The mathematical knowledge of premodern India is often understood as a mental construct of individual thinker-mathematicians. Challenging this dominant understanding, this project delineates the interactions between humans and nonhumans that form mathematical knowledge—numbers, measurements, procedures, and rules—in premodern India. It does so by analyzing the computation of materials such as gold, paddy, rice, wood, and land in premodern India between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, while also engaging with the central questions of the ASTRA working group Performative Philology: Crafting Knowledge in Action. These interactive emergences of mathematical knowledge are performative formations.
These performative formations are products of interconnected networks, including ecology and cosmology; production and distribution; trade and utilization; governance and administration; and pedagogy and erudition. Practitioners such as sawyers, goldsmiths, agrarian laborers, traders, accountants, and schoolteachers engage with materials (paddy, wood, gold, and silver), environments (forests, goldfields, paddy fields, sawing yards, gold workshops, farmhouses, marketplaces, habitations, temples, and schools), artifacts (handsaws, crucibles, touchstones, testing sticks, weighing scales, palm leaves, and styluses), and animals (bullocks, oxen, and elephants) in the historical processes of knowledge formation.
With a particular focus on two premodern mathematical treatises in Malayalam—Kaṇakkatikāram (Topics of Calculation) and Kanakkusāram (Essence of Calculation)—available as palm-leaf manuscripts, transcripts, digital editions, and printed texts, the project engages with a range of premodern Indian mathematical treatises and historical documents. It analyzes these sources through an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival, philological, and materialist approaches.
