Re: Why did India fall behind West
So I got a response to this which said "Industrial Revolution". The main question is what made Industrial Revolution happen in the West before it did in India even though India was not far behind in terms of technology (Tipu Sultan's army invented rockets).
Well to me the main point of inflection was invention of the Printing Press which enabled thoughts, ideas and learnings to be duplicated and replicated far and wide whereas in India learning and knowledge passing was oral. This meant that in India one had to be close to a learned person to be able to develop intellect. Moreover because things were not written down or recorded, they kept getting lost throughout. Human mind does have its limitations.
In the West one the printing press got developed and replication of knowledge became easy, that would have spawned creating people far and wide to build on the available knowledge. There are intelligent, creative and hard-working people everywhere.
The internet is doing the same now and that is enabling India to start catching up.
Thats my thought. Ideas / comments?
7 comments:
But doing a RCA, why did we not get to the Printing press first?
India was never known for its engineering prowess, now science, yeah that's a different thing. (incidentally Chinese invented rockets and not Indians).
Maybe the military tradition of India effectively ended with Ashoka there being too few kings after him who actually had a large empire( I can only think of Harsh and Shivaji who came much later). Mughals were an import.
The knowledge tradition was sacrificed at the alter of frequent invaders and caste system.
Yes, so next question is why we as a nation/civilization were never known for engineering prowess. Were we too obsessed with the abstract ie: philosphy and arts or were we incapable of manual labour of the labs and the workshops to build and test anything credible or sheer lack of logical skills.
I have a neem theory for that http://neemhakim.blogspot.com/2007/12/language-barrier-to-communication.html :)
Sorry, didn't get that. We had too many languages at hand and i sometimes believe it hindered putting together a education system for the masses and cross enlightening each other.
What I am pondering over is the effect of not having invented the Printing Press first and not the cause why we did not invent it first. History is full of accidents. For example, Saudi Arabia is rich because it has oil. Thats an accident and nothing more.
Had this thought in my mind so let it go out.
The accident was not the invention of the printing press, what started the industrial revolution was James Watt's invention of the steam engine. The industrial revolution let to mass production of goods, generated mass employment and demonstrated benefits of development of a society founded on scientific temperament. Actually, perhaps the industrial revolution would itself not have happened, had it not been for the Rennaisance, which started in the 14th century. This led to a cultural awakening not only in terms of science, but art, literature, poetry, politics, religion accross Europe. That, is the singular thing that missed us by. For such a thing to happen, there has to be a prolonged period of stability. We were getting invaded and plundered that time, and were actually not even a single country. We were a group of kingdoms fighting against eachother. Similar events were happening in China as well, and they missed the boat too. A rennaissance of sorts did start in India and 400 years later, but under British rule and could not make spread beyond Bengal anyway. Our primary lament should thus be that post independence we could have picked up the pieces they way the other Asian countries did, post independence.
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