দেশিয় জ্ঞানচর্চা - জটিল হিসেব রাখা

ইওরোপের দাবি(মূলত পি জে মার্শাল ইতিহাস আঙ্গিকে) জটিল হিসেব রাখার মন্ত্র ইওরোপ উপমহাদেশকে শিখিয়েছে। এর বিরুদ্ধে ম্যাক্স ওয়েবারের এশিয়স্তরে যুক্তিবাদের অভাবের অভিযোগ নিয়ে প্রসন্নন বলছেন, যে ব্যবসায়ী, কারিগরেদের হিসেব রাখা, খাতাপত্র রাখা এগুলি ছিল যুক্তিবাদের চূড়ান্ত। সপ্তদশ অষ্টাদশ শতকে উত্তর ভারতে মুঘল ইরাণি এবং হিন্দু হিসাব রাখার পদ্ধতি মিলিয়ে মিশিয়ে একটা যৌথ ডবল এন্ট্রির খাতা রাখার পদ্ধতি চালু হয়। দক্ষিণ ভারতের তাঁতিরা তাল পাতায় খব জটিল হিসেব রাখতেন।

In the Indian subcontinent, merchants engaged in careful calculations for their commercial transactions. Their methodical procedures were objectified in the form of sophisticated accounting techniques that even went beyond the recording of debits and credits in double-entry bookkeeping. According to Christopher Bayly, they “provided a map of the relationships between the family firm and the economy as a whole.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, manuals were written on the science of accountancy in northern India, which spread knowledge and practice of numeracy and calculation. These works, reflecting the syncretic culture of the region, drew upon the arithmetic and accounting systems of Hindu merchants and procedures from Iranian and Mughal sources and were composed in Persian. There is evidence that the keeping of accounts was not restricted to merchants.Weavers in eighteenth-century South India, for example, were well known for keeping a record on cadjans (palm leaves) of their transactions – which could be extremely complex as they included advances of cash from several merchants, purchases of materials such as yarn, oil, tools and equipment, sale prices for cloth, and so on. This suggests that numerical thinking and economic calculation may have diffused quite widely among South Indians, but the evidence for this is very difficult to recover from the surviving sources. Frank Perlin also argues that the plentiful material on the profusion of small value moneys provides evidence that market transactions were common and thus a market mentality was widespread.