Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi - Work and Thoughts of Prominent Indian Anthropologist, Historian, Political Theorist, Linguist, Multidisciplinary Expert

On 29 June 1966, the famous Indian anthropologist, historian, political theorist, linguist and mathematician, Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi died in Pune. He had received all his education in America. He was born on 31 July 1907 in Goa. Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi was born in a Gauda Saraswat Brahmin family where he spent his early years, where his mother tongue was Konkani. His early education took place in Pune, where his father, Acharya Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi was a teacher of Pali language at the leading Buddhist scholar Ferguson College. The main subjects of study of Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi were mathematics, history and linguistics. After completing his education, he taught for some years at Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University and then moved to Fergusson College, Poona, becoming Professor of Mathematics in 1932. In 1946 he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research where he worked for 16 years.

-Only in that science can the scientist be truly free which is employed for the benefit of all mankind and not for bacteriological, nuclear, psychological or other mass wars. -Damodara Dharmanand Kosambi

Damodara Dharmanand Kosambi is usually remembered as a scholar whose passion for the history of ancient India led to his admiration for Marxism. His views are not confined to Marxism or to the scholar of antiquity. Kosambi is appreciatively quoted by historians of modern India on subjects ranging from medieval writers writing on Indian feudalism and the advent of colonialism to the forms of popular expression in the revolt of 1857. The fact that he was a mathematician rather than a historian by profession and training makes his work and its impact even more remarkable.

According to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi Marxism cannot be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics even on grounds of political convenience or party solidarity. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique like working on an automatic lathe. When the material exists in human society, it has endless variations. The observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory requires the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. One way to learn it is to be in constant contact with large sections of people. For an intellectual, this means spending at least a few months in physical labour, earning his livelihood as a member of the working class and not as a superior man, not as a reformist, not as a sentimental progressive visitor to the slums. The experience gained by living with the worker and the peasant, as one of them, must be constantly refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading.

According to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi Some opponents of Marxism consider it an outdated economic theory based on 19th century prejudices. Marxism has never been a theory. Why should it be considered obsolete and wrong because of its formulation in the 19th century, not like the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have joined the field of science... It is usually said in defence that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian, foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is usually argued in English, which is the common foreign language of educated Indians and people who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced in India by foreigners). Therefore, the objection is less to the foreign origin and more to the ideas, which may threaten class privilege. Marxism is said to be based on violence, on class-war, in which even the best men nowadays do not believe. They may as well declare that meteorology promotes storms by predicting them. In no Marxist work are there specious arguments for the incitement to war and senseless killing that can be compared with those in the divine Gita.

Engineering is based on physics and chemistry, which qualify as exact sciences precisely because they involve a mathematical basis. No other discipline has opened the door to the motion of atoms or celestial bodies as thoroughly as mathematics has. Given the merits, mathematical research requires the least financial resources of any science. However, I chose mathematics because I could not resist its attraction. Mathematical results have clarity and give intellectual satisfaction greater than any other. They have full validity in their own domain, because they involve a rigorous logical procedure, independent of experimental verification, on which the applications of the exact sciences must depend. Mathematics was the language of nature, as Roger Bacon said in Cnninarum clavis et porta.

Ancient coins have provided a wealth of information about the places where they were found and also about the societies that produced them. Even more information can be extracted from them with modern statistical methods.

Ramakrishna Ramaswamy wrote about Kosambi's scholarship integrating mathematics and history - Kosambi's importance and contributions as a historian outweigh his reputation and contributions to mathematics. He worked in both fields for most of his adult life, and to understand his work in either the social sciences or mathematics, an appreciation of the complementarity of his interests is essential. An understanding of Kosambi the historian can only be enhanced by an appreciation of Kosambi the mathematician. Mathematics itself may be difficult to understand in a subtle and exhaustive way for those not trained in the subject, but knowledge of the intellectual preoccupations, the questions related to them, and the techniques and tools available to them can help inform and refine the mathematics of DDK in a very natural way. Fundamentally Kosambi embodied a multidisciplinary approach, channelling diverse interests, indeed combining them, producing scholarship of a high order.

In 1948 - 49 Kosambi visited the United States, delivered a course of 36 lectures on tensor analysis at the University of Chicago, visited Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent the spring of 1949 as a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. There he spoke to, among others, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Marston Morse, Oswald Veblen and Carl Ludwig Siegel. He left the United States in May of that year, departing from New York for London on 17 May 1949. During a short stay in London he met the historian and Indologist Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914 - 1986) at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi was a prodigious Indian mathematician who published many papers on mathematics and mathematical physics, as well as on genetics, numismatics, Indology, Sanskrit studies and Indian history. He incorporated mathematics, statistics, Marxism and critical analysis in his study of historiography.

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