Wow reading the comments here, there is so much in terms of invention and contribution that I wasn’t taught (in American schools). Given the importance of some of these contributions, I feel a bit shocked at how much is left out of our education in America (and I assume Europe) about what other cultures have provided. India in particular feels like a blind spot - they’re the largest country by population but also conspicuously missing. All you hear about is Gandhi, and even that is not covered well (in terms of the politics of colonization or the partition of India). It feels to me like it is purposeful - how else do you explain skipping out on all these math inventions that are critical to the modern world?
Many things are not taught in school, because basic education is short, and a lot of it happens before people's cognitive abilities have fully developed. The average kid probably spends about a year learning about society and culture, and much of it must be devoted to topics that are relevant to daily life in their own society.
Back in Finland some decades ago, there was pretty decent coverage of India in three topics: world religions and the history of religion; European explorers, colonialism, and imperialism; and "modern" history with Gandhi, Nehru, the partition, and the wars. There were also some passing mentions in other topics. Overall, we probably spent more time on Indian history than American history.
> and a lot of it happens before people's cognitive abilities have fully developed.
This is sort of trivially true, in that there is generally literally no point at which a person's cognitive abilities are "fully developed" (cognitive abilities being non-uniform in development, and some aspects of cognitive ability tending to continue developing until very late in life, long after most of the rest have been declining for quite a long time.)
The West hardly knows anything "true" of India; almost everybody looks at it only through a narrow perspective and thus are "incorrect".
The History of India is a multi-branched tree with the main branches being; a) Oral Tradition b) Linguistic Tradition c) Philosophical/Religious Tradition d) Literature/Poetry e) Mythologies f) Historical writings g) Writings by other cultures/civilizations h) Archeology. All of them have to be studied to get an idea of what India was/is.
1) A good book to start with is A.L.Basham's The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent Before the Coming of the Muslims.
Not just that! For many hundreds of years there were over 250 ships a year trading between India and Rome, and tariffs on that trade alone accounted for 25% of the Roman Empire’s tax revenue. Among many other things, India fed the demand for transparent clothing, which was all the rage in the Roman Empire during that period.
