500-Year Long Siege: How India's Scientific Spirit Was Sabotaged And Why We Must Reclaim It

The Long Siege: 500 Years of India’s Struggle for Technopolitical Freedom. Chaitanya Giri. BluOne Ink Publishers. Pages: 160. Price: Rs 384.

The thorn of colonialism that Bharat endured for 500 years gave us a momentary poisoning in our long-living civilisation. While well-meaning social, political, and economic truth-tellers have informed us how colonialism disregarded and looked down upon the organic attributes of our culture, ethics, and ethos, we have hardly had a science truth-teller looking at history from a metastrategic lens, observing the labyrinthine big picture.

This is the gap I seek to bridge, not through another history book but through a strategic analysis of the scientific and technological history of Bharat over the past 500 years, one written with Bharat’s holistic concerns, potentials, and the Republic's ambitions in mind.

This is what I have attempted in my new book, The Long Siege: 500 Years of India’s Struggle for Technopolitical Freedom. The book is information-dense; it is full of anecdotes of known and lesser-known individuals who have fought for freedom but on technopolitical planes of the struggle. I have attempted to stitch their stories in a way that has never been done before.

The Weaponisation of Science

Colonialism forced upon us an incompatible and hostile way of science, one that was not for the greater good of our people but was a weapon wielded by the proponents of colonialism. The weaponisation of science that Western companies initiated, backed by rapid innovation in the 17th and 18th centuries, was deliberate and calculated.

They weaponised science to empower their Crusade; they separately wanted to subjugate the Eastern pagan and Dharmic societies, exploit the same science to overflow their treasuries, and use it to denigrate societies and fuel their extermination to promote a global monoculture.

The British East India Company publicly expressed their intentions to subjugate Islamic rule over Bharat and to take control of the Bharatiya realms. Until the battles of Buxar and Plassey, their primary objective was to control the Bengal Subah, which was equivalent to today's California in terms of economic dimensions and influence, and these conflicts were Crusades.

When the Anglo-Maratha, Anglo-Carnatic, and Anglo-Sikh Wars culminated, the Company commenced establishing a network of semaphore stations, telegraph cables, and theodolites for trigonometric surveying. While the Islamic invasion of India was characterised by brute force and swift destruction, the subsequent Company invasion employed advanced technology meticulously, with these technologies serving not liberation but the reinforcement of colonial exploitative dominance.

The Company had no intention of sharing with the Bharatiya people the knowledge of the theodolites, the cables, and the semaphores. Even after 1851, when the first three universities were established in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, none of them was allowed to open a science R&D department for approximately 80 to 90 years.

Indians were systematically excluded from scientific pursuits; this exclusion was motivated by a mixture of racial prejudice and fear. More critically, there was apprehension that Bharat would develop scientific instruments and technological innovations to overthrow the British Raj and deprive it of the wealth and power derived from Asia.

The Maritime Decline and Loss of Exploration

Today, in 2025, can we imagine a country capable of becoming a superpower without the capabilities to venture into outer space? Without the means or wherewithal to explore the world, to secure realms and supply chains far beyond the frontiers of their own country, to prevent any assault from enemies? No, either a nation has these serious competencies or it had better avoid the embarrassment of becoming a vassal.

In the same regard, we had better not forget that in the last 500 years, when alien powers waged maritime wars in our waters, and when we could not pay back in the same coin in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, that is where and when we went into a decline.

Most of the technological instruments we use today have emerged from exploratory activities, from their willingness to wage such distant wars. For instance, a Swiss 'chronometer' watch, which is much desired for and sold at hefty prices, came from the need for celestial navigation by global blue-water navies of the colonisers.

Had our Indian kingdoms had ports of their own, they would have had fleets, businesses around them, capital to earn from them, commodities to control, and wealth to patronise science and technology that would eventually augment these strategic pursuits. Loss of access to ports and seas did not matter for long, even after independence. That is the poisoning of colonisation; no given independence can get you rid of this poison.

The Dual Struggle: Political and Scientific Freedom

Our popular history of modern Bharatiya science was glitchy. We speak of science as if it were detached from our immense freedom struggle and the pursuits of our scientific greats, as if those were egalitarian, individualistic pursuits to quench the momentary thirst for knowledge, with no role in the greater good of our people.

We have made our scientists into worthy idols; we celebrate their lives. But that is a very atomic approach. We must evaluate the situations, institutions, and serendipitous events that made them the great contributors they are. The science we do today is an outcome of the same freedom struggle carried out through the Swadeshi and Revolutionary movements.

The convergence of these movements began around the same time as we were preparing for the First War of Independence. There is evidence of it in activities in Calcutta, Poona, and Bombay. Many greats were involved, doing their bit.

We have heard and read about the India House in London and its immense service to our freedom struggle. But we have not read much about another India House, this one in Tokyo, Japan. That lesser-known India House has contributed to our Swadeshi scientific and industrial progress, creating some of the biggest modern-day industries of our country, and while doing so, also to our freedom struggle.

Deshnayak Subhas Chandra Bose's presidency of the Congress was crucial for the establishment of the major scientific laboratories that we see today. His contributions, too, have long been disregarded, which is highly unfortunate, but no more. Indian scientific institutions, even those that were newly created, were subjected to sophisticated espionage and monitoring since 1942, and even after 1947.

Our Global Quest for Scientific Knowledge

We were just as curious about the rapid pace of innovation during the Industrial Revolution. There were our people who had realised that the then geopolitical and geoeconomic compulsions did not allow us to partake in the first Industrial Revolution, and that non-participation had nothing to do with intellect, as racist academic troopers later tried to ram into our minds.

Our great kings, whom we adore, sent their emissaries to Europe to learn astronomy. Our spies were travelling to Turkey and Russia in the 1850s. We were captivated by the Meiji Revolution, and pan-Asianist ideas had begun in the 1880s.

We deliberately opened a science diplomatic line in Central Europe, among non-English-speaking competitor countries of Britain. This struggle for scientific independence spanned continents, revealing a sophisticated understanding of the global nature of technological advancement.

The Continuing Shadow of Colonialism

Despite consistent efforts at decolonisation, colonial rule has embedded so many landmines in the form of institutions, ideologies, practices, and codes that it is difficult to remove many of them. We have a long way to go, but we should keep at it relentlessly; perhaps increasing the speed of decolonisation is what we have to do now.

The Department of Science and Technology takes pride in the Survey of India, a colonial institution, being its first and foremost scientific institution. Of course, I am not suggesting the government disband the institution, but at least take efforts to have a discontinuity, a transition that explains why these institutions take no pride in their colonial history, and that they have evolved into a fully Bharatiya institution for good.

The Indian Armed Forces have shown the way: the Indian Navy, not long ago, removed the George Cross, a symbol not native to India, from its insignia. Fort William, the leading military installation of colonial India, was also recently renamed Vijay Durg.

Our human mind is greatly influenced by symbols, lexicon, the antiquity of institutions, the figures we carve into statues, and the purpose they all serve. Having a colonial legacy will never help us achieve our true potential; our institutions and the colonial imprint they and their staff and governors carry would never allow us to pursue science like a mentally unshackled Hindu would.

Asserting Scientific Autonomy

When we speak of our Mars mission, we must understand how other nations frame their achievements. Our friendly nation, the United Arab Emirates, an Asian country, proud of its achievements, and rightly so, has sent its Hope spacecraft to Mars; what does the UAE Space Agency website call it? "The first Arab and Islamic Probe to Mars."

Of course, the Americans, Russians, and Europeans would not call their missions Christian, nor would the Israelis call their missions Jewish. Our government may not want to call our space missions Hindu missions for now; perhaps we are advocates of multicultural undertakings. But then there are limits to the forced and inorganic monoculture called 'multiculturalism'.

In Bharat's context, true scientific autonomy would mean our temples operating world-class astronomical observatories, just as the Vatican does. One would want Hindu temples to have promotional exhibits like 'Jews in Space' run by the New York-based Yiddish Institute for Jewish Research, or a Hindu fund of funds that is operationally at par with the John Templeton Foundation, which operates on the Christian faith and worldview.

True scientific autonomy would only come when we practice science as true-blue Bharatiya janmanas, testing our hypotheses, building our equipment, and pursuing our atypical approach to the study of the world and our existence and sustenance in it. All the geopolitical biases troubling us will vanish once we do science with full confidence in our Dharma and our Karma. The biases that remain thereafter will not trouble but tickle.

The Imperative of Exploration

The urge to write about this came from one major comprehension: as a civilisation, Bharatiya minds had long stopped exploring the unknown. I am not equating this exploration to wandering, meandering, travelling, or migrating. What I am saying is 'exploration', an endeavour that is thoughtful, meticulously planned, with supplies and contingencies in place, and with a certain kind of outcome desired out of it, the kind we did during Ashwamedh.

Since we stopped exploring, non-natives began probing our realms, our minds. Their probing led to what we call colonisation.

Civilisations never stop exploring; they never stop seeking the signatures of creation, preservation, and destruction. They seek to understand the grand design, seek what is hidden within our Vasundhara, seek how we can find solutions to the problems that the Anthropocene has created, venture into outer space to find the greatest and grandest realities of our universe, find panacea for what ails us and our minds, and find resources necessary for our constructive pursuits.

Most strategic scientific innovations are actually the products of colonialism and serve to control resources, land, and people. These are usually not shared; this innovation and the information related to it will never be equitably shared. But one must also understand that this is not the Gyan, which we loosely translate as knowledge.

Looking Forward: A Secured Future

Today, India places great emphasis on shipping and its space capabilities. We are reinvigorating ancient ports, building stitched ships, building the space station, and publicly announcing multimodal trade corridors. Let us not take them as yet another governmental project. We must view all of these from a metastrategic perspective.

Although superficially colonialism has ended, let us be true to ourselves; it continues in the hands of natives who have been brainwashed, for they have become the legatees of colonialism.

I fear that if we get colonised once again, this time the assault will be on the minds of those who do not subscribe to a monolithic global culture. The assault will prevent cultures from reaching their true potential. Never stop exploring.

The Swadeshi and Revolutionary movements were not reactionary but deeply spiritual endeavours in which the liberation of Vigyan, a crucial element of Gyan Yoga, was achieved through Karma Yoga. We must identify the gangrenous vestiges of colonialism still lingering in our institutions. Such comprehension of the itihasa of our modern science is vital for our progress as a civilisational nation.

All countries do science; the oldest living civilisation cannot afford to ape them. It would have to pursue it in its own peculiar way, absorbing the knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence from the vast time and space continuum it has existed in a way no other can. We have to preserve that continuum.

If tomorrow an alien species from faraway worlds were to land on our lands, we must have a protocol to communicate our culture, our itihasa, and our science, because if we do not do so our way, perhaps we will play second fiddle to those who do.

The book is realistic, not nihilistic, nor pessimistic, nor excessively jingoistic. It seeks to help us accept harsh facts, analyse history, and face the current situation with a singular focus: a secure future for Bharat and its intertwinedness with humanity's secure future.

Note: You can purchase the book here.