38 Technology in Ancient India

Michel Danino

Introduction:

Technology is today defined as applied science, but early humans developed technologies — such as stone-working, agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, textile manufacture, bead-making, wood-carving, cart-making, sailing, etc. — with hardly any science to back them up. If we define technology as a human way of altering the surrounding material world, we find that the first stone tools in the Indian subcontinent go back more than two million years! (That was long before the advent of modern man in India, which is thought to have occurred some 70,000 years ago.) Jumping across ages, the “Neolithic revolution” of some 9,000 years ago saw the development in agriculture in parts of the Indus and the Ganges valleys, which in turn triggered the need for pots, water management, metal tools, transport, etc.

1. Harappan technologies

The Indus or Harappan civilization (2600–1900 BCE for its urban or “Mature” phase), which flourished in the northwest of the subcontinent, saw the rapid growth of an efficient agriculture that adapted itself to very diverse climates and conditions, from the water-rich Indus valley to semi-arid areas of today’s Rajasthan. The Harappans grew wheat, barley and millets, and practised not only plough-based agriculture but also intercropping in places. Their wheel-turned pots came in various shapes and sizes, and some were glazed and painted in addition. Metal smiths extracted copper from ore available in the Aravalli hills, Ambaji (Gujarat) or Oman, and, alloying with tin, produced bronze. Mixing (deliberately or accidentally) various impurities into it, such as nickel or arsenic, hardened it to the point where bronze tools could be used to dress stones. Harappans invented the true saw, with teeth and the adjoining part of the blade set alternatively from side to side, a type of saw unknown elsewhere until Roman times. They left us a few bronze figurines, which were cast by the “lost-wax” process.

The Harappans also developed advanced grid-based town-planning, sanitation that collected used waters from individual bathrooms into municipal drains that were regularly inspected and cleaned. They realized that bricks of proportions 1 : 2 : 4 (width equals two heights; length equals two widths) permitted alternating courses and therefore stronger walls — the so-called “English bond” of masonry, which should properly be called the “Harappan bond”! Baked or mud bricks were not the only building material: at Dholavira (in the Rann of Kachchh), stone was also used on a huge scale.

Harappan craftsmen used a number of minerals for ornamental, cosmetic and medicinal purposes; they excelled at bead-making, and their long beads of carnelian (a semiprecious stone), in particular, were highly prized in royal families of Mesopotamia. India’s love for bangles is traceable to the Harappans’ manufacture of large numbers of gold, bronze, conch-shell, glazed faience or humble terracotta bangles. Weavers used wheel -spun thread and, besides the widely-used cotton, evidence of silk has recently come to light at two sites. Other crafts included stone and ivory carving, carpet-making, or inlaid woodwork.

2. Later Pottery

After the Harappan age, innovations in pottery shifted to the Ganges valley. The Painted Grey Ware (PGW), late in the second millennium BCE, is associated with iron-based cultures. A few centuries later, from around 700 BCE onward, the Northern Black-Polished Ware (NBPW) was first found in today’ s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and is associated with the emerging cities of the Ganges valley. Both pottery types were produced on fast-spinning wheels using fine clay and fired to a high temperature in kilns under controlled conditions.

Other regions of India eventually developed many other types and styles of pottery, and pottery sherds remain a major source of information for archaeologists, who have meticulously documented all those types and worked out their chronologies and regional spreads.

3. Metallurgy after the Harappans

As we have seen, the Indus civilization was essentially bronze-based, while the later Ganges civilization was iron -based. But it is now known that iron was produced in central parts of the Ganges valley right from 1800 BCE. Its use became widespread by about 1000 BCE, and we find in late Vedic texts mentions of a “dark metal” (krishnāyas), while the earliest texts, such as the Rig-Veda, only spoke of ayas, which, it is now accepted, referred to copper or bronze.

Whether other parts of India learned iron technology from the Gangetic region or came up with it independently is not easy to figure out. What matters is that the dates for copper, bronze and iron in India correspond broadly with those in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and Caucasus. Let us note that an old theory according to which India learned iron metallurgy from those regions is now discredited.

Moreover, Indians invented two highly advanced types of iron. The “wootz steel ”, produced first in south India from about 500 BCE, was iron carburized under controlled conditions. Exported from the Deccan all the way to Damascus, it was shaped there into swords renowned for their sharpness and toughness; later, the Arabs fashioned it into swords and other weapons. A Roman historian, Quintius Curtius, recorded that among the gifts which Alexander the Great received from Porus of Taxila (in 326 BCE), there was some two-and-a-half tons of wootz steel — clearly it was as highly prized as gold or jewels. From the 18th century onward, savants in England (Pearson, Stodart and Faraday), France and Italy tried to master the secrets of wootz; their researches led to the understanding of the role of carbon in steel and to new techniques in steel-making.

The second advanced iron is the one used in the famous 1,500-year-old Delhi Iron Pillar, consisting of six tons of wrought iron (there are a few other such pillars in other parts of India). Its rust-resistant properties were only recently understood, and are due to the presence of phosphorus in the iron: together with iron and oxygen from the air, phosphorus forms a thin protective coating at the surface, which gets reconstituted if damaged by scratching. Indian iron-smiths would not have known the chemistry at play here, but it goes to their credit that through patient trial and error they were able to locate and process the right type of iron ore for such monumental pillars. The same technology was used to manufacture huge iron beams used in some temples of Odisha, such as Jagannath of Puri.

It is interesting to note that most of India’s production of iron was controlled by specific communities, most of them from the lower rungs of Indian society. For instance, the Agarias of U.P. and M.P. are reputed metal workers, and there are other communities scattered across Jharkhand, Bihar, West-Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

In the late 1600s, shipments of tens of thousands of wootz ingots would leave the Coromandel coast for Persia every year. India’s iron and steel industry was intensive till the 18th century and declined only with the British selling their own products into India while imposing high duties on Indian products.

Iron technology did not put an end to the earlier bronze metallurgy, however. The two were used for different purposes. An eloquent testimony of the further growth of bronze metallurgy is found in a huge bronze statue of the Buddha made in Sultanganj (Bhagalpur district, Bihar), between 500 and 700 CE; at 2.3m high, 1m wide, and weighing over 500 kg, it is the largest bronze figure of its kind in the world, and was made by the same lost-wax technique that Harappans used three millenniums earlier (it is now at the Birmingham Museum). So were thousands of bronze statues made later in Tamil Nadu, such as the beautiful Natarāja statues. Similarly, highly polished bronze mirrors are still made in Kerala today, just as they were in Harappan times.

4. Chemistry and Alchemy

Although chemical practices were in use much earlier, a theory of chemistry took shape in the first centuries CE, especially during the Gupta Empire. The discipline was variously called rasashāstra, rasavidyā or dh ātuvāda. Its foundations were basically esoteric: rasa or mercury, one of the most important elements, was identified with the male principle (Shiva), while sulphur was associated with the female principle (Shakti). Transmuting base metals into gold and the pursuit of the “elixir of life” would today be categorized as “alchemy” more than chemistry.

This connection with concepts from Tantrism was not, however, devoid of practical applications, since Indian chemistry evolved practical methods to refine and produce medicines and other substances. The rasashāstra texts discuss many chemical substances categorized as mahārasas , uparasas, navaratnas, dhātus, poisons and plants, and also describe various types of apparatus, which were ingeniously developed and used for processing these substances. A detailed study of these texts reveals how skilled the rasavādins (chemists) were at performing purificatory processes in order to remove the toxic effects of metals and minerals and make them fit for internal use. For instance, although mercury compounds are regarded as poisonous, cinnabar (mercuric sulphide) went through eighteen complex processes called samskāras, including rubbing with various medicinally efficacious plant juices and extracts, incorporation of sulphur, mica, certain alkaline substances, etc. The resulting mercury compound was then declared fit for consumption and believed to lead to the body’s rejuvenation. Similar processes existed in Tamil alchemy and the Siddha system of medicine, which developed special techniques in connection with various naturally occurring salts.

5. Other technologies

The first appearance of glass in India goes back to the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. At Taxila (ancient Takshashila, now in northern Pakistan), the Bhir mound yielded numerous glass beads of several shapes and colours dated to the 5th century BCE or so. Glass objects and ornaments have also come to light at places like Kopia, Ujjain, Nasik, Ahicchatra, Sravasti, Kolhapur, Kaundinya, Brahmagiri, and at several sites of Tamil Nadu (such as Arikamedu, Kodumanal and Porunthal). The early Indian glass-makers were skilled at controlling the temperature of fusion, moulding, annealing, blotching and gold-foiling, the last done in an exquisite manner.

From antiquity this land has been renowned for the quality and dazzling variety of its production of textiles with fine skills in weaving and dyeing. The art of paper-makingwas introduced into India probably in the 11th century CE, perhaps from China through Nepal. Before the introduction of paper, the ancient literature was preserved on palm-leaves in south India and birch-bark in the north. By the latter half of the 15th century, Kashmir was producing paper of attractive quality from the pulps of rags and hemp, with lime and soda added to whiten the pulp. Sialkot, Zafarabad, Patna, Murshidabad, Ahmedabad, Aurangabad and Mysore were among the well-known centres of paper production.

5.1 Pyrotechnic Practices (or fireworks) appear to have been current in India in the 13th or 14th century. Gunpowder was an article of warfare at the beginning of the 16th century: the Indian craftsmen were quick to learn the technique from the Mughals and to evolve suitable explosive compositions. A 16th- or 17th-century Sanskrit treatise contains a description of how gunpowder can be prepared using saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal in different ratios for use in different types of guns.

From the 16th century, rockets began being used in wars waged in India, as testified by military annals of the period. The Mahrattas are reported to have fired rockets at the 1761 Battle of Panipat which they lost to the Afghans. Hyder Ali, the 18th-century ruler of Mysore, and his son and successor, Tipu Sultan, used rockets to great effect in the Anglo-Mysore Wars against the British East India Company, with a “rocket corps” of thousands of men. The rockets consisted of a tube of soft hammered iron about 20 cm long and 4 to 8 cm in diameter, closed at one end and strapped to a shaft of bamboo about 1 m long, with a sword often fitted at the other end. The iron tube contained well-packed black powder propellant. Though not very accurate, when fired en masse they could cause damage as well as panic among the troops. The British lost no time in taking a few rockets to England for closer study, which ended up boosting rocket technology in European warfare.

5.2 Cosmetics and Perfumes were an article of trade with the Romans (along with textiles, spices and timber) and are described at some length in Varāhamihira’s Brihat Samhitā: scented water for bathing, scented hair oil, perfume for cloths, for the mouth, scented tooth sticks are among the described items. This art became increasingly popular and some new compositions catered to the needs of the royal baths and religious ceremonies, particularly during the Mughal period. The Āin-i-Akbar ī speaks of the “Regulations of the Perfume Office of Akbar”; the āttar of roses was a popular perfume, the discovery of which is attributed to the mother of Nurjehan.

In many fields, especially metallurgy, India perfected advanced technologies centuries before Europe, which occasionally practised “reverse engineering”, as in the case of wootz steel, zinc distillation, Sushruta’s rhinoplasty and Tipu Sultan’s rockets. Some of the ancient technologies remain useful even today: metallurgical techniques, ecological and agricultural traditions, Ayurveda and various local health traditions, water management (see Module on Water Management), among others. They are part of what has been called India’s traditional knowledge systems. Even the technologies that have lost their relevance today remain interesting from a historical point of view. And there remains considerable scope for documenting, testing, assessing, and sometimes streamlining India’s enormous traditional technological wealth.

Web links

• The Origins of Iron-working in India: New Evidence from the Central Ganga Plain and the Eastern Vindhyas, Rakesh Tewari
•  A summary of the history of Indian chemistry, D.P. Agrawal
• Metallurgical Heritage of India, S. Srinivasan and S. Ranganathan
• Imagecasting in Swamimalai, video by Sharada Srinivasan
• India’s Legendary Wootz Steel: An Advanced Material of the Ancient World, Sharada Srinivasan & Srinivasa Ranganatha, online text of 1st edition
•  On the corrosion resistance of the Delhi iron pillar, R. Balasubramaniam
• Corrosion resistance of the Dhar iron pillar, R. Balasubramaniam & A.V. Ramesh Kumar
• A Marvel of Medieval Indian Metallurgy: Thanjavur’s Forge-Welded Iron Cannon, R.
• Balasubramaniam
•  On the growth kinetics of the protective passive film of the Delhi iron pillar, R. Balasubramaniam
• The Rise of Calico Printing in Europe, Giorgio Riello
•  Chintz, Wikipedia
• Calico, Wikipedia
• Indigo revolt, Wikipedia
• Mysorean rockets, Wikipedia
• Rockets in Mysore and Britain, 1750-1850 AD, Roddam Narasimha
• Papers on Indian Science and Technology, resource prepared by SandHI, IIT Bombay

Bibliography

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• Balasubramaniam,R. Marvels of Indian Iron through the Ages, Rupa & Infinity Foundation, New Delhi, 2008
•  Balasubramaniam,R. The Saga of Indian Cannons, Aryan Books International, 2008
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