D D who?

India does a splendid job of many things, including forgetting its heroes. Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi, whose centenary year this is, was one of them. True to form, India has forgotten this scholar of scholars, the historian of historians, the man who in his 59 years contributed to mathematics, genetics, physics, statistics, Sanskrit and numismatics, among others. If anyone can be called a genius, he could be. Harvard waived the entrance exam requirement for him.

But genius extracts its price. He was forced to leave Ferguson College in Pune where he started teaching in 1933 because his lectures went over the heads of the students. They protested that he was not helping them pass the exams! That was not the only 'mistake' he made.

In the field of politics he was an admirer of the Chinese revolution and a critic of India's economic policies, which he thought were promoting capitalism in socialist garb. One wonders what he would have said of post-Deng China. He had visited China many times and was very critical of Nehru's policies. Homi Bhabha didn't approve and eventually Kosambi was obliged to leave the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, where he had been working since 1945.

Kosambi published a paper on eugenics in 1944. He also suggested the Kosambi Map Function which improved on what JBS Haldane had proposed. His contribution in statistics is called Proper Orthogonal Decomposition and is used in several areas that require data to be processed. His books and articles on Indian literature, notably Bhartrihari, are almost too numerous to be counted. With such men the question always arises: what should we remember them for? For reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably have something to do with the way in which Marxists appropriate intellectual legacies, Kosambi will always be known in India as "Oh, that historian chap?" But in spite of the communist efforts to claim ownership, Kosambi was not a Marxist in the way the world knows them now or indeed knew them then. He would have made short work of today's pretenders, as he did of the charlatans then.

His Marxism lay more in the method than in the polemic. He saw the fundamental truth of Marx's proposition that it was economic reasons that determined the course of history. For him history lay in economic and the consequent social dynamics, not in the tiresome one-king-after-another kind of episodic history. For example, and to simplify hugely, the 'Aryan' expansion down the Gangetic plain, he said, was because they were looking for iron with which to build weapons. His observations on Krishna and the growth of Krishna worship in India are equally fascinating. His masterpiece, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline, demonstrates how best Indian history can be understood. It also shows how historical, literary and archaeological evidence can and should be adduced to prove a point beyond any but the silliest disputations. It shows the staggering diversity of his thought and knowledge. And, it leads one to suspect the real reason why even historians are not celebrating his centenary properly "" he puts them all in such shade, especially the pretenders to Marx's intellectual heritage. His inability to suffer fools gladly was, after all, legendary.

Given how poorly his memory has been treated, it is impossible not to recall the European jibe that upset him hugely: "India has had some episodes but no history". It needs to be asked if he too has become one of those episodes in our intellectual history. Surely he deserves better than just that lone biography by a bureaucrat-economist "" C D Deshmukh!