Week 6 Discussion: South Asian History of Science in Antiquity

This week, it is the same as last week's discussion. So we again was being segregated into two group with 5 and 6 groups in one group. My group was given a shorter number of pages which is 'Sanskrit Scientific Libraries and their Uses: Examples and Problems of the Early Modern Period'. So we are asked to prepare some question and answer all our own questions. So here are some questions that we manifested today.

1. What is Indology?
It is the study of history, culture, language and literature of the Indian Subcontinent. So this is the answer for a definition. If it were for my understanding, I think that it is the learning of every continent in India and learn about all about the culture and everything.

2. How did people acquire archives of Sanskrit in the European Country?
During the mid 19 century till the mid 20 century, the European country come to Asia and try to take over what we have. When they did, they will have people here to study about the culture here. This is when the people manage to acquire all the things that we have now about Sanskrit. After they did their researches and everything, they bring it back to their country. But, all the things that they took back might not be accurate. There are things that might be incorrect when they interpret the text from Sanskrit to English. We will discuss this in later questions.

3. What were the problems that they faced when they are acquiring about Sanskrit?
Well, people faces problem. Everyone does. Even for geniuses. So it is not wired that they face problems. They have people helping them in collecting of the information. When people go to a place to look at the manuscript, they were treated coldly by other people, till people only show them those manuscript for a brief moment. Like I've said in the past post, manuscripts are so much scattered all around the places. There are people who kept the manuscripts, manuscripts that are hidden and have not been found at all and so much more. People need to go all around to find one manuscript. The time used up is so much and the money and resources would also be so expensive to just retrieve and recover those manuscripts.

4. What did the collectors wanted to do after they got the materials?
Most probably writing all the informations in the manuscripts into books. They spend so much time and so much energy to get all these manuscripts. That is why they must made all their efforts worth it. I'm here to discuss what I'm understand within the text and not copy and paste the text. So I think that somehow like china, the scholars from Europe would like to collect all the manuscript there are and compile it into what we have today, books.

I think that is all the question that I could answer in the time being. All the other question are based on facts and do not need much understanding and discussion. That is why I will stop here today. This is a particularly short post. :)

Cheerios,
YiXin