The ongoing devaluation of India's ability to innovate is driven to a large degree by its colonial past, but today some seek to revive the claims of our past achievements to support a national identity. We see this with the recent changes made to our NCERT textbooks, where they claim that Brahmagupta and Bhaskaracharya were the inventors of Algebra before anyone else. These comparisons, which are now made on physiology and lack of resources, are an indicator of how some have lost sight of their own intellectual contributions and are merely exhibiting a superiority complex by pointing out that others (in Europe, particularly) were "competing" with them.
The way forward is for modern Indian Scientists like Prafulla Chandra Ray, the Father of Indian Chemistry who was a superstar with the development of an entity in the 1880's that produced mercury based compounds and articles published in the leading European Scientific journals. Ray also started an Indian company, Bengal Chemicals, which still exists today, and Ray had done this while continuing to conduct research on ancient texts in Sanskrit related to the science of Alchemy.
By the years 1902-1904 we see Ray publishing his book A History of Hindu Chemistry. The stories behind this book are not coincidental. The ideas Ray included in his book on the chemistry of alchemy came about as a result of discussions with the noted French chemist Marcelin Berthelot. Berthelot saw a connection between the chemistry of alchemy and current scientific practices of today. Ray's approach was that just as Europe can show it's pride by tracing its history through scientific discovery, India can do the same. Therefore Ray melded his own scientific pursuits and discoveries with the idea of utilizing the past in forming an identity to stand up against the colonial influences of his time.
This has been a struggle for more than 200 years. Beginning with Dayanand Saraswati's Satyarth Prakash, Indian scholars have slowly fought back against the European view that only Europe created Science. The idea was to establish a scientifically-based background that demonstrated to the world that India was not a land of superstitions but one with a "scientific spirit."
