Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
Progressive circles in India have been late in
remembering D. D. Kosambi in 2007, the centennial year. Of course Pune, where
Kosambi lived and died, led the way to centenary celebrations. A committee was
formed with R. P. Nene and Meera Kosambi, daughter of D. D. Kosambi, to pay
homage to the savant extraordinary in a befitting manner. A number of public lectures
were organized on and from 31 July 2007, with Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Prabhat
Patnaik, and others as speakers. The Birth Centenary Committee has also been
successful in persuading the Government of India to issue a postal stamp and
instituting a Chair in the name of Kosambi in the University of Pune. The Human
Resources Development ministry has sanctioned a grant of
Rs. one crore (ten million) for this post. One, however, cannot be sure whether
the right man will be appointed to continue the works of Kosambi along his
lines.
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| DD Kosambi |
Memorial
meetings have been held in Aurangabad, Kolkata, Goa, Manipal, and Mumbai and
maybe in other places in India. A Kosambi Festival was held in Goa from 4 to 7
February 2008 to celebrate “the life and work of an extraordinarily erudite son
of a legendary figure in Goan intellectual history, the Abhimanyu of an Arjun,
as someone has said about Damodar Kosambi and his father Dharmanand” (Reported
by Sandhya Palekar in Indian Skeptic, 21: 1, 15. 05. 2008, p. 18). Dr.Vivek
Monteiro, a Harvard doctorate, who abandoned the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research to teach mathematics and science to the children of slum-dwellers of
Mumbai, and finally became a trade
unionist, gave a talk on “Science as the cognition of necessity”, the
definition of science proposed by Kosambi.
Such
attempts, however laudable, are not sufficient to make the new generation aware
of what a versatile genius Kosambi was. Of course, it is not possible for a
single person even to describe in broad terms, not to speak of evaluate, the
contributions made by Kosambi in such diverse fields as anthropology, archaeology,
classical genetics, Indian history, mathematics, numismatics, statistics, and
Sanskrit text criticism. He was equally thoroughgoing in all the disciplines he
had enriched. The bibliography of his works is bound to fill anyone with awe. A
man like him is rare in all ages, more particularly in our times when ‘superspecialization’
is the key to both fame and success. In what follows I shall try to give an
inkling of the man Kosambi, not the prodigious scholar he was.
Kosambi
was a difficult man to work with. He was a veritable Durvasa, the sage known
and feared by all for his irascibility. As
Vasudev Viswanath Gokhale, foremost of the very few friends Kosambi had, and
himself one of the greatest Indologists of our times, wrote in the obituary on
Kosambi:
“As an independent thinker with a passionate devotion to scientific
research, he seemed to be almost exclusively preoccupied with his own
intellectual pursuits. As such, he was sometimes accused of brusqueness and intolerance, but he had
obviously no use, nor time for all the sophistications of our normal social
life, nor could he afford to waste his energies on empty rituals and
ceremonies, except for treating them as objects of his anthropological studies”
(Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 47 (1967), reprinted
in: R. S. Sharma (ed.), Indian Society: Historical Probings, New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1974, p. 4).
Not
that Kosambi himself was unaware of his acid tongue. He has himself recollected
how, in his early boyhood, his grandmother would seat him upon her lap and put
sugar into his mouth with a benediction that his words might be sweet. Kosambi
wryly commented: “Those who witnessed this charming, ridiculous, now forgotten
observance feel, judging from the result, that she did not use enough sugar!” (An
Introduction to the Study of Indian History, revised second edition, Bombay:
Popular Prakashan, 1975, p. 381 n).
A
grave and sombre person, he could, on rare occasions, relax, and then, as Gokhale
assures us, “his childlike simplicity and sparkling wit were most refreshing
even to those who were nearest to him and he spread laughter and sunshine
around him.” But this is only one façade of his personality. He was also
capable of playing pranks, just to irritate people who did not share his views.
Think of his dedication of the Three Centuries of Bhartrihari’s Sanskrit
Epigrams published in the Singhi Jain Series in 1948. In chaste Sanskrit he
dedicated the work (which may be translated as follows): “In sacred memory of the
pioneers of new human society, the vigorous great men (mahamanava) named Marx,
Engels and Lenin.” Similarly he dedicated the collection of epigrams,
Vidyakara’s Subhashita- ratnakosha (1957) edited jointly by him and V. V. Gokhale,
“to all those who work for peace by peaceful means”. The work was published in
the Harvard Oriental Series with Professor Daniel H. H. Ingalls as the Series
editor, who was an anticommunist to the core. Kosambi was active in the World
Peace Council, suspected by the U. S. establishment as a front organization of
the international communist movement. The highly skilful editing of the joint
editors was appreciated by all (well, almost all) but Louis Renou, the doyen of
French Indologists, was taken aback by the Introduction written by Kosambi.
Renou could not understand why a scholarly work, a critical edition of an
anthology, should contain such items as class struggle (Jounal Asiatique,vol.
245, fascicule 4, 1957, p. 406).
To take another example: Kosambi dedicated the
second dition of his Introduction to the
Study of Indian History (1975) “to
Indo-Soviet Friendship” (the first edition (1956) was dedicated to Monica
Felton, a Stalin Prize winner) in place of an individual.
It is not enough to explain Kosambi’s pranks
as something to be expected of a true Marxist disdaining to conceal his views. More
likely he had a puck in him who encouraged him to do and say things that would
irritate other people. In his meetings with Homi Bhabha in TIFR, he used to oppose
whatever Bhabha proposed. Bhabha could not tolerate contradiction and Kosambi
revelled in it. This did not contribute to the furtherance of his career but he
could not help being what he was: a maverick.
Kosambi
has often been accused of his disrespectful attitude to and open sniggering at
eminent scholars, who were his
contemporaries. It cannot be denied that he was a man of strong likes and
dislikes. To take one example, look at his dismissal of an erudite German
Indologist: “W. Ruben’s Einführung in a. Indienkunde shows how a good
Sanskritist can go to pieces because of Marxism ill disgested…” (Introduction, etc.,
p. 14 n1). O. Herold is curtly written off for assuming the Urvasi-Pururavas
legend as a case of Aryan group-marriage, “for which there might be no evidence
but which apparently makes no difference to his judgment, being required by
some (presumably Marxist) theory” (Myth and Reality, Bombay: Popular Prakashan,
1962, p. 54 n6). Anyone unacquainted with Kosambi’s world view would take him to
be an anti-Marxist if such comments are read out of context. Or one might think
that Kosambi considered himself to be the sole depository of Marxism, every
other Marxist unfit to be called so.
Yet
the fact remains that Kosambi was always prepared to honour those to whom it
was due. Naturally his standards were very high, and so the only names he
mentions are bound to be of persons of the first water. At the end of his
Introduction to
Myth and Reality he writes: “Readers will recognize my debt to
B. Malinowski, H. Obermaier, H. Breuil and H. Frankfort, among other giants;
but more than any other, to K. Marx” (p. 11 n). Strangely enough, F. Engels is
not mentioned here, although in a letter to Vidal-Naquet (dt. 4 June 1964)
Kosambi said: “I learned from these two great men [Marx and Engels] what
questions to ask and then went to fieldwork to find the answers because the
material did not exist in published books.” In course of a conversation with
Charles Malamound, Romila Thapar came to learn that Kosambi had admitted to him
that the deepest intellectual influence on him had come from the works of
Engels (R. Thapar, “The Contribution of D. D. Kosambi to Indology”,
Journal of
the Asiatic Society of Bombay, New
Series, vols. 52-53/ 1977-78, pp. 381 and 384 n55). Kosambi’s admiration for
Stalin, more particularly for his polemics against Academician Marr, is
apparent from a reference to the rejoinders written by Stalin and printed in
the journal, Soviet Literature
(Myth and Reality, p. 44 n1).
Kosambi’s
respect for truly eminent persons was not confined to Marxists. In a sharply
phrased passage he makes fun of worthless Sanskritists and upholds a Christian
Missionary: “The ability to replace incomprehensible Sanskrit works by still
larger and equally meaningless English terms can make a prosperous career. It
cannot produce an Albert Schweitzer, whose magnificent study Von Reimarus Zu
Wrede, analysis of Bach’s music and record as medical missionary at Lambarene
were impressive even in my irreverent undergraduate years” (“Adventures into
the Unknown” in K. Satchidananda Murty and K. Ramakrishna Rao (ed.), Current
Trends in Indian Philosophy, Waltair: Andhra University Press/ Bombay: Asia
Publishing House, [1972] , p. 154).
There
is no denying that Kosambi was a proud man, impatient with lesser mortals and aggressive
in attitude. But by no means was he too proud to accept his own errors. When J.
Brough corrected one of his mistakes, he admitted it in unequivocal terms (see Introduction
etc., p. 109 n12).
Archaeological
fieldwork took up a large part of Kosambi’s time and he was accused of
neglecting mathematics by his superiors in TIFR. Kosambi did not neglect
mathematics; it was his first love. He was working on prime numbers and one
paper had already been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (U. S. A.), vol. 49, 1963, pp. 20-23. The paper, however, failed to
evoke the expected response. When Kosambi was invited by the Andhra University
to write on his personal philosophy as a scientist and research worker, he
vented his despair in an epilogue to the autobiographical essay he contributed.
It is necessary to quote the relevant passage in full if the reader is to comprehend
how crest-fallen Kosambi had felt at being spurned by Western mathematicians:
Every
competent judge who saw only this radically new basic result intuitively felt
that it was correct as well as of fundamental importance. Unfortunately, the
Reimann hypothesis followed as a simple consequence. Could a problem over which
the world’s greatest mathematicians had come to grief for over a century be
thus casually solved in the jungles of India? Psychologically, it seemed much
more probable that the interloper was just another ‘‘circle-squarer.’’
Mathematics may be a cold, impersonal science of pure thought; the
mathematician can be thoughtless, heatedly acrid, even rabid, over what he
dislikes. Let me admit at once that I made every sort of mistake in the first
presentation. There is no excuse for this, though there were strong reasons: I
had to fight for my results over three long years between waves of agony from
chronic arthritis, against massive daily doses of aspirin, splitting headaches,
fever, lack of assistance and steady disparagement. It was much more difficult
to discover good mathematicians who were able to see the main point of the
proof than it had been to make the original mathematical discovery. How much of
this is due to my own disagreeable personality and what part to the spirit of a
tight medieval guild that rules mathematical circles in countries with an ‘‘affluent
society’’ need not be considered here. There is surely a great deal to be said
for the notion that the success is fundamentally related to the particular form
of society. (Current Trends in Indian Philosophy, p. 168. A part of this
posthumously published essay has been reprinted in other volumes by and on
Kosambi bearing a new title, “Steps in Science,” without,
however, this significant Epilogue).
How
should one judge the matter? Are we to take this as the raving of a paranoid or
are we expected to sympathize with a man silently rejected for being a
non-Westerner? Much depends on one’s attitude. I for myself believe that
Kosambi was right; he has been shabbily treated both in India and abroad. Even
now he remains neglected and misunderstood. Death released him from all
ignominy in the early hours of 29 June 1966.
I
am not competent to speak of Kosambi’s achievements in scientific fields. As a
student of Indology, I believe that his books and articles remain a quarry of
the most fruitful ideas to be developed by his successors. This is not to say
that Kosambi was always right. Some of his cherished theories and hypotheses
have been challenged and, in a few cases, disproved. But that does not detract an iota from the merit of his works or his
achievements as a historian. As D. Lorenzen observed, when some otherwise sound
historians like A. L. Basham purposely hesitated to offer radically new and speculative interpretations
of the sources of change and conflict in ancient India and of the interrelations
of economy, politics, social structure, and cultural values, “ D. D. Kosambi
has no such hesitations. His two general works, An Introduction to the Study of
Indian History and The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical
Outline, spew forth new ideas and provocative comments as if from a shotgun .
Although some of his speculative hypotheses are virtually impossible to verify,
many have opened up fruitful new paths of understandings and research” (“Imperialism
and the historiography of ancient India” in: S. N. Mukherjee (ed.), India:
History and Thought, Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1982, p. 98). This boldness is
what is lacking in the works of many later historians. They are afraid to go in
for systematic theoretical generalizations.
Kosambi never refrained from doing this very thing. Lorenzen has noticed that “Kosambi’s edition
of Sanskrit texts and many of his articles display an academic rigour sometimes
lacking in these two works [Introduction
and Historical Outline],’’ but added that in spite of this shortcoming, they do
not fail “ to be original and provocative” (p. 98 n29). And this is what really
matters. I can do no better than end this tribute to Kosambi by quoting Lorenzen
again:
A historical work which makes such
generalizations undoubtedly risks, indeed requires, the formulation of an
ideological bias, but this is, after all, what makes it food for thought. No
one today reads Grant or Mill, or even Nehru, because of their historical
accuracy. They remain important works precisely because of the ideological
biases of their authors. ‘‘Accuracy,’’ as Housman once remarked, “is a duty,
not a virtue.’’ (p. 100).
This essay
was first published in Frontier, Annual Number 2008
