There is no question of the superiority of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the science. Not only is Aryabhatta s… - Mountstuart Elphinstone in India, 1796-1818

Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book .. .is there any allusion to a prior residence ... out of India ... There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one.

Such arguments were by no means uncontested. In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone objected that "it is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book . . . is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India." Responding to some of the arguments that had been brought forward, he argued that "to say that [the original language] spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption, and even contrary to language; for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle." As far as he was concerned, "the question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one, and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest trace of their records or tradition" (97-98).

In the Surva Siddhanta is contained a system of trigonometry which not only goes beyond anything known to the Greeks, but involves theorem which were not discovered in Europe till two centuries ago.