25-06-2009 om 14:10 by Stafford Wadsworth

Because of the long British colonial period, the ubiquity of Bollywood and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), today, people often forget the great antiquity and fertility, in very many respects, of Indian civilization.

Buddhist logic developed in India in the third century BC, in the Matsya Nyaya (the logic of the fish) form, is regarded by specialists as one of the most refined systems of logic ever developed. Concepts such as zero, and various forms of mathematics, including algebra, have their source in India - although they may have been transmitted via the Middle East in the Dark Ages, their roots were in India. Even the Chinese sent pilgrims to India (Fa Hsien)

It was the discovery of Sanskrit by European scholars in the late XVIIIth century that gave birth to the science of linguistics, and even today, more than a couple of centuries later, there is no linguistic grammar that improves on Panini’s grammar written (in verse) for the Sanskrit language in the Vth century BC. On the literary front, the Odyssey and the Iliad had great Indian predecessors in the VIIIth century BC in the form of The Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

There were other areas of scholarship in which the Indians can still amaze us. They were great investigators and catalogers of sexual activity and the Kama Sutra; a sort of handbook of sex, produced early in the Christian era, still excites the senses and intrigues the reader. That, combined with the dancing girls sculptured in Khajuraho, gives another dimension to one’s imagination. Another aspect of this world is seen in the more refined forms of dance, such as those performed by the Kathakali dancers in the south.

India is a source of a great deal of inspiration, and one of the latest developments has been here in Meuse-Rhine at the University of Maastricht, where a special institute has been set up to develop a major India project. According to the university newspaper, the Observant in Maastricht, a prize of EUR 1.8m lies in wait in 2015, if the India project develops as it is hoped.

The University of Maastricht has its India Institute, its own office in Bangalore and is intending to explore the Indian market for higher education. Well, if reports in the British newspaper, The Independent, last week (180609) are anything to go by, the University of Maastricht is about to take off in many respects, but India is center stage again. Who knows what this might lead to? In any event it will lead to more than Slumdog Millionaire and curry with everything.

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