Indira ‘Durga’ Gandhi during the Emergency sneaked in Article 51-A(h) into the Constitution that says it shall be the fundamental duty of every Indian "to promote humanism and the scientific spirit". But scientific temper cannot be ushered in by a stroke of legislation, an undemocratic one at that.
In India, secularists of various hues have a tendency to blame the BJP/Hindutva for several of our stupidities, but historically even the so-called secularists have never embraced basic scientific values with enthusiasm. And the project of secularism is deeply intertwined with the fate—if this unscientific invocation can be forgiven—of science. It is the failure to evolve a genuine scientific temper that has left us an unreasoning, if not unreasonable, people. We seem to have an inherent mechanism that makes us anti-science, for the spirit of science here has historically subserved the cause of religion.
There were indeed tendencies early on to understand the world and worldly phenomena on their own terms. But in the struggle between heterodox, atheistic credos such as Buddhism or the Lokayata of Charvak and the orthodox tendencies of Vedic Brahminism, the spirit of inquiring into otherworldly matters triumphed over the will towards this-worldly inquiries. When we look at the totality of science in the Christian West, it emerged out of the speculations on natural philosophy, whereas in ‘Hindu’ India whatever the speculations on natural philosophy yielded by potentially scientific schools of thought—the materialism of the Lokayata school, the subject-object distinctions of Samkhya philosophy, the Vaisesika Darsana or atomism, the Nyaya or logical system among the so-called six schools of Hindu philosophy—what really triumphed over all else was the Advaita Vedanta of Sankara that deals almost entirely with metaphysical speculation based on the Upanishads.
In other words, the tendency towards the metaphysical—speculations about reincarnation, the individual soul and the universal soul—triumphed over the physical. When the real world was itself nothing but maya (illusion), there was no point wasting one’s time figuring it out. But such a worldview must have been, fortunately, limited to the higher, dwija (‘twice-born’) sections of the varna hierarchy. There were sections of people—the working castes—who had to grapple with the material world and be engaged in production. The leather workers, agriculturists, smiths, potters and cloth-makers were ‘doing science’, but were cut off from the speculative world where textual knowledge was trapped.
In the Brahminical universe, a dichotomy was constructed between the mental and physical realms, where the former was prioritised as clean and the latter as polluting. Knowledge systems that involved physical labour came to be inferiorised as menial. Hence the celebration of the intellectual ‘sciences’ such as logic, mathematics and astronomy-astrology (in ancient India, the two came under one head, jyothishya, and hence the persistent, Murli Manohar Joshi-led confusion). In fact, one historian of science believes that philosophical formulations concerning shoonya (emptiness/void) could have led to the conceptualisation of zero. Abstruse intellectual jugglery and philosophical mumbo-jumbo passed for science. The rupture between the physical and the intellectual meant Brahmins couldn’t soil their hands with ‘impure’ materials, while the working castes were denied access to logical and philosophical training of the gurukuls. There was thus never any ground for genuine people-centric science to take root.
Buddhism, of course, directly challenged this principle of exclusion by accommodating people of all castes, and women, into the sangha. According to the historian of medicine, Kenneth Zysk, it was the impetus of Buddhism’s doctrine of Four Noble Truths (suffering, its cause, its ending, and the means to end it) that led to the inauguration of medical science in India. But Buddhism was to eventually lose the battle with Brahminism. There was a time when surgeons and medical men, including Charaka, were excommunicated. Consequentially, a brahminised Ayurveda came to be privileged as a science to be practised by ‘upper’ caste vaids while surgery and midwifery became the domain of the ‘lower’ castes. And as the caste system gained in strength in the post-Buddhist period, truly scientific knowledge systems of the artisan and working castes were trapped in caste cocoons, and technological advances in one profession were not necessarily made available to the other. As Ambedkar saw it, the caste system meant not just a division of labour, but a division of labourers.
Concomitant to such an entrenchment of Brahminism was the issue of indignity of labour. In another society, a group that evolved the mechanism to convert dead animal carcass into leather would have been highly regarded for its technical expertise and respected as the progenitor of a proto-science. However, throughout India, leather workers continue to hold a ritually untouchable status. The sanction for this comes from religion. (Ironically, Chamars and Madigas do not figure prominently in the Central Leather Research Institute.) Such traditional knowledges, when inferiorised, and when not given a place in our books of learning, also tend to stagnate and under-develop over centuries. Thus we have the Chola-era bronze statue-makers, who in the 11th century must have been experts in metallurgy; but today in Swamimalai, Thanjavur, the traditional sculptors (Viswakarmas) seem caught in a time-warp, continuing to cast the same mythological figures, sticking to iconographic conventions instead of responding to the changing times. In Andhra Pradesh, as in other parts of the country, weavers’ suicides have become a regular affair because traditional, labour-intensive skills get romanticised, modern technology is projected as evil, the result being the inevitable pauperisation of the skilled castes.
On the whole, any genuine scientific inquiry in India has had to appease religion. So when Aryabhatta in the 5th century AD declared, a thousand years before Copernicus, that it was the earth that moved and the sun was stationary, and explained how lunar and solar eclipses take place, he was jeered at by his contemporaries. It is his detractors who seem to have won the battle of ideas; their beliefs continue to hold us in thrall—most ‘non-Hindutva’ Hindus today observe Rahu-kalam and Ketu-kalam, and even in atheistic, Dravidian parties-driven Tamil Nadu there are few homes, irrespective of religion and caste, that do not have the date-sheet calendar listing ways to manage time in auspicious ways. The panchangam has triumphed over punctuality. Surgeons fix an auspicious hour for operations; a Caesarean comes in handy to pull a child into the world at an astrologically-suited time; sex-determination tests are a craze in rural, and according to latest reports, even urban India—science in the continued service of religion.
True, many temples are technological marvels. (We must realise, though, that the beautiful temples were initially not built: they were carved out of large blocks of stone hollowed out, as in Mahabalipuram or Ellora, because the constructed arch came to be used only with Arabic influences.) Yet, much of the math and physics that was known was directed at temple-building. By the 12th century, India saw the use of iron girders and beams on a scale unknown in other parts of the world. The Puri temple has 239 iron beams; one beam in the Konarak temple is 35 feet long. But a society that is one of the oldest practitioners of agriculture, and has witnessed several riverine civilisations, developed little on its own in this labour-intensive field. So much so that Babar in his 16th century memoirs often complaints that "there is no running water in Hindustan". Well, there was Karikala Chola’s 2nd century BC Kallanai (anicut) along the Kaveri, the oldest stone water-regulator structure in the world still in use, but at the base of the structure the king had to build a small temple.
It is true that in Christian Europe a similar situation prevailed initially. In his time a Da Vinci’s or Newton’s works were not enthusiastically welcomed. But soon the secular and rational spirit prevailed. Though the Europeans were comparatively barbaric when Aryabhatta proposed the heliocentric universe, they went on to develop a sociocultural context that enabled the translation, assimilation and appropriation of the knowledges of the East and the Arabic worlds only to leave the Quranic and Brahminic worlds far behind.
Our legacy problems persist, for they have never been addressed. Today, the most scientistic minds are insular to genuine scientific values. People ‘do science’ in the public realm (lab/university/office) but stick to values rooted in religion/caste in the domestic sphere. The mistake committed in defining secularism has been repeated with science. Both have been seen as something one professes in the public sphere. But can a man of science treat his menstruating wife or mother as untouchable? Or, can someone who sees a menstruating woman as polluting ever be deemed competent to do science? The public-private binary is as anti-science as it is anti-secular.
As age-old problems haunt us, our dependency syndrome continues. Indian bikes and cars come fitted with Honda, Kawasaki or Ford technology. We need outsiders to make our batteries. We don’t even make good torchlights. Innovations and inventions rarely happen in this part of the world. Even our set-top boxes are being imported from Korea. A certain section of India thinks it’s on top of the world in computers and IT. But the physical-mental division of labour reinvents itself here as hard-soft. India imports and assembles most hardware; in software, Indians just provide cheap labour.
A scientist in Chennai, who distanced himself from the Patriotic and People-oriented Science and Technology (PPST) movement a decade ago when he realised it was assuming anti-people, right-wing tendencies, says Indian craftspersons have never been encouraged to enter the portals of science and technology institutes. However, in Japan, preferential treatment was given to traditional blacksmith communities and today professors have emerged from their ranks. ppst sought to document the so-called traditional sciences, but again it was a movement led from above. The fundamental failure, according to him, has been that science teaching and learning in India is limited to the English language and this naturally excludes a good 97 per cent of the population. "Unless we grapple with the challenge of teaching quantum mechanics in Tamil and Bengali to the rural folk, we cannot usher in any serious functional science. Only then can we bring skilled people into the modern mainstream. Russia and Japan did not do science in German or English. What we do right now is not national science, we merely replicate western models. Science in India does not seem to have a context."
Maybe we could begin by coining words for Reason.
