BESIDES India’s philosophical literature as contained in Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Brahmans, Sutras, Smiritis, Shrutis and Shastras, there is another sphere of Indian life and letters which only ancient Indian materialistic literature enables us to reconstruct.
Their vigour and originality of thought and the clarity and brevity of the language help in understanding the mind and spirit of India. The materialist classical literature of India sheds light on the forgotten aspects of a bygone civilisation the echoes of which still vibrate in the Indian psyche and way of life.
This stream of literature includes three classics: Kautilya’s Arthashastra, an exegesis on political and economic organisation in the 4th century BCE; Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit, Astadhyayi, one of the greatest productions of the human mind; and Patanjali’s commentary on Panini’s work called Mahabhasya.’
Science of wealth
The Arthashastra of Kautilya is the most significant of these classics. It deals with a variety of subjects and covers every aspect of the theory and practice of government. Described as the science of wealth and the science of polity, other subjects discussed in this treatise are trade and commerce, guilds and crafts, municipal councils, law and law courts, social customs, rights of women, including widow remarriage and divorce, taxation and revenue, weights and measures etc.
The materialist classical literature of India sheds light on the forgotten aspects of a bygone civilisation the echoes of which still vibrate in the Indian psyche and way of life
There are also the lawbooks of Manu (Manusmiriti), Yajnavalkya, and Narada. There is Shukracharya’s Nitisara, or the science of polity, giving an idea of Indian polity prior to Turkish and Afghan invasions. It deals with the organisation of central government and of the town and the village panchayats or elected councils.
There is also the widely known old medical literature of India, such as Susrut-samhita of Susrut on surgery and Charak-samhita of Charaka on medicine, which dates from the Christian era and enumerate a large number of diseases and methods of diagnosis and treatment.
Discovery of zero
There are many astronomical and mathematical works of Aryabhatta (Aryabhatia, Aryabhatasiddhanta), Varahmihir (Panch-siddhantika), Bhaskar and Brahmagupta belonging to the early centuries of Christian era. Aryabhatta is credited with the discovery of zero and the decimal system and approximation of the value of pi. He also found out that the planets and the moon shine by reflected sunlight and that the motion of the stars is due to Earth’s rotation and its movement around the sun.
Einstein acknowledged India’s contribution to world civilisation in realms of mathematics and astronomy when he said, “we owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.”
Moreover, there is Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (River of Kings) – a chronicle of the rulers of Kashmir – which is the only old book that may be considered as real history. This thousand-year old Kashmiri historic epic contains that immortal twin phrase widely used in the sense of law and order, dharma and abhaya, or righteousness and absence of fear, which was the duty of the ruler and the state to preserve. Law was something more than mere law, and order was the fearlessness of the people, the stress being on inculcating “‘fearlessness’ rather than enforcing ‘order” on a frightened populace.
Travelogue literature
Equally important for the understanding and appreciation of ancient Indian civic life and work is the travelogue literature of Megasthenes, Fa-Hien, Sung Yun, Hiuen Tsang, and I-Tsing. The most abiding of these is Hiuen Tsang’s book Si-Yu-Ki, or Record of the Western Kingdom (meaning India). Coming from a highly civilised country, when China’s capital Si-anfu was a centre of art and learning, his descriptions of conditions in India are valuable. Tsang was struck by the love of learning of the people.
Indian classical literature found its way to Europe, West Asia, China and Tibet. Over eight thousand such works in Chinese and Tibetan translations are preserved in the Sung-Pao collections in China. Collaboration between Indian, Chinese and Tibetan scholars is evidenced in extant Sanskrit-Tibetan-Chinese dictionary of Buddhist literary terms (Mahavyutapatti) dating from the ninth century AD.
