জ্ঞানচর্চায় ইওরোপিয় আদান-প্রদান নাকি জ্ঞান ধ্বংস

এই বইতে প্রসন্নন পার্থসারথি যে আদান-প্রদানের কথা বলছেন, তাঁর বাইরে দাঁড়িয়ে ধরমপাল দেখিয়েছেন কোন কোন প্রযুক্তি, জ্ঞান, দক্ষতা ইওরোপ উপমহাদেশের নানান এলাকা থেকে চুরি আর ধ্বংস করেছিল।

This book also challenges the still deeply held belief in the uniqueness of early-modern European scientific culture. In the period from 1600 to 1800, intellectual life in the Indian subcontinent was far from stagnant and there were intellectual shifts which led to self-conscious searches for new forms of knowledge. Indian thinkers also began to place a higher value on understanding the natural world for the economic and political utility of that knowledge. States and rulers sought to compile both European and Indian learning to put it at the service of political power. Indian artisans were also exposed to European technical developments through contact with skilled individuals and the products of Europe. While Indian manufacturers benefited from the encounter with European techniques and know-how, the flow of information was by no means one way. Europeans sought out both Indian learned men and artisans to gain access to their technical and scientific knowledge. Therefore, any portrayal of Europe as uniquely scientific and technological rests on a misunderstanding of conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or projects the backward conditions that emerged in nineteenth-century India into earlier periods.