Positive Aspect of Negative Event

Positive Aspect of Negative Event Positive Aspect of Negative Event W hen Arabs came to India, it was apparently an invasion. However, there was a positive side to this negative event. The Arabs introduced a new culture into India, for example they brought equality. Former Prime Minister of India Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has endorsed this fact in his book The Discovery of India, where he writes of the Arabs coming to India with their ‘brilliant culture’ (p. 227). The Arabs also became an instrument of introducing Indian knowledge to the rest of the world. For example, the Indian numeral system came to be known to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi. He discovered a tract on this subject in Sanskrit and translated it into Arabic. He then wrote his Arabic book in four volumes, “On the Use of the Indian Numerals” (Kitab fi Isti‘mal al-’Adad al-Hindi) about 830 AD. The original Sanskrit text is now lost. The only source of knowing this chapter of Indian history is through the Arabic translation. Al-Kindi’s work was principally responsible for the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration in the Middle East and the West. The Arabs learned the numeral system from India and called it Indian numerals. As it was from the Arabs that the Europeans learned this system, the Europeans called them Arabic numerals. It is nature that creates such historical turbulence for the benefit of mankind. The British entered India in the eighteenth century. This was again akin to an invasion by a foreign power. But this invasion