There has been many a discussion about Indian thinkers
discovering and inventing things at the same time or
sometimes before their western counterparts. We have studied about the zero, plastic surgery and all. But I found something more subtle. While studying for my post grad, I found a book titled tarka bhasha (a book on logic). In this book, while discussing the gunas or attributes of various sense organs, the author of the book Keshava Mishra discusses about sound. Now here he begins a serious discussion. He proposes a question as to if the sound is generated at one point, how does it reach the ear of the listener who is at a distance from that point? He then mentions a phenomenon called vichi taranga nyaya (). Both the words vichi and taranga mean wave and nyaya means phenomenon. By this phenomenon it is proposed that sound originating from one point doesnt travel to the listeners ear directly but through a series of origination and destruction. The original sound gives birth to another sound and then dies, this second sound gives birth to the third and too dies, this process goes on until it reaches the ear of the listener. What the listener hears is the last sound, and so isnt the actual sound which had originated. And so Keshava Mishra calls it as an illusion to say that I have heard the drum as no one can listen to the actual first sound, but hears the last
one. Hence the sound travels in waves.
The author is said to have been born in 1275 A.D. So his book must belong to 13th or 14th Century A.D. Also to be noted is that the book belongs to philosophy. But discusses wide range of things including gravity. I do not propose that the this wave theory has been originally given by an Indian. As far as I have searched on the internet, the credit of the original thought is given to the Greek philosopher Chrysippus (c. 240 B.C.). This book has its origins in the Vaisheshika Darshana (a part of the six darshanas or books on philosophy) which is said to have been composed from 600-200 BCE. This one has simply mentioned that sound is produced by conjoining and disjoining of matter. Apart from this he discusses gravity, micro particles and stuff. So itd be too wild to imagine that after Sage Kanad () wrote Vaisheshika Darshana, the next improvement or addition in the information happened in 14th century. Just imagine if the Nalanda University wasnt destructed, we could have found the missing links of the improvement of various fields of knowledge. Even in the case of borrowing of the concept, we earn a good score as our ancestors could accept valid information from elsewhere too, they werent anti-west.