics and scientific credentials of experts on whose opinion so many wide-ranging decisions are based, especially in a knowledge society? Certificates from the West, or other measures of social acceptance in the West, are a thoroughly improper measure of the real scientific credentials of an expert, for the West has a habit of issuing the warmest such certificates to just those of its lackeys who best serve its interests.

In the case of mathematics, for instance, as I have pointed out the theorem-proving sort of mathematics is religiously oriented, and based on Christian theological principles (the theorems of present-day formal mathematics would mostly fail with Buddhist or Jaina logic, for example). So, such theorem-proving mathematics is of no secular value and only pushes the Western agenda of hegemony. If we still do it, it is because we are being adviced by bad experts who are pushing Western propaganda because their whose financial interests are tied to West. What a secular state needs to be concerned with is only the practical value of mathematics.

Let these experts show how their contributions have benefited our interests —the practical interests of people in this society. How has the work of these experts helped to improve the standard of living of anyone (other than the experts themselves, that is). If they can’t show that, or can’t show it publicly, then these “experts” are just parasites. They can’t be expected to quit on grounds of public decency, so they perhaps need to be forcibly shown the door. If the bureaucrats won’t do it, the people should.

The managers who went horribly wrong about the people they kept and the people they threw out, were they perhaps equally wrong about the technology whose mimicry they advocated? What does history say about the future of a civilization that throws out its creative soul and survives on mimesis?

These are some of the neglected questions that, in my opinion, ought to be discussed on Kosambi’s 101st birthday. These questions have become all the more pressing today, because of the recent events concerning the nuclear deal.

Special EPW Issue on DD Kosambi

This week's EPW is a special issue focused on DD Kosambi. I will upload the articles later here, meanwhile, you can access them at the EPW site.

Kosambi's Myth and Reality available in Hindi

Kosambi's Myth and Reality available in Hindi from ICHR and can be ordered online (Price Rs. 450).

Historical and Ethical Roots of Jainism

Historical and Ethnical Roots of Jainism

One must not glass over the existence of the Pani tribe. But again it is not quite certain where this tribe had settled. It is referred to in Rigveda and in other Vedic literature but to which group it belonged-whether to the Dravidian or Aryan-it is as yet not possible to say definitely.

This literature tells us about the riches of Pani. A Pani is called 'ayajnic' i.e. not a sacrificer (they think of him in this way, called the Pani Dasas, as they call all non-Aryans). The Aryans fought against Pani tribe, subjugated and plundered them and turned them into slaves.


These people are described as liers, evil-doers and demons, robbers of treasures and cows.

D. D. Kosambi considers that these people carried on trade with Aryans and that the words 'Baniya' and 'Vanik'-merchant, are of non-Sanskrit origin and can be traced back to the ethnonym Pani.

Several Indian scholars express the opinion that Pani were the bearers of the 'culture of Shramana' i.e. the Jainic religion.

Kosambi on Buddhist poet Vidyakara

This is not written by Kosambi, he is only cited in this article on the Buddhist Sanskrit poet Vidyakara and his collection of verses Subhasitaratnakosa. I found the article informative and thought that it might be of interest to the readers of this blog.

Source: BANGLAPEDIA: Subhasitaratnakosa

Subhasitaratnakosa is an anthology of Sanskrit verses compiled by a Buddhist scholar named Vidyakara who lived in Bengal from the latter half of the 11th century AD to c 1130 AD. The first edition of this anthology, containing over a thousand verses, was prepared by Vidyakara shortly before 1100 AD. This first edition's palm leaf manuscript was discovered at the Ngor monastery in central Tibet. A second edition of the Subhasitaratnakosa (treasury of well turned verse), increased in size by about one third, containing 1738 verses, was compiled by Vidyakara himself not later than 1130 AD. A paper manuscript of this expanded edition was found in the private collection of the Nepalese Rajaguru, Pundit Hemaraja. The researches of DD Kosambi have shown that an anthology of Sanskrit verses published by FW Thomas in 1912 under the conjectural title Kavindravachanasamuchchaya from a fragment of a palm leaf manuscript represents the second edition of Subhasitaratnakosa.

About Vidyakara, the compiler of the Subhasitaratnakosa, no details are known. Researches of DD Kosambi have shown that Vidyakara was a monk at the Jagaddala monastery (in varendra) and in the compilation of his anthology he used the manuscripts kept in the library of that monastery. Several of the verses quoted by Vidyakara have references, which seem to be the very shelfmarks of the library of the Jagaddala vihara. It appears from the arrangement of verses that Vidyakara compiled his anthology over a long period, probably as a life-long hobby. It seems probable that with the decline of Buddhism in Bengal and Bihar and the invasion and occupation of North and Western Bengal by Muslims, some monks took the manuscripts of the Subhasitaratnakosa along with other manuscripts to neighbouring countries like Tibet and Nepal.

Of the 275 authors quoted in the Subhasitaratnakosa, only eleven seem to be earlier than the seventh century AD. Again, Vidyakara's favourite authors were close to him in time and place. Vallana, Yogeshvara, Vasukalpa, Manovinoda, Abhinanda were all Bengalis or at least easterners of the Pala kingdom, the core of which comprised Bengal and Bihar. Among the less frequently quoted authors are many Pala princes of state and church whose verses are not found in any other extant work. Among them are dharmapala, Rajayapala, Buddhakaragupta, Khipaka, and Jnanashri. Though Vidyakara quotes verses of classical authors like Kalidasa, Rajashekhara, and Bhavabhuti, he shows a special predilection for eastern or Bengali poets. His favourite authors in order of the frequency with which he quotes them belonged to a period from 700 to 1100 AD. But the Subhasitaratnakosa is eventually an anthology of the middle classical period (700-1050 AD) of Sanskrit.

Vidyakara has drawn verses from four sources: the great kavyas, the plays, small kavyas, and anthologies and stray verses. He has quoted verses mostly from plays, small kavyas and anthologies. The Subhasitaratnakosa has 50 vrajyas or sections. Following the usual norm of all Sanskrit works he begins with a benedictory verse composed by himself. As a Buddhist monk, he then quotes verses with praise of the divine human, the Buddha (section 1). The verses on the Buddha are followed by the sections containing the verses on the Bodhisattva Lokeshvara and the Bodhisattva Manjughosa (sections 2-3). Vidyakara includes more verses in praise of Hindu gods than of the Buddha (sections 4-7). Sections 8-13 contain verses on the different seasons. Vidyakara's liking for love poetry is manifest in verses on love in sections 14-26. In the Subhasitaratnakosa there are verses on villages and fields (sections 12, 13, 35). The verses throw light on contemporary society. There are also verses on warfare and heroism (sections 45-46). In the section 49, entitled miscellaneous, we find verses on Hari-Hara, that is to say, love and gnomic verses teaching some point of worldly wisdom. The last Vrajya (50) in praise of poets has literary as well as historical value.

Vidyakara's anthology is proof of ancient Bengal's contributions to Sanskrit literature. It also contains valuable information on the socio-economic history of ancient Bengal. It still remains the oldest general anthology of Sanskrit verses. govardhanacharya (Aryasaptashati) and Shridharadasa (Saduktikarnamrta), the court poets of the Sena period, carried on the tradition and enriched Sanskrit anthological literature (Kosakavya). [Shahanara Husain]

Bibliography DD Kosambi and Gokhale (ed), The Subhasitaratnakosa, Harvard Oriental Series, 42, 1957; HH Ingalls (tr), An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, Vidyakara's 'Subhasitaratnakosa', HOS, 44, 1965.

A Discussion on Kosambi's work on Numismatics

Kosambi's book Indian Numismatics can be downloaded from here.

Indo-Eurasian_research : Message: Re: [Indo-Eurasia] The Abrus precatorius seed as an Indian weight unit

Re: [Indo-Eurasia] The Abrus precatorius seed as an Indian weight unit

Francesco writes in his post on seeds (proposed by Allen speculatively) being used as an Indus weight standard:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/10328

/> Any comments, anyone?

Allen's idea (and Kosambi's) is interesting, Francesco -- but how could it be tested? What evidence of such use would remain in the artifactual record? And seed weights vary, so the hyperbole about perfectly standardized Indus weights in any event would still go out the window.

There are also genetic issues to consider. As I know from visits to Steve Weber's lab and talks with Steve and Dorian Fuller, we can't assume that modern seeds and those found in the Indus Valley are identical in size or weight. That needs to be taken in consideration in statements like this:

/> Contrary to what you, Allen, suggest in your post, the rattI has an
/> *average* (but not certainly a fixed) weight of 0.106 to 0.109 grams.
/> It was the smallest unit of weight measurement for ancient Indian coins.

On the calculations you point to in Kosambi, you write:

/> This subject was magistrally discussed by D.D. Kosambi in _Indian
/> Numismatics_ (New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1981), where he provides a
/> severe critique of the interpretation of the data on Indus weights
/> offered by A.S. Hemmy (whose work has been cited by Steve in some
/> earlier posts in this thread). Kosambi thought it plausible that
/> the seed of the gunja plant could have been the basis of the Indus
/> weight system:
/>
/> http://tinyurl.com/4anmts

It is important to note that Kosambi is not predominantly talking about Hemmy's work that I cited but his work on the weights of Indian coins from nearly two millennia after the fall of the Indus.

Moreover, he doesn't criticize Hemmy's RAW measurements, which is all I referred to. He instead criticizes a part of Hemmy's work that I didn't refer to: Hemmy's fudging to find standard proportions in the data, which led him to conclude (after his fudging) that the Indus mixed up binary and decimal systems (invented to explain all the anomalies in weight proportions: this is ultimately what lies behind many of the later myths about perfectly proportioned weights).

Since the raw data from the 20s and 30s from Mohenjo Daro (in Hemmy) and the raw data from modern Harappan excavations (sent to me by Richard Meadow) don't suggest that there were precise standards, you can ONLY get these neat proportions by fudging the data.

But if you read Kosambi carefully, you'll see that he does the same thing that Hemmy does: he starts from the assumption that there is a single weight standard, just like Hemmy. He only disagrees with Hemmy's work by replacing Hemmy's imagined standard with a seed standard -- basing his calculations on *modern* seed weights. (Sorry, it can't work.) There are a lot of mathematical manipulations in this chapter, but given all the unknowns the equations he gives just add smoke to his mirrors.

(Note also all the strange assumptions he makes about supposed links between Mohenjo Daro finds and "Indo-Aryan Linguistic survivals of the dual system rise to 8 units" [p. 29. It would take a lot of space to analyze what he's talking about here, but it is all irrelevant to our discussion, so I won't bother.)

In any event

(1) we don't know seed weights from the Indus era and can't know them: the seeds that researchers like Weber count are preserved by being carbonized in hearths; it takes a lot of expertise even to tell different carbonized plant seeds apart, and of course the data preserve no information on weight; moreover, there are no reasons for supposing that Indus seeds would be genetically identical
to modern seeds.

(2) we have no evidence that the Indus used seeds this way in the first place. What we DO know is that the weights that have survived in the Indus Valley aren't standardized precisely either within individual sites or across multiple sites.

So the seed idea that Allen proposed is interesting and possible, but it is difficult to see how it could be tested. If some direct evidence of some sort showed up that supported it (iconographical? Possible but unlikelky), it wouldn't have any pertinence to the "standardized weight" myth.

Still an interesting idea, however. But beads of particular sizes might work just as well, really.

Best,
Steve

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