Digital Rare Book:
A History of Hindu Chemistry - Volume 1
From the earliest times to the middle of the sixteenth century, A.D., with Sanskrit texts, variants, translation and illustrations.
By Praphulla Chandra Ray
Published by Williams and Norgate, London - 1907

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Prafulla Chandra's unique contribution: The history of chemistry in India

From his childhood, Prafulla Chandra was interested in history, and as a chemist it was natural to be curious about the history of chemistry. In studying this aspect from books by European authors, he noticed that they wrote about the developments in chemistry in ancient Egypt, Syria, Arabia and China, but there was almost no mention of India. From his knowledge of the history of ancient India, Prafulla Chandra knew that there had been many significant developments in chemistry in India, but at that time there was hardly any systematic research to find out exactly what was known in what period in the Indian history.

Prafulla Chandra decided to take up that gigantic task.

Today it may be difficult to figure out how difficult the task was. The ancient manuscripts that might contain concrete information of this aspect are mostly destroyed; some were still there, but are hidden moth-eaten somewhere in the personal collections of wealthy Rajas and zamindars; some were there in the collections of Euro- pean museums. It was a Herculean task to collect these, which Prafulla Chandra did over a long period of about 12 years. He had to learn Sanskrit and Pali to read these (he also took help from scholars of ancient Indian languages like Acharya Brajendranath Sil and Pandit Nabakanta Kabibhusana). But a bigger challenge lay somewhere else. At that time the learned community was divided into two poles in their views of ancient India. The anglophiles belonged to one camp, which were all praises of the language, literature, culture, and science of the British and could see nothing good in ancient India. In the other camp were those who, out of their nationalistic sentiments, sang praises of an imaginary glory of ancient India. For them, the mention of 'pushpak vimana' was an incontrovertible proof of the discovery of aeroplane at the time of Ramayana; the mention of the word 'taranga' made them believe that electromagnetic waves were discovered in India millennia before Maxwell. In such a cultural atmosphere it was very difficult to do a proper analysis of India's scientific heritage.

This is exactly what Prafulla Chandra did in his book 'The History of Hindu Chemistry' (Vol. I was published in 1902, and Vol. 2 in 1908). In this book he showed, from an unbiased scientific standpoint, how much the knowledge of acids, alkali, metals, and alloys proceeded in different
epochs of Indian history. He showed that, the science of metallurgy and of medicine had advanced significantly in ancient India; when Europe was practising alchemy, India was not far behind. In doing so, he had to face the question: Why did science in India decline and disappear, so that there was no cultivation of science after Bhaskara?

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