Volume 1: Preface

My encounter with the amazing historical work of Dharampal came about in 1976 in a most unexpected place: a library in Holland. I was at that time investigating material for a Ph.D dissertation part of which dealt with the history of Indian and Chinese science and technology.

While there was certainly no dearth of historical material and scholarly books as far as Chinese science and technology were concerned-largely due to the work of Dr Joseph Needham, reflected in his multi-volumed Science and Clvilisation in China—in contrast scholarly work on Indian science and technology seemed to be almost non-existent. What was available seemed rudimentary poor unimaginative wooden more filled with philosophy and legend than fact.

Desperate and depressed. I wandered through the portals of every possible library in Holland trying to lay my hands on anything I could find. The irony of looking for material on Indian science and technology in Holland should not be missed. However. I was doing a Ph.D. there and had very little choice.

Then one morning, I walked into the South East Asia Institute on an Amsterdam street and found a book called Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century on the shelf. I took it down curious. It was by a person named Dharampal whom I had not heard of before as a person or scholar active in that area of research. I took the book home and devoured it the same day. It altered my perception of India forever.

Now more than twenty years later. I know that the book appears to have had a similarly electrifying effect on thousands of others who were fortunate to get a copy of it. It spawned a generation of Indians which was happy to see India thereafter quite differently from the images with which it had been brought up in school particularly English medium school.

The book also provided a firm anchor for the section of my dissertation dealing with Indian science and technology. The dissertation was eventually published in 1979 with the rather academic title: Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India., China and the West: 1500 to the Present Day.

The same year (1976), a friend of mine from Orissa dropped in at our flat in Amsterdam. I mentioned Dharampal to him. Astonishing to relate he turned out to be a friend of Dharampal and even told me where he lived. Next door he said in London. He also had Dharampal's telephone number. The following week, we took a flight to London and I met Dharampal for the first time in my life. His family was with him at the time his wife. Phyllis his two daughters. Gita and Roswita, and his son, David.

The meeting initiated a relationship that has persisted till the present moment. Today I am happy to head a publishing house that is bringing out his Collected Writings.

I myself returned to India in 1977. Stranger events followed thereafter.

In 1980, I was called to Chennai to join a civil liberties team probing the killing of political activists in fake police encounters in North Arcot district in Tamilnadu. Predictably our team was beaten up by a mob set up by the police. On our return to Chennai. where we decided to hold a press conference, we were put up at the MLA hostel. While passing by one of the rooms. whom should I see sitting there but Dharampal himself! I had to rush to the press meeting thereafter.

Before the press could arrive however two or three young strangers arrived to meet me. They said they were from the Patriotic and People-Oriented Science and Technology (PPST) group which had members and sympathisers in both Kanpur and Madras IITs. They wanted to sit with me and discuss my book. Homo Faber (the Indian edition had just been brought out by Allied Publishers then). They also wanted more Information about Dharampal, whose work they were coming across for the first time in Homo Faber. Why do you want to talk to me. I asked them when you can very well meet Dharampal himself! They were astonished. Dharampal? Here in Madras? When I told them where I had found him, they made a bee-line for the MIA hostel.

That encounter initiated a long, fruitful and creative association between Dharampal and the PPST which has also persisted, with some ups and downs, to the present day. For a few years, the PPST brought out a journal called the PPST Bulletin. In it, Dharampal and his work occupied pride of place. During this period, in fact, members of the PPST Group produced some of the finest articles ever written and published on the subjects of Indian science, culture, technology, and the relevance of Western science and technology to Indian society. Some members of the PPST later spent a considerable amount of time and energy working on the Chengalpattu data which often recurs in Dharampal's writings.

Today, Dharampal's work is quite extensively known, far beyond the PPST Group, not just among intellectuals and university professors, but also among religious leaders including swamis and Jain monks, politicians and activists. One of the most impressive offshoots of his research has been the organisation of the bi-annual Congress on Traditional Sciences and Technologies. Three such Congresses, organised by the PPST and institutions like the IITs, have so far been held, generating an impressive wealth of primary material. Dharampal himself has been invited to deliver lectures at several institutions within India and abroad. (Some of these lectures can be found in Volume V of the Collected Writings.)

The general effect of Dharampal's work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However, conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades. Dharampal never trained to be a historian. If he had, he would have, like them, missed the wood for the trees. Despite having worked in the area now for more than four decades, he remains the quintessential layman, always tentative about his findings, rarely writing with any flourish. Certainly, he does not manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their 'facts' but their assumptions as well. But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence at the conclusion that Indians were technologically primitive or more generally how were they unable to discover the historical documents that he without similar training had stumbled on so easily.