DD Kosambi Festival of Ideas on 8th Feb at Panaji

The Hindu : Karnataka News : Kosambi Festival of Ideas

Kosambi Festival of Ideas

Special Correspondent

Panaji: Actor and playwright Girish Karnad will be one of the speakers at the third D.D. Kosambi Festival of Ideas 2010 to be held here from February 8.

Besides Mr. Karnad, the five-day festival will have educationist and National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) Director Krishna Kumar, the former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, human rights activist Harsh Mander, and columnist Guru Gurucharan Das as speakers.

Mr. Karnad will deliver a lecture on “Colonialism and Culture”.

Kosambi on early feudalism in the Punjab

Baba Farid- The intellectual developments of 12th century Punjab and rise of Sufism « Indus Asia Online Journal (iaoj)

D. D. Kosambi, the renowned Indian historian, is not very impressed with the level of knowledge created during the transformation from Vedic tribalism to feudalism in the Punjab and the rest of India. The Punjab was in the forefront of such a transformation from tribalism to feudalism, giving birth to isolated villages and cities where kings and priestly classes had developed close links. Kosambi argues that the isolation of villages and their surplus channeled through the king and not through market mechanism, created conditions that were not conducive to enhancing knowledge: The interaction of individuals through commodity markets creates and builds institutions of knowledge.

Kosambi maintains that the Punjab was at par with Greece in the early periods, but the repulsion felt by the priestly classes for material reality hindered progress. In his words, “Thus, Brahmin indifference to past and present reality not only erased Indian history but a great deal of real Indian culture as well. The loss may be estimated by imagining the works of Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides and their contemporaries as replaced by priestly rituals rewritten [by the Greek intelligentsia]…” In other words the priestly classes were just rewriting rituals, while society was transforming its base in the Punjab.

DDK on the national language

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | Something to learn and ponder

D.D. Kosambi was a Marxist polymath. From his eyrie in Deccan College, Poona, he used to wander in the hills behind, pick up sharpened pebbles (‘microliths’ in archaeologists’ jargon), and wonder which of them shepherds had used to circumcise their goats as they migrated between their winter pastures down in the hills and monsoon refuge in the Western Ghats. In a 1960 article included here, he asks what should be India’s national language. He rejects both Sanskrit and English because they were imposed by ruling classes, and Hindi because its adoption would scare Madrasis that they would be overrun by Marwari shopkeepers. Having rejected all common languages, he is left with the alternative that everyone should speak his own language — whether they understand one another or not is immaterial.

Popular introduction to DD Kosambi

This is the chapter on DD Kosambi which appears in a forthcoming book on a popular introduction to Indian scientists. The book has been written by Arvind Gupta and is being published at the initiative of the Indian Science Academy.

DDK on Facebook

The DD Kosambi blog now has a group in Facebook. Do join.

Recent Researches into the Harappan Script

Veteran epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan shares some fascinating breakthroughs on his researches on deciphering the Harappan script.

When the Indus script became extinct, the memory of its grammatical elements should have been lost; but it did not quite happen that way. Since most of the Harappan ruling classes had names or titles ending in -(a)nr , that sound was borrowed by Indo-Aryan as an ethnic name to denote the neighbouring Non-Aryan people. Thus, Dr. –(a)nr > IA anr > andhra ( attested in Aitareya Brahmana VII:18).

...

The ‘alpha and omega’ signs have been so designated not only because they respectively commence and end most of the Indus texts, but also because they sum up the essence or most important feature of the Indus seal-texts, namely, the identity of the Harappan ruling class. This is shown below schematically (from left to right for convenience) :...

...

After the collapse of the Indus Civilisation, the institution of mel-akam (‘High House’) did not survive. But those who owned allegiance to the mel-akam , the akatt-u people, did survive and, in course of time, re-emerged in the Vedic period as the ‘jar-born’ priests typified by Agastya. A section of the ruling classes did not stay on, but migrated under the leadership of the Akattiyar clan to South India, where they founded the Early Historical kingdoms (of Andhras and their successors in the Deccan, and the triple kingdoms, Chera, Chola and Pandya, in the Tamil country).

Download pdf file

Courtesy: Harappa Project

Note: This article is not related directly to DD Kosambi but I felt it might be of some interest to the readers of this blog.

DDK on Solar Energy

An Indian Express editorial cites DDK's views in favour of solar energy.

In the ’50s and ’60s, solar energy was just a glint in the Indian scientific establishment’s eye. Two of our intellectual heavyweights, D.D. Kosambi and Homi Bhabha, clashed over whether India should concentrate on solar or nuclear energy. Kosambi’s view that India has a natural advantage in the solar sector, compared to the enormous costs of nuclear power, was ultimately disregarded. Since then, we have dawdled for years. According to the CAG, our solar energy centre in the renewable energy ministry, which is meant to link government, institutions, industry and consumers, sent back 44-76 per cent of its budget between 2002-7. There was practically no headway in research or tech, or any productive relationships with industry.

But now, India is all set to come up with a global energy breakthrough, with a solar plan that aims to generate 20 GW (that is, 20,000 MW) over the next couple of decades (the largest in the world). This would make us a leader in renewable energy, and would radically change India’s role in climate change mitigation. Obviously, there is much to be worked through in order to transform solar energy from a small boutique alternative to a steady and substantial part of our energy mix — most importantly in the price differential between conventional and solar power. India’s solar plan aims for grid parity by 2020. Another significant shift is the focus on solar thermal, along with photo-voltaic (electricity-generating) technology.

All of this sounds thoroughly commendable, but the question is, how will it be executed and who will pick up the tab? While private industry is most competent to take on this task, payback will take a long time, and much of the risk and R&D will have to be publicly footed. The challenge is to structure incentives to spur disruptive innovation, without having to prop it up altogether. Once we have a clear aim, cost estimates, and a set of our own commitments by the time Copenhagen rolls around, India is entitled to ask the world to pitch in, at least in terms of financial support. Either way, India has finally come to a constructive position and crafted a plan commensurate with its capacities, rather than whingeing about the unfairness of having to take action on the world’s behalf.

DDK on Adivasis

JJ Roy Burman cites DDK in his article on the term 'Adivasis':

At the outset it needs to be realised that a nation-state like India is not a cultural but political entity which was borne due to a quirk of history. Imposing Hindi as a national and official State language over all the regions is not a very civilised act—it smacks of North Indian chauvinism. Secondly, it is also not true that the tribes in all quarters of the country are aboriginals of the regions where they inhabit at present. While the famous historian Kosambi (1956) viewed that the tribes had migrated to the plain areas at a much later date only after the vegetation had thinned out and wild animals became less numerous—making the area less dangerous for human habitation and fit for settled cultivation, Archana Prasad (2003), the young scholar from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, feels that the tribes practising settled cultivation in the plains were pushed to the hills and forests by the profligate Aryan invaders and later Hindu settled cultivators and the outside traders. Either way the tribes are not autochthons of the spaces occupied by them at present. In 1980s Andre Betteille` had similarly expressed about the inapplicability of the concept of aborigine to the tribesmen in India.

MR Rajagoplan on DDK

MR Rajagoplan of the Gandhigram Trust writes a biographical sketch of DD Kosambi and Dharmanand Kosambi. (.doc file)

The impact of his work, however, continued growing after his death. Eight years after his death, in 1947, three books honouring Kosambi were published. As many as 14 years after his death, in the year 1980, he was decorated with the ‘Hari Om Ashram Award’ by University Grants Commission for bringing to light the mutual relationship between science and society. The freshness of his ideas and thoughts has not reduced one bit even nearly half a century after his demise. Last, but not least year long celebration has been arranged for his centenary in Pune beginning from July, 2007. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Romilla Thapar a famous Historian. Prabhat Patnaik and Irtan Habih have delivered talks. The last in the series would be in June 2008. Pune University would bring out a publication of these 12 lectures.

Prime Minister of India has sanctioned a Chair in the name of Kosambi with an amount of Rs. One crore in Pune University. He has also announced the release of a postal stamp in Kosambi’s honour.

Book on DDK, in Marathi

Arvind Gupta has digitized a book on DD Kosambi by Sudhir Panse. The book is written in Marathi.