Social History of Science and Mathematics in the Tamil Region

Part of ’Contemporary Tamil Culture’ project

Objectives

The social history of science and colonialism is an emerging discipline within the disciplinary field of the History of Science and Technology in India. This particular project aims to study the social history of transmission of science and the making of new disciplines in colonial Tamil Nadu. Focusing on the discipline of mathematics, it attempts to study the history of mathematics teaching in the colonial period. Situating Tamil mathematical teaching and learning practices in the pre-colonial period, it studies their continuity and transformation under colonial rule. Studying both institutions of teaching and the curriculum of mathematics, the project explores the manner in which social mobility, state policy and contending ideologies contributed towards the making of a pedagogic discourse on mathematics.

Materials and methods

The first phase of the project has unearthed hitherto unknown Tamil mathematical treatises like the Kanakkatikaram genre of manuscripts along with elementary mathematical texts like the Encuvati. These materials have helped in identifying a dynamic tradition of mathematical practice that was strongly rooted in the day-to-day practice of the Tamil society in the pre-colonial period and which continued through the nineteenth century. The large corpus of archival resources pertaining to colonial initiatives in education that include policy documents, reports, journals combined with a substantive amount of missionary archives have helped in the creation of the complex processes that constitute modern mathematical curriculum. Other significant corpus of materials used in the project include both English and Tamil mathematical textbooks.

In the second phase, we intend to do field work on specific localized territories, with well-defined themes, that would include the Arctic, Papua New Guinea and South India. The South Indian part of the project will be coordinated by the French Institute of Pondicherry, using original textual sources in Tamil. Fieldwork will be done in the districts of the Kaveri Delta region.

Partners

• REHSEIS ACI "Anthropologie des mathématiques: activités mathématiques et mathématiques savantes en Papouasie-Nouvelle Guinée, Arctique et Inde du Sud", www.rehseis.cnrs.fr
• Association INUKSUK - Espace culturel inuit
• Centre for Historical Studies,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Funding

• French Institute of Pondicherry
• French Ministry of Research, ACI culture scientifique

Team

IFP

• Senthil Babu, Research Fellow
• Kannan M, Advisor

Research Collaborators

• Agathe Keller, REHSEIS, CNRS
• Eric Vandndriessche, REHSEIS, CNRS
• Prof. Sabayasachi Bhattacharya, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Prof. Francois Gros, Ecole Pratique Haute Etudes, Paris
• Dr. Dhruv Raina, Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Prof. R. Ramanujam, Department of Theoretical Computer Science, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. Bhavani Raman, Department of History, University of Michigan

Main Outputs

Chapters in Books

• BABU S., 2007. Dialects in Practice, In Streams of Language Dialects in Tamil. Edited by KANNAN M., IFP: 249-256.

• BABU S., 2006. Science and Tamil Society: Issues for Consideration in Kannan. M and Carlos Mena eds., Negotiating with the Past Classical Tamil in Contemporary Tamil, University of California Berkeley and French Institute of Pondicherry.

Articles

• BABU S., 2007. Memory and Mathematics in the Tamil Tinnai Schools of South India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education, 2(1): 22-46.

• BABU S., 2004. Popularizing Science for Social Change: M. Singaravelar, Economic and Political Weekly, pp. 234-237.

• BABU S., 2004. Tamil Mathematical Manuscripts and the Possibility of a Social history of math education in India, Proceedings of Episteme 1, Homi Bhaba Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai.

This project will be shortly submitted as doctoral dissertation to the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi.

Workshops to be conducted in Paris and Pondicherry – complete report and several publications by the end of 2008