Diagrams in premodern South Asian scientific texts
jean-yves beziau
Thursday, March 27, 2025, from 10:00 to 16:00
Bâtiment Condorcet, Université Paris Cité, 4 rue Elsa Morante, 75013 Paris.
If you would like to attend the seminar remotely, please write to Karine Chemla at: che...@univ-paris-diderot.fr for the Zoom login link.
- Dagmar Wujastyk (University of Alberta)
Communicating science through visual aids: Diagrams in premodern South Asian scientific texts
Abstract: A recent discovery of technical drawings and diagrams on over twenty manuscripts of two Sanskrit alchemical texts challenges preconceptions about scientific interaction and technological development in premodern India. Indic scientific disciplines with practical applications such as medicine, alchemy, mathematics, calendrical astronomy, etc., were systematized, codified, and disseminated through texts composed in Sanskrit and in vernaculars from the early centuries CE, with each discipline developing its own body of literature. The texts fulfill multiple functions, ranging from encoding the disciplines’ practices and serving didactic purposes to endowing the disciplines with status, legitimacy, and authority. There are different layers to the textual communication of Indic scientific knowledge. The literature broadly divides up into 1. root or base texts, which provide the discipline’s paradigms, and 2. commentarial literature, which explains and develops the themes of the root texts, often substantially reshaping the root text through omissions, redactions and reinterpretations. The representation of knowledge through visual elements such as diagrams, tables, charts, and technical drawings may be understood as a third layer of communication with both explanatory and representational power.
This paper will explore how scientific insight and discovery were communicated in premodern South Asia, focusing in particular on the uses of graphics and text in the production of technical knowledge.
I will query what necessitated the introduction of visual materials to the scientific textual corpus and will examine what functions the integration and application of charts, diagrams, technical drawings, etc. fulfilled over time. My hypothesis is that the integration of visual elements in the textual transmission of scientific disciplines is indicative of both interdisciplinary and intercultural scientific communication, but may also reflect ruptures in knowledge transmission, especially as boundaries between different knowledge systems were crossed. The recently discovered diagrams of alchemical instruments and apparatuses on manuscripts of alchemical texts will form a starting point to this inquiry.
- Fabrizio Speziale (EHESS-CESAH, Marseille)
Drawing the secret tools of the art: function of illustrations in Persian texts on Indian alchemy
Abstract: This talk presents a preliminary discussion of the drawings of alchemical apparatuses in copies of Persian texts, providing accounts of the methods used in Indian alchemy and medical alchemy (rasaśāstra). These Persian texts were produced in India, and the earliest of them, the Majmū‘a-yi Żiyā’ī, was written in the Deccan in the first half of 14th century. In the first part of this talk, I will situate these works within their socio-intellectual and economic contexts. Mercurial and metallic preparations were costly goods sought after by wealthy clients for the many properties ascribed to them, such as longevity and virility. Muslim scholars were eager to assimilate knowledge of these drugs, and Persian texts written in India provide many accounts of the methods used in rasaśāstra.
In the second part, I will discuss some hypotheses regarding the function of the drawings of apparatuses. We should take for granted that illustrations conveyed some added and practical value to the text and were not just meant to adorn it. These apparatuses were used to refine metals—otherwise highly toxic—and we may assume that the practical knowledge of such procedures counted among the secrets of the art transmitted by a master to his apprentices. Therefore, why would individuals or groups who monopolise these procedures share them with others, considering the economic value of such knowledge? Drawings revealed the shape of apparatuses, and the texts often explained how to use them.
Or, though helpful, would texts and drawings not have been enough to allow replicating these procedures without oral and practical instruction? Therefore, were these drawings meant to be explained by masters who would have then kept the hegemony over the use and pedagogy of these techniques? Moreover, was oral instruction only needed to decipher the drawings or also the texts explaining how to use the apparatuses, which included many technical terms derived from the Hindi lexicon? Finally, I will compare these materials with the function that drawings of the subtle body played in Persian Sufi handbooks of the Mughal period.