HistoriCity: Tech and its chequered history in India
Any brief history of technological advancement and its diffusion across the world must start with the wheel, makes the world go round
The recently concluded AI Summit has left a mixed afterglow thanks in no small part to the Galgotia University fiasco. The event saw almost all the top companies doff their hats to India’s potential and strength first as a market and then as a central player to AI growth. The power and all-pervasiveness of artificial intelligence as technology can hardly be ignored although the risks posed by it are perhaps not acknowledged enough. AI’s development as a disruptive new tool is akin to several other tech inventions or innovations that have spurred the advancement of human beings for at least the last ten thousand years, and it is worth taking a moment to delve into the past.
Any brief history of technological advancement and its diffusion across the world must start with the wheel, which not only makes the world go round but enables the transmission of power more efficiently, thereby making it indispensable in every sphere of modern life; including and especially in silicon semiconductors which are essential for all computing and AI processing.
The economical transmission of power and its earliest evidence through the use of the cart-wheel without spokes takes us 60,000 years back to Iraq and the Mesopotamians who first used a wagon-like vehicle on solid wheels. We know from carbon-dated clay seals that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation used what is extant: bullock carts.
Excavations at Mehrgarh in Pakistan show the presence of the potter’s wheel in 4000 BCE, used by the Chalcolithic community that lived in the plains below Quetta. Thus, the Indian subcontinent can claim precedence over other parts in regards to wheel-turned pottery. Soon after, the spoked wheel’s usage spread from Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and other parts of the world; the axel was invented but it is impossible to be certain about its origin, it is more likely that it was one of those commonsensical ideas that are difficult to patent.
Without food surplus no civilisation could have progressed. And agriculture was itself enabled by the use of the ox-plough, which improved the efficiency of sowing seeds in furrows. Similarly, the simple hole in the axe-blade, in which the wooden handle rests, made the axe much more effective and helped in faster clearing of forests for agriculture. The Indus Valley sites have provided ample evidence of cultivation of barley, millet, wheat, rice, ragi, and cotton. Professor BB Lal unearthed furrows in Kalibangan that prove the prevalence of ox-plough, especially enabled by the natural hum of the Indian ox. The use of shaft-hole axe is seen at both Mohenjodaro and Chanhudaro around 1500 BCE. In the gangetic plains the axe-hole shaft’s evidence goes back only to 900 BCE, which leaves the question of what delayed its adoption in what later became the cradle of Brahminical Hinduism.
Several other tools of transmitting power such as the mortar-pestle and the draw-bar transformed milling over the following centuries and millennia. It is safe to speculate that with cross migrations from one geography to another these tools and technologies spread across not only their countries of origin but also to neighbouring regions and beyond.
Ancient India was an important source for cotton and it was widely cultivated, and its fabric created in colourful patterns. From Buddhist Jatakas to Greek and Roman several accounts describe the vividness and fine quality of this fibre, which was known in Sanskrit as karpas and seems related to the Greek karpos and Latin carbasus. The history of cotton spinning covers several innovations that were variously brought in from China and then West Asia. The word cotton itself comes from Arabic qutun which means soft.
It is a generally held belief that the spinning wheel or charkha to make cotton thread is of Indian origin due to its presence as a key symbol of self-rule during the independence movement. However, the spinning wheel was most likely a Chinese invention as evidence for it in that country goes back to the first millennium BCE during the reign of the Zhou dynasty. In India, the earliest evidence of creating cotton threads is through hand spinning which is described in literature beginning in the 11th and 12th century. Irfan Habib writes in Pursuing the History of Indian Technology: Pre-Modern Modes of Transmission of Power,
“In the 11th and 12th century texts we have the carding bow (pinjana), the spindle (tarkuh, kartanbhanda(, but no wheel. In 1301–02, at Delhi, Amir Khusrau, giving counsel to his young daughter, insisted on her remaining content with two things alone: the needle and spindle.”
Another poet writing fifty years later echoes this patriarchal view. Disparaging Razia, the only female sultan of Delhi, Isami says, “sovereignty doesn’t suit a woman, since she is intrinsically of defective intelligence. That woman is better, who sits with her charkha all the time; for a position of dignity would make her wanton. Let cotton be her mate, the water-jar her wine-cup, and the twang of the spindle her minstrel”.
It has remained an intriguing question: why did the industrial revolution happen in West Europe of all places in the world? It should be self-evident that such a phenomenon doesn’t happen all of a sudden and needs a continuum of cultural acceptance of knowledge and learning, and not just of the high-brow kind that ancient Indian texts illustrate so well, but also technological and artisanal know-how. India and other parts of the world were at similar levels of development whether it was maritime or land-based technology. It appears now that the Renaissance was partly responsible for a.) rise in the status of craftsmen and their access to education, and b.) the taking up of crafts and artisanship by the educated elite.
The latter was also present in China where the literati took up subjects like mining in their works. This didn’t happen in India, where the scientists or the knowledgeable pundits remained vested in the pursuit of astronomy, astrology and mathematics besides literature and other arts. The former development led to artisans being educated and the eventual production of two major mechanical devices which became critical for technological growth in later centuries. Two key inventions that took place in Europe prior to the 15th century seem to have laid the bedrock on which came later technological developments. These breakthroughs were the humble spiral spring and the grooved screw. Only Europeans had it, not China or Iran or India. When Europeans brought these devices to India, artisans here tried to reproduce it by winding a wire around wooden screws but couldn’t replicate the same strength. And the spiral spring’s absence in India meant that we weren’t able to produce a quality watch till much recently.
In Europe these two primary but crucial devices enabled the development of complex machinery which eventually led to the Industrial Revolution which was itself a result of surplus capital as well as the democratisation of knowledge. When the educated elite began exploring technology and crafts in a serious way and craftsmen themselves became educated it created the intellectual and material precondition for the development of machines on scientific principles.
Professor Irfan Habib writes in Pursuing the History of Indian Technology: Pre-Modern Modes of Transmission of Power, “it is true nevertheless that in any culture the attitude of the educated to craft-technology must influence its progress. Ideology may thus after all matter. One misses in India even that curiosity which the Chinese literati and the Greek and Roman citizenry displayed in the techniques of the crafts. This does not only mean that our craft-history is so much less documented; it also means that diffusion through means of official or aristocratic support would have been on a minimal scale in pre-modern India”.
(HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.)
The recently concluded AI Summit has left a mixed afterglow thanks in no small part to the Galgotia University fiasco. The event saw almost all the top companies doff their hats to India’s potential and strength first as a market and then as a central player to AI growth. The power and all-pervasiveness of artificial intelligence as technology can hardly be ignored although the risks posed by it are perhaps not acknowledged enough. AI’s development as a disruptive new tool is akin to several other tech inventions or innovations that have spurred the advancement of human beings for at least the last ten thousand years, and it is worth taking a moment to delve into the past.
Any brief history of technological advancement and its diffusion across the world must start with the wheel, which not only makes the world go round but enables the transmission of power more efficiently, thereby making it indispensable in every sphere of modern life; including and especially in silicon semiconductors which are essential for all computing and AI processing.
The economical transmission of power and its earliest evidence through the use of the cart-wheel without spokes takes us 60,000 years back to Iraq and the Mesopotamians who first used a wagon-like vehicle on solid wheels. We know from carbon-dated clay seals that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation used what is extant: bullock carts.
Excavations at Mehrgarh in Pakistan show the presence of the potter’s wheel in 4000 BCE, used by the Chalcolithic community that lived in the plains below Quetta. Thus, the Indian subcontinent can claim precedence over other parts in regards to wheel-turned pottery. Soon after, the spoked wheel’s usage spread from Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and other parts of the world; the axel was invented but it is impossible to be certain about its origin, it is more likely that it was one of those commonsensical ideas that are difficult to patent.
Without food surplus no civilisation could have progressed. And agriculture was itself enabled by the use of the ox-plough, which improved the efficiency of sowing seeds in furrows. Similarly, the simple hole in the axe-blade, in which the wooden handle rests, made the axe much more effective and helped in faster clearing of forests for agriculture. The Indus Valley sites have provided ample evidence of cultivation of barley, millet, wheat, rice, ragi, and cotton. Professor BB Lal unearthed furrows in Kalibangan that prove the prevalence of ox-plough, especially enabled by the natural hum of the Indian ox. The use of shaft-hole axe is seen at both Mohenjodaro and Chanhudaro around 1500 BCE. In the gangetic plains the axe-hole shaft’s evidence goes back only to 900 BCE, which leaves the question of what delayed its adoption in what later became the cradle of Brahminical Hinduism.
{{/usCountry}}Without food surplus no civilisation could have progressed. And agriculture was itself enabled by the use of the ox-plough, which improved the efficiency of sowing seeds in furrows. Similarly, the simple hole in the axe-blade, in which the wooden handle rests, made the axe much more effective and helped in faster clearing of forests for agriculture. The Indus Valley sites have provided ample evidence of cultivation of barley, millet, wheat, rice, ragi, and cotton. Professor BB Lal unearthed furrows in Kalibangan that prove the prevalence of ox-plough, especially enabled by the natural hum of the Indian ox. The use of shaft-hole axe is seen at both Mohenjodaro and Chanhudaro around 1500 BCE. In the gangetic plains the axe-hole shaft’s evidence goes back only to 900 BCE, which leaves the question of what delayed its adoption in what later became the cradle of Brahminical Hinduism.
{{/usCountry}}Several other tools of transmitting power such as the mortar-pestle and the draw-bar transformed milling over the following centuries and millennia. It is safe to speculate that with cross migrations from one geography to another these tools and technologies spread across not only their countries of origin but also to neighbouring regions and beyond.
Ancient India was an important source for cotton and it was widely cultivated, and its fabric created in colourful patterns. From Buddhist Jatakas to Greek and Roman several accounts describe the vividness and fine quality of this fibre, which was known in Sanskrit as karpas and seems related to the Greek karpos and Latin carbasus. The history of cotton spinning covers several innovations that were variously brought in from China and then West Asia. The word cotton itself comes from Arabic qutun which means soft.
It is a generally held belief that the spinning wheel or charkha to make cotton thread is of Indian origin due to its presence as a key symbol of self-rule during the independence movement. However, the spinning wheel was most likely a Chinese invention as evidence for it in that country goes back to the first millennium BCE during the reign of the Zhou dynasty. In India, the earliest evidence of creating cotton threads is through hand spinning which is described in literature beginning in the 11th and 12th century. Irfan Habib writes in Pursuing the History of Indian Technology: Pre-Modern Modes of Transmission of Power,
“In the 11th and 12th century texts we have the carding bow (pinjana), the spindle (tarkuh, kartanbhanda(, but no wheel. In 1301–02, at Delhi, Amir Khusrau, giving counsel to his young daughter, insisted on her remaining content with two things alone: the needle and spindle.”
Another poet writing fifty years later echoes this patriarchal view. Disparaging Razia, the only female sultan of Delhi, Isami says, “sovereignty doesn’t suit a woman, since she is intrinsically of defective intelligence. That woman is better, who sits with her charkha all the time; for a position of dignity would make her wanton. Let cotton be her mate, the water-jar her wine-cup, and the twang of the spindle her minstrel”.
It has remained an intriguing question: why did the industrial revolution happen in West Europe of all places in the world? It should be self-evident that such a phenomenon doesn’t happen all of a sudden and needs a continuum of cultural acceptance of knowledge and learning, and not just of the high-brow kind that ancient Indian texts illustrate so well, but also technological and artisanal know-how. India and other parts of the world were at similar levels of development whether it was maritime or land-based technology. It appears now that the Renaissance was partly responsible for a.) rise in the status of craftsmen and their access to education, and b.) the taking up of crafts and artisanship by the educated elite.
The latter was also present in China where the literati took up subjects like mining in their works. This didn’t happen in India, where the scientists or the knowledgeable pundits remained vested in the pursuit of astronomy, astrology and mathematics besides literature and other arts. The former development led to artisans being educated and the eventual production of two major mechanical devices which became critical for technological growth in later centuries. Two key inventions that took place in Europe prior to the 15th century seem to have laid the bedrock on which came later technological developments. These breakthroughs were the humble spiral spring and the grooved screw. Only Europeans had it, not China or Iran or India. When Europeans brought these devices to India, artisans here tried to reproduce it by winding a wire around wooden screws but couldn’t replicate the same strength. And the spiral spring’s absence in India meant that we weren’t able to produce a quality watch till much recently.
In Europe these two primary but crucial devices enabled the development of complex machinery which eventually led to the Industrial Revolution which was itself a result of surplus capital as well as the democratisation of knowledge. When the educated elite began exploring technology and crafts in a serious way and craftsmen themselves became educated it created the intellectual and material precondition for the development of machines on scientific principles.
Professor Irfan Habib writes in Pursuing the History of Indian Technology: Pre-Modern Modes of Transmission of Power, “it is true nevertheless that in any culture the attitude of the educated to craft-technology must influence its progress. Ideology may thus after all matter. One misses in India even that curiosity which the Chinese literati and the Greek and Roman citizenry displayed in the techniques of the crafts. This does not only mean that our craft-history is so much less documented; it also means that diffusion through means of official or aristocratic support would have been on a minimal scale in pre-modern India”.
(HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.)
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