Statistics in Ancient India: A Historical and Thematic Review of the Indian Statistical Knowledge System
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrjiks.2026.v3.n1.021Keywords:
history of statistics, Arthaśāstra, Piṅgala, Indian Statistical Institute, NyāyaAbstract
This review asks what a rigorous, citable evidence base for an “Indian Statistical Knowledge System” (ISKS) currently contains, spanning both the institutional history of statistics in India and the older historiography of Indian administration and mathematics, and where that evidence base remains thin. Candidate sources were screened against traceable bibliographic and institutional records, retaining only entries verifiable to a specific author, title, venue, and year. The institutional historiography of statistics in India, anchored in Mahalanobis's founding of Sankhyā in 1933 and in accounts such as Ghosh et al. (1999) and Menon (2022), is well documented, though this literature substantiates the institutional and political mobilisation of the ISKS claim rather than the historical validity of its pre-modern antecedents. Those antecedents — administrative enumeration in the Arthaśāstra and combinatorial reasoning in Piṅgala's prosody — rest on a small number of credible anchors surrounded by a much larger body of unrefereed secondary restatement. As a preliminary step toward closing this gap, the review offers a first catalogue of the Arthaśāstra's enumerative administrative offices. The review concludes that ISKS scholarship is best understood as three literatures of uneven maturity sharing a common motivating claim, and that the clearest opportunity for original contribution lies in source-critical work on the Arthaśāstra and the Piṅgala–Syādvāda linkages, rather than further restatement of the institutional history.
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