DAMODAR DHARMANANDA KOSAMBI

chalega- better than a

Padma-this-that-or-the-other!
If there is one person, whose legacy the writer would, in the eyes of
posterity, love to inherit- or usurp if you please, it is DD Kosambi.

Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi- of amcho Goa again (b.1907 d.1966, a
mere 59), master of all that he surveyed, made invaluable original
contributions to Pure Mathematics as well as Statistics, but is best known
as a Marxian Historian. Babasaheb Kosambi, as people affectionately
called him. In the not too distant past, the Marathi male child would
invariably be addressed as (choose one): Baba, Nana, Baban, Kaka, Balu,
Raja, Dada, Anna, Sonya, Appa, and upon growing up the appellation
would get suffixed with Saheb or Rao or Bapu, depending upon the station
in life. Likewise, in case of the girl child: Baby, Tai, Jiji, Akka, Chhaku,
Rani

DDK also studied at Cambridge, Mass., Harvard etc. He taught
Mathematics and German at BHU, then Mathematics at AMU, then
Mathematics for 12 years at the Fergusson, served for 3 years at TIFR,
then taught at University of Chicago and Princeton, returning to India
thereafter for good, to engage in full time writing of commentaries and
books on Ancient Indian History and Sanskrit texts. For some time he also
served as Scientific Advisor to the Government of the Peoples Republic of
China.
He fell out with Dr. Bhabha and left TIFR because when scientists were
debating the relative advantages of solar and nuclear energy, Kosambi
argued for the sun whereas Bhabha preferred uranium and had the backing
of Jawaharlal Nehru He wrote thus in favour of solar energy:

The cost of research on direct utilization of solar energy would be far lower
than for atomic energy. India has much greater supply of solar energy than
most other countries; in fact, the problem is to keep the land from being
blasted altogether by the sun. One difficulty is that the suns energy is not
constant. There is the variation between sunrise and sunset, with nothing at
all at night. Again, cloudy days make a difference. The problem of storage,
however, is not too difficult. Better storage batteries can certainly be
produced, to give long life without heavy servicing. Another method would
be to pump water by use of solar energy, at whatever variable speed the
sun allows, into high-level tanks (say on towers). The water can then come
down by gravity through turbines which turn electric generators, and can be
further used for irrigation. The advantages are that the fuelthe suns
radiationcosts absolutely nothing, and there are no harmful exhaust
gases or radioactive byproducts. Moreover, the installation can be set up
anywhere in India, and will work quite well except perhaps in the heaviest
monsoon season. The research is of no use for war purposes. That is why
it attracts some of us, but does not attract those who control the funds
(the parting kick in the para being for Bhabha- read http://permanent-
black.blogspot.in/2012/06/unsettling-past-dd-kosambi-and-romila.html)
His taike on Indias population problem:

Children are the sole means of support for those among the common
people who manage to reach helpless old age. The futility of numerical
planning of the population, when nothing is done to ensure that even the
able-bodied have a decent level of subsistence, is obvious to anyone but a
born expert. Convince the people that even the childless will be fed and
looked after when unable to fend for themselves and birth control will
become popular..

What monumental foresight how much ahead of the times! We imagine
he was not the recipient of a Padma-this or a Padma-that or a Padma-
other because the Government had not the guts to offer one to him. You
know what Baba would have said. Hed convulse in his virtual grave if
someone tried to award one posthumously. But does this mean that our
educators deprive our generations of information on this person, who is one
of the greatest Indians ever born? If it were not for the democratic features
of the net, the very traces of Kosambi, who himself discerned whole
societies in a grain of sand, would ironically disappear. But for any of us
who desires to know about D D Kosambi, each word ever penned by
Kosambi is available for free-his life is an open non-copyrighted book..the
best things in life are free...

The most poignant tribute, when he died, came from A.L.Basham, the
famous British historianhere are some excerpts:

When his attention turned increasingly to anthropology as a means of
reconstructing the past, it became more than ever clear that he had a very
deep feeling for the lives of the simple people of Maharashtra. When he
described local festivals, and religious ceremonies or showed the excellent
colour slides that he had taken of them, one felt that he would have liked to
participate, to identify himself with the peasants worshipping at a village
shrine or making a pilgrimage to Pandharpur

..one realized that the range of his heart and mind was very wide. He had
a great love of literature in all languages. Once he impressed me by
quoting passages from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress from memory. I
was astonished that he should know this seventeenth century English
religious classic so well, and suggested that his taste for Bunyan was
rather incongruous in a professed unbeliever. He replied that he loved
Bunyan because his language was so beautiful and simple, he was a
product of the popular culture of the time, and he imparted valuable moral
lessons, even to one who had no faith...

Impatient with hypocrisy, inefficiency, bureaucracy, dogmatism and
intolerance, a man of very deep convictions and strong principles, with a
very powerful will, he may have made enemies as well as friends
I am not qualified to pass judgment on his work in mathematics, and have
hardly the right to assess his editions of Sanskrit poetical texts, which,
according to the specialists, are marvels of their kind.

As a historian he made very important contributions to the study of many
aspects of Indian history. His statistical analysis of the punch-marked coins
has produced one of the most convincing interpretations of these so far to
have been offered. His An Introduction to the Study of Indian History is in
many respects an epoch making work, containing brilliantly original ideas
on almost every page; if it contains errors and misrepresentations, if now
and then its author attempts to force his data into a rather doctrinaire
pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the significance of this very
exciting book, which has stimulated the thought of thousands of students
throughout the world..