ABSTRACT
Aryabhata (fifth century), a Dalit, invented calculus a thousand years before Newton and Leibniz. This breaks the myth that scientific innovation (and even education) in India was confined to upper castes. Nevertheless, the myth is defended by crediting Indian calculus to the “Kerala school”, which included the highest-caste Namboodiri Brahmins, such as Nilakantha, who were, ironically, followers of Aryabhata, breaking both the caste and the north-south divide. Colonialism, obviously, did everything possible to harden both divides, for example, by confounding Western racism with caste. Colonial control of knowledge persisted post-independence. It sustained elite (and often casteist) islands of ideological appendages in India which propagated the Western formalist philosophy of mathematics. Formalism springs from the church dogma that metaphysical reasoning (without facts) is infallible. Consequently, today it is taught that a particular metaphysics of infinity/eternity (formal real numbers and the related set theory) is essential to understand calculus. This metaphysics adds nothing to the practical value of calculus for science and engineering but makes it needlessly complex and difficult. Mathematics needs to be decolonized, to focus on practical value for the colonized, instead of ideological value for the colonizer.
