D. D. Kosambi
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- For other persons named D. D. Kosambi, see D. D. Kosambi (disambiguation).
| D. D. Kosambi | |
|---|---|
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| Born | July 31, 1907 Kosben, Goa |
| Died | June 29, 1966 Pune |
| Occupation | Mathematician and Marxist Historian |
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (July 31, 1907-June 29, 1966) was an Indian mathematician and statistician, who contributed in genetics by introducing Kosambi's map function. He is well-known for his work in numismatics and for compiling critical editions of ancient Sanskrit texts. He is best known as an eminent historian of ancient India. Being a Marxist, he drastically shaped the field of historical research in India, with his application of the principles of historical materialism in the study of ancient Indian history. He was critical of Nehruvian policies which grounded capitalism in the guise of democratic socialism, and was an enthusiast of the Chinese revolution and its communistic ideals. He was a leading activist in the World Peace Movement and contributed in the debates of the communist and Marxist movements in India.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Family and Childhood
D.D.Kosambi was born in 1907 at Kosben in Goa, which was under Portuguese rule. His father was the renowned Buddhist scholar Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, who hailed from a Saraswat Brahmin family, but developed an utter disregard for the caste system and religious rituals, and spent many youthful years as a Buddhist bhikshu renouncing home and family, travelling extensively. He was one of the prominent Pali language scholars. Kosambi's mother, Balabai came from the Lad family of Goa.
Because of his prodigal talents, Kosambi was called Abhimanyu, a mythical character in Mahabharata who learned his warrior skills while he was still in his mother's womb. At the age of 8, he completed his vernacular schooling and entered first standard of English school (equivalent to today's 5th standard).
[edit] Education
After a few years of schooling in India, in 1918 D.D. Kosambi and his elder sister, Manik Kosambi, went to Massachusetts with his father, who was assisting Harvard University professors in compiling a critical edition of the Visuddimagga, a book on Buddhist philosophy. There Baba, as D.D. Kosambi was called, spent a year in the Grammar school and then was admitted to the Cambridge High and Latin School in 1920. The stay in the US proved good for his health, and made him athletic. He became a member of the Cambridge Branch of American Boy Scouts.
It was here in Cambridge that he befriended another prodigy of the time, Norbert Wiener, whose father Leo Wiener was Kosambi's father's colleague at Harvard University.
Kosambi did very well in his final school examination. He was one of the few candidates who were exempted on their merit from passing an entrance examination essential at the time to enter into Harvard University. He joined the university in 1924, but eventually postponed his studies, and returned to India. He stayed with his father who was now working in the Gujarat University, and was in the close circles of Mahatma Gandhi.
In January 1926, Kosambi returned to the US with his father, who once again worked in Harvard University for a year and half. Kosambi studied mathematics under George David Birkhoff, who wanted him to concentrate on mathematics, but ambitious Kosambi ignored his advice and took as diverse courses as possible, and excelled in each of them. In 1929 he came back to India after obtaining Bachelor of Arts along with the title of summa cum laude and the membership of Phi Beta Kappa.
[edit] Back in India
[edit] Banaras and Aligarh
He obtained the post of professor at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). He taught German along with Mathematics. He struggled to pursue his reasearch on his own, and published his first research paper, "Precessions of an Elliptic Orbit’ in the Indian Journal of Physics in 1930.
In 1931, he got married to Nalini, daughter of a very wealthy and distinguished Madgaonkar family. It was in this year that he also obtained a job at the Aligarh Muslim University and got the opportunity to work with well-known mathematicians like Andre Wile and Vijay Raghavan. During his two years stay in Aligarh, he produced eight research papers on Differential Geometry and Path Spaces, and could publish a number of them in Italian and German journals.
[edit] Fergusson College, Pune
In 1933, he joined the Deccan Education Society’s Fergusson College in Pune, where he taught mathematics for the next 12 years. In 1935, his eldest daughter, Maya was born, while in 1939, the youngest, Meera, a well-known sociologist and feminist was born. Meera Kosambi was until recently Director of Women's Study Center of SNDT Women's University in Mumbai. She studied at Uppsala and specialized in urban history, with studies dedicated to Pune.
In Pune, while teaching mathematics and conducting research in the field, he started his interdisciplinary pursuit. In 1944 he published a small article of 4 pages titled ‘The Estimation of Map Distance from Recombination Values’ in Annals of Eugenics, in which he introduced what later came to be known as Kosambi's Map Function.
One of the most important contribution of Kosambi to statistics is the widely known tool called Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). This is also referred to as Karhunen-Loeve expansion and was originally developed by Kosambi in 1943. This tool is finding applications in diverse field like image processing, signal processing, data compression, oceanography, chemical engineering and fluid mechanics. Sadly his work is hardly acknowledged in any paper on POD and is a classical example of plagiarism.
He contributed in numismatics using his mathematical knowledge with the historical study. It was his studies in numismatics that initiated him in the field of historical research. He made a thorough study of Sanskrit and ancient literature, and he started his classic work on the ancient poet Bhartrihari. He published his critical editions of Bhartrihari's Shatakatrayee and Subhashitas during 1945-1948. It was during this period that he started his political activism, coming close to the radical streams in the ongoing Independence movement, especially the Communist Party of India. He became an outspoken Marxist and wrote some political articles too.
[edit] TIFR days
In 1945, Homi J. Bhabha invited Kosambi to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) as Professor of Mathematics, which he accepted. After independence, in 1948-49 he was sent to England and the US as a UNESCO Fellow to study the theoretical and technical aspects of the computer. During this time, he was a guest professor of geometry at the Chicago University. He spent some time at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton. He renewed his contacts with his old friends. In London, he started his long-lasting friendship with indologist and historian A.L. Basham.
After his return to India, in the Cold War circumstances, he was increasingly drawn into the World Peace Movement and served in his capacity as Member of the World Peace Council. He became a tireless crusader of peace, campaigning against the nuclearisation of the world. Kosambi's solution to India's energy needs was in sharp conflict with the ambitions of the Indian ruling class. He stressed on alternative energy sources, like solar power. His activism in the peace movement took him to Beijing, Helsinki and Moscow. However, during this period he relentlessly pursued his diverse research interests, too. Most importantly,he worked on his Marxist rewriting of ancient Indian history, which culminated in his book, Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956).
He visited China many times during 1952-62 and was able to watch the Chinese revolution very closely, making him critical of the way modernisation and development were envisaged and pursued by the Indian ruling classes. All these contributed in straining his relationship with the Indian government and Bhabha, eventually leading to Kosambi's exit from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1962.
[edit] Post-TIFR days
His exit from the TIFR gave Kosambi the opportunity to concentrate on his research in ancient Indian history culminating into his book, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India, which was published in 1965 by Routledge. The book was translated in German, French and Japanese and was widely acclaimed. He also utilised his time in archaeological studies, and contributed in the field of statistics and number theory. His article on numismatics was published in February 1965 in Scientific American.
Due to the efforts of his friends and colleagues, in June 1964, Kosambi was appointed as a Scientist Emeritus of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) affiliated to the Maharashtra Vidnyanvardhini in Pune. He got involved in many historical, scientific and archaeological projects (even writing stories for children). But most of his works that he produced in this period could not be published during his lifetime. On June 29, 1966, he died in Pune. He was posthumously decorated with the Hari Om Ashram Award by the government of India's University Grant Commission in 1980.
His friend A.L. Basham, a well-known indologist, wrote in his tribute to Kosambi:
- At first it seemed that he had only three interests, which filled his life to the exclusion of all others- ancient India, in all its aspects, mathematics and the preservation of peace. For the last, as well as for his two intellectual interests, he worked hard and with devotion, according to his deep convictions. Yet as one grew to know him better one realized that the range of his heart and mind was very wide...In the later years of his life, when his attention turned increasingly to anthropology as a means of reconstructing the past, it became more than ever clear that he had a very deep feeling for the lives of the simple people of Maharashtra.[1]
[edit] Kosambi's Historiography
As a historian, Kosambi is acclaimed to have revolutionised Indian history writing with his Marxist approach, crucially diverting from the mainstream nationalist and imperialist schools. He understood history in terms of the dynamics of socio-economic formations rather than just a chronological narration of "episodes" or even the feats of a few great men - kings, warriors or saints. In the very first paragraph of his classic work, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, he gives an insight into his methodology as a prelude to his life work on ancient Indian history:
- "THE light-hearted sneer “India has had some episodes, but no history“ is used to justify lack of study, grasp, intelligence on the part of foreign writers about India’s past. The considerations that follow will prove that it is precisely the episodes — lists of dynasties and kings, tales of war and battle spiced with anecdote, which fill school texts — that are missing from Indian records. Here, for the first time, we have to reconstruct a history without episodes, which means that it cannot be the same type of history as in the European tradition."[2]
As an erudite Marxist scholar, Kosambi was the first to apply Marxist Dialectical Method to the study of Indian history. According to A. L. Basham, "An Introduction to the Study of Indian History is in many respects an epoch making work, containing brilliantly original ideas on almost every page; if it contains errors and misrepresentations, if now and then its author attempts to force his data into a rather doctrinaire pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the significance of this very exciting book, which has stimulated the thought of thousands of students throughout the world."[3]
[edit] Books by D.D. Kosambi
[edit] Works on History and Society
- 1956 An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Popular Book Depot, Bombay)
- 1957 Exasperating Essays: Exercise in the Dialectical Method (People's Book House, Poona)
- 1962 Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (Popular Prakashail, Bombay)
- 1965 The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London)
- 2002 D.D. Kosambi: Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings - Compiled, edited and introduced by Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (Oxford University Press, New Delhi)
[edit] Edited Works
- 1945 The Satakatrayam of Bhartrhari with the Comm. of Ramarsi, edited in collaboration with Pt. K. V. Krishnamoorthi Sharma (Anandasrama Sanskrit Series, No.127, Poona)
- 1946 The Southern Archetype of Epigrams Ascribed to Bhartrhari (Bharatiya Vidya Series 9, Bombay) (First critical edition of a Bhartrhari recension.)
- 1948 The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartrhari (Singhi Jain Series 23, Bombay) (Comprehensive edition of the poet's work remarkable for rigorous standards of text criticism.)
- 1952 The Cintamani-saranika of Dasabala; Supplement to Journal of Oriental Research, xix, pt, II (Madras) (A Sanskrit astronomical work which shows that King Bhoja of Dhara died in 1055-56.)
- 1957 The Subhasitaratnakosa of Vidyakara, edited in collaboration with V.V. Gokhale (Harvard Oriental Series 42)
[edit] Papers in Mathematics
- 1943 Statistics in function spaces, J Indian Math Soc;7:76-88
[edit] Notes
- ^ A.L. Basham, "Baba: A Personal Tribute"
- ^ An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, pp.1
- ^ A.L. Basham, op cit
