In this installment of our “10 Questions for the Historian of Science”, I talked to Tejas Aralere about his research, methodologies, and the state of the history of science.
Tejas Aralere. Source: Tejas Aralere, 2023.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Tejas Aralere: I’m an Assistant Professor of classics and humanities at the University of New Hampshire, USA. This year I’m a Loeb Classical Foundation and Center for Hellenic Studies Fellow which have given me the opportunity to visit ASTRA. I’m writing this as a Fellow at the Fondation Hardt for Classical Studies in Geneva. I have a range of interests in Classics ranging from cognitive scientific approaches to understanding the beginning of writing, Imperial Latin elegiac poetry, the Mahābhārata, and others. Now I’m working on the second phase of my first book project on the exchange of astral science between Sanskrit and Roman sciences between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE, focusing on the Yavana cultural identity and the Kushan empire as the connecting node between India, the Mediterranean, and China. I gained admission to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, which garnered my interest in neuroscience, so I earned Neuroscience (BS) and Latin (BA) degrees before going to University of California Santa Barbara to earn a PhD in Classics. There, I also did extensive coursework in Religious Studies to study Sanskrit so I could do interdisciplinary research. This combination got me thinking about history of science from quite early on!
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Tejas Aralere: I work on the exchange of astral and medical scientific knowledge between the Mediterranean and South Asia from the 1st to 4th centuries CE. I was a neuroscience and Latin language major in college and a professor specialized in ancient science. So, when I studied ancient Latin scientific poetry with her, she told me that there was much more to investigate, and naturally, I began thinking about how Sanskrit scientific material is ignored in these Classical histories of science which focus on Greek and Roman intellectual advances. She asked me to write a chapter for her edited volume on the history of Hellenistic science discussing the syncretic exchange of knowledge between ancient India and the Mediterranean and it’s then that I discovered David Pingree’s work on the ancient astral sciences that was inspirationally interdisciplinary. I specifically found interesting the theory of melothesia, a theory claiming that the 12 Zodiac signs influence different parts of the body, giving them particular qualities associated with that sign. This arrangement of signs first appears in the Astronomica, a Latin epic poem about astrology written during the reign of Rome’s first emperor Augustus around 20 CE. Scholars mostly ignored the two passages where the melothesia occurs with some suggesting that these were later interpolations and that they didn’t make sense in the text. What caught my attention was that this same melothesia arrangement appears in the opening verses of a 2nd–3rd century CE Sanskrit astrological treatise called the Yavana Jātaka, often translated as the “Greek Horoscopy” since Yavana is the Sanskrit form of “Ionian.” While scholars knew that astral science knowledge was being exchanged between the Mediterranean and Sanskrit sources, what I was interested in was exactly how knowledge that was exchanged was accepted or rejected and the processes of contextualization that were required to permit the incorporation of this foreign knowledge. Deeper study of this Sanskrit treatise left me wondering about whether our definition of who these “Yavana” people were that supposedly inspired or composed the treatise and this led to my second project that I worked on while at MPIWG which has begun to include the Kuṣāṇa Empire.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Tejas Aralere: I draw on translation theory quite often, since there are some technical Greek terms that are adopted by the Sanskrit astronomers. The sources I use are critical editions, which I’m lucky to have for my materials but I also look at manuscripts, particularly for medical materials or illuminations of the Zodiac Man, which is the illustrated form of the melothesia. Many of these texts are in the UK or Paris, and some of them are not digitized, so that’s been exciting to travel and see them in person. For the Yavana Jātaka, there was a new manuscript discovered, so I’ve been fortunate to have high-resolution scans shared with me. I’m so appreciative of the openness of the academic community in this regard.
I also use engraved gems, coins, stone inscriptions, and sculpture because they give us all the “real-world” data that formalized literature lacks. Most of the time, the Classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit literature we have is produced by the highest social classes who had literacy and leisure to write these works. Often the provenance of these manuscripts is unknown and /or the extant manuscript is just a few centuries old when we know that the original text was composed more than a millennium ago. So, the material evidence aside from manuscripts can sometimes help build a deeper understanding of world of words, images, and symbols that a text developed and was embedded within. In Germany, this led me to visit the Munich Coin Collection which holds numerous Kuṣāṇa coins and Hellenistic gems which are less studied.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Tejas Aralere: My work attempts to bridge the subfield of history of science in classical studies with the newly emerging tradition of science history in South Asian Studies. A similarity between these fields is that both emerged from the study of the history of the Exact Sciences, meaning mostly mathematics and geometry. Then some philosophy was brought in when it addressed topics related to inquiries into “Nature” which itself had many definitions. On the Indic side, there was a very early recognition in the colonial period that Indians had scientific knowledge in astronomy and medicine, and so Indian pandits often worked alongside European scholars to produce critical editions in English and scholars have published on how a hybrid form of knowledge emerged from this that lives on today.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Tejas Aralere: I’ll give you my opinion as a scholar of Classics and South Asian Studies, not trained formally in History of Science or Science and Technology Studies. As it stands, I think there are productive conversations occurring in the history of science, but mostly focused on the events surrounding the Enlightenment up to the modern age. In Classics, the ancient science papers mostly get grouped with philosophy panels or panels that examine the genre within which a text is classified, so Lucretius might show up on an epic poetry panel or on an ecocritical Classics panel, but rarely as a standalone panel. In South Asian Studies, it barely exists at all as a distinct subfield. At the most recent History of Science Society conference, I was part of a group of Classicists invited to organize discussions on the future of the history of science, but found that there were not enough opportunities for productive cross-disciplinary conversations between those of us who study ancient science and scholars of the “history of science.” That needs to change if Classicists want to find ways to show their work’s relevancy to modern issues, and Historians of Science want to really understand the problems they’re tackling over the longue durée.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Tejas Aralere: I don’t think this is a particularly profound take, but history of science is simultaneously a history of politics, socio-cultural situatedness, and an indicator of what a society’s economic driving forces and leadership have decided is a priority for research and development. This doesn’t mean that the public agrees with this or acknowledges it as being necessary, but those who are employed as scientists will still have to support the regime’s goals. If we think the idea of a military industrial complex as a motivating force for research is new, we need to look back to the narratives, however apocryphal they might appear, and look to the 3rd century BCE Greek tyrants of Syracuse. Figures like the Tyrant Hiero II were giving patronage to brilliant thinkers like Archimedes, who essentially had freedom to work on whatever he wanted, but was reminded to occasionally produce something that the tyrant could show off to his subjects as benefitting them. Archimedes’ engineering feats famously included machines that could be used for warfare too, like a parabolic dish that could direct sunlight into a beam and set things on fire from a ship. If scientific research is theoretically supposed to benefit society or humanity writ large, history of science gives us the perspective to evaluate the ethics of research questions and methods. More recent developments like have raised concerns over the ethics of scientific inquiry. While scientists certainly operate in accordance with their national ethics boards and regulations, the globalization of scientific research and the rise of ethno-nationalism globally require us to remember the harm that humans can do one another under the auspices of “science.” That I was sitting and writing this response at the MPIWG just block away from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology which once housed the Nazis’ department of Eugenics has brought this to the front of my mind in a more concrete way. Though the Nazis’ actions were condemned and prosecuted, it’s jarring to think how many of them returned to their teaching posts without having to really change their beliefs, and their concept of “science” remained part of the academy, however implicitly it might have been.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Tejas Aralere: My specific project highlights a few different aspects of science that we ought to keep in mind as we re-envision the future of scientific inquiry and practices. The first is that “science” and scientists may have a particular set of research questions framed within the academic context, but these do not and should not hold absolute authority in the wider world. I mean that there are numerous indigenous, localized, alternative, and non-post-European-Enlightenment methods for understanding Nature or our lived experiences in this world. Astrology is a great example since post-Copernican and Newtonian gravitational celestial science denies its validity, but people continue practicing it to find meaning in their lives. Science attempts to do this too, but seeks general laws about the world’s events. This highlights what science sometimes fails to do, which is present its practitioners with a deeper sense of meaning and direction at an individual level. That said, there are limits on how far one can go with this perspective. Certain scientific breakthroughs like vaccines and antibiotics generally are effective, and naysayers, doubters, and truthers need to be challenged and silenced. But my point about parallel or competing scientific systems and alternative practices remains valid when it comes to engaging in intercultural investigations of how other people conceptualize and experience their world.
Second, I think my research on rethinking the category of the Yavana science through the Ionians is important for re-envisioning the longue durée narrative of history of science as a globally unified set of practices. My questioning of the definitions of terms for science (ars. śāstra, technē) remains an important one since scientists themselves have not agreed on a single definition of science. Science’s Latin root “scio” means to know and so we must acknowledge alternative modes of inquiry as being valid though they arise from different sets of customs, beliefs, and expectations of scientific inquiry.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Tejas Aralere: Unusual stories? Not any that I can think of specifically. I feel like I’m always arguing that the dominant narrative needs to be questioned, so I’m surprised when I find folks who agree with me! A surprising find was when I was looking for astral science manuscripts in the British Library and I found a zodiac man manuscript illumination which had a bright red background. On the reverse of this same folio was a vein man with small labels containing names of illnesses that could be cured through bloodletting at a particular body part. To my surprise when I lifted the page to turn it, I realized that the manuscript’s illuminator had taken time to paint a red background so it looked like the zodiac man was bleeding since they were all filled with red in the obverse of the folio—the vein man was surrounded by little pools of blood. The materiality of the parchment page as animal skin also made me much more aware of the medium for this type of information to be documented. So, this certainly changed my view on scientific manuscripts from mostly being utilitarian to also being beautifully and thoughtfully prepared, which is something I rarely get to experience as a classicist who works primarily from nicely printed critical editions.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Tejas Aralere: My future research involves turning this second “part” of my dissertation project, which I’ve been plugging away at during my stay at MPIWG, into a monograph. Also, I hope to work on my project exploring the interconnected history of Classics and Sanskrit in the United States which I plan to continue working on at the Fondation Hardt this April. The development of Sanskrit studies and Classics as distinct disciplines originating from a single linguistic origin has been discussed in some scholarship in British Classics and Sanskrit studies, but not in the American context which I hope to further examine. Related to this desire to understand historical linguistics is my side project on 19th and 20th century European intellectual interest in dissecting “wholes” into their constituent parts in an effort to question fundamental modes of knowing the world around them. This desire to “ana-lyze” or “break down” their objects into their smallest individual components is crucial for understanding knowledge production practices in European science. But in the arts, we see that painters are experimenting with expressionism and pointillism to challenge realism’s claim to capture on canvas the world they saw around them: they challenge the human belief in the sense faculty of sight and are met with great resistance by the artistic community. Linguistically a similar investigative approach is taken philologists and linguists who seek out the fundamental components of spoken language and meaning. Can we trust what we see or hear? I think it’s important to acknowledge that artists and scientists have often been pursuing similar intellectual projects though with differing methodologies and I think it could be theoretically interesting to investigate these as related phenomena.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Tejas Aralere: Well, I think we should be talking about the “futures” of the history of science in the plural form because this field is a truly global one—at least in how I see it being practiced at MPIWG. One “future” that I think must be pursued is in the public humanities. Given the rise of anti-intellectualism and the challenges to their authority and expertise that scientists (both the “lab sciences and humanistic ones) are facing, I think historians of science must act in their capacity as historians of knowledge (Wissenschaft) and continue teaching the public about the importance of intellectual successes and failures. We have been fed a false narrative that science is all about success and finding facts, but facts can change! This means addressing scientific ethics and being able to talk to an audience untrained in the specifics of scientific practices. Even if the scientific method is one of the defining features of “science” the public must be taught about how and why it works and the impact of science on their daily lives. Additionally, AI is also a critical force for reminding us just how much humans need humans—not more machines. Scientists and technologists must keep that in mind as they do their work. Too often, the human factor is sidelined or ignored in seeking efficiency, and that’s to our collective detriment.
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!