Couple of months back when I posted against western scientists piracy of Bharatiya knowledge, one friend of friend suggested that, why do I paint all as pirates?
No. I don’t. I very well welcome scientists who give references.
I have high respect for Donald Knuth.
The name of Leonardo of Pisa, also called Fibonacci (I 170-1250), is attached to the sequence 0, I, I, 2. 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . , in which the nth term is given by Un = Un-1 + Un-2. But the sequence was well known in India before Leonardo’s time. Indian authorities on the metrical sciences used this sequence in works on metric.
Professor (आचार्य) Pingala is the first known authority on the metrical sciences in Bharat whose writings indicate a knowledge of the so-called Fibonacci numbers. He is considered as younger brother of आचार्य Panini. There is alternative opinion that he is maternal uncle of आचार्य Panini.
From now on, teach your children Matra-meru numbers.
Read more: http://tjure.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/files/Kursmaterialien/Gerdemann/sdarticle.pdf
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This is called cultural digestion. Rajiv Malhotra puts this cultural hijacking in words very nicely. Beware of cultural hijacking!
Rajiv Malhotra frequently draws on the Tiger and the Deer metaphor to explain the process of digestion. Malhotra writes (“The Tiger and the Deer: Is Dharma being digested into the West?”.): “Just as the tiger, a predator, would, the West, a dominant and aggressive culture dismembers the weaker one – the deer – into parts from which it picks and chooses pieces that it wants to appropriate; the appropriated elements get mapped onto the language and social structures of the dominant civilization’s own history and paradigms, leaving little if any trace of the links to the source tradition. The civilization that was thus “mined” and consumed gets depleted of its cultural and social capital, because the appropriated elements are then shown to be disconnected from and even in conflict with the source civilization. Finally, the vanquished prey – the deer – enters the proverbial museum as yet another dead creature (i.e. a dead culture), ceasing to pose a threat to the dominant one.”
Malhotra adds: “There are several examples of civilizations becoming digested by some other civilization. Many symbols, rituals and ideas came to Christianity from the so-called pagans (pre-Christian Europeans), but these pagan faiths were demonized and destroyed in the process. Native Americans gave numerous riches to the European colonizers – including potatoes, tomatoes, material wealth, fertile lands – but these original discoverers and citizens of the Americas lost their own way of life, and have ended up in museums as exotic artifacts, or as drunken people living on isolated reservations. Egyptian civilization was digested into Greece, and before that some of the African civilizations had been digested into Egypt. In each case, the side getting digested was compromised, marginalized and eventually ceased to be a living, thriving civilization. Today, before our very eyes, Tibetan civilization is being digested into China by a very aggressive and deliberate strategic plan.”
