A History of Circulation vs. an ‘Episodic’ History of Mathematics in South Asia: Titrating the Historiography and Social Theory of Science and Mathematics

Abstract

The historiography of mathematics of the non-Western world long appeared immune to the influence of cultural studies or of critiques of Orientalism. The turn to “ethno-mathematics” and the interrogation of the historiography of proof as boundary marker (Chemla 2012), the internal challenge to foundationalism, etc., have all played a role in pluralizing conceptions of mathematics—though inklings of the idea can be found in the work of a thinker scholars have, understandably, treated with kid gloves: namely, Oswald Spengler. And yet the practice of mathematics continues to manifest a dynamic and positive relationship with its past and the different ways of doing mathematics: How else is one to understand why mathematicians pursue problems that are 300 years old, or why the theoretical astrophysicist and Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar produced a book on Newton’s Principia at the end of the twentieth century (Chandrasekhar 1995)? Furthermore, recent studies on the historiography of non-Western mathematical traditions in Western histories of mathematics produced at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe actually reveal the shaping of the historiographical landscape by the changing representations of the Orient in European historical discourse—splintered, of course, across varying “national interpretative traditions” (Said 1994). Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the Scottish reading of the Indian mathematical tradition was at variance with the French one (Raina 2001, 2012a). This paper sidesteps the preoccupation of historians with priority disputes and looks more closely at the similarities and differences that might stimulate the development of a cognitively just history of mathematics. This requires closer scrutiny of the historiography of European and Indian mathematics, the modality of construction of the Indian and West-East mathematical divide, and its relationship with modernity.