Science and Religion in India

Beyond Disenchantment

Renny Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032527093
• eBook ISBN: 9781000534313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists' religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of 'conflict' and 'complementarity'. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.

1 Science, rationality, and scientific temper in postcolonial India

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213475-2

This chapter tries to unfold the debates on rationality and scientific temper in postcolonial India. It narrates the story of the emergence of science as the paradigm for modernity in India. Nehru’s love and admiration for science and his friendship with scientists is well known. This state–science relationship gave science and scientists a superior status in India. No discussion about science in postcolonial India would be complete without discussing Nehru and his ideas on scientific modernity. Although the book is an ethnographic investigation of ‘science and religion’ in contemporary India, it is imperative to have a historical understanding of the debates on science and rationality in order to understand how they shaped the way we understand the question of science and religion in India today.

What represents ‘Nehruvian science’ in contemporary times? Nehru emphasised the importance of problem-oriented research since for him science and technology were meant to solve the problems of India. The scientists whom I interviewed in Bangalore expressed deep love and admiration for Nehru. Scientists told me that they wanted to do ‘problem-oriented research’ to solve the various problems of India. For instance, the biologists and biotechnologists told me that they wanted to work on ‘problem oriented’ research as it had greater relevance for a developing country like India, and many argued that they did not want to go after ‘fashionable’ and ‘new areas’ as it was time-consuming and was not of immediate use for a country like India. We can very well call them Nehruvian scientists. Moreover, the naming of scientific institutions after Nehru, such as Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), and displaying his photos and statues along with scientists testify his significance in the field of Indian science. For instance, when one enters the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore, one notices in the garden a marble stone carrying Nehru’s famous statement “I too have worshipped at the shrine of science.”

Figure 1.1 A marble stone carrying Nehru’s statement, JNCASR, Bangalore. Photo by the author.

To fathom the debates on science and religion in contemporary India, it is important to understand the life of science in colonial and postcolonial India. Historians of science have written on the institutionalization of science in colonial and postcolonial India in great detail, and it will be too ambitious for me to discuss all the work here. The interests of British colonial power in institutionalizing various sciences in India have been documented in detail (see Kumar 1995), and historians have noted the shift after India’s independence (India obtained independence in 1947). Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, science and technological institutions grew; various scientific and technological institutions were established with the help of leading scientists of the time. Even during colonial times, with very limited resources, Indian scientists did important research, and received international recognition, including the Nobel Prize (C. V. Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930). Historians of science have noted that Indian scientists have engaged and collaborated with many leading scientists from different parts of the world even during colonial times (Banerjee 2020). It was not that Indian scientists were collaborating only with western scientists. Indian scientists were collaborating with scientists from other parts of Asia as well, including China, during colonial times (Ghosh 2021). India has witnessed a growth in scientific institutions and research labs since Independence. Scientists were given the freedom and resources to conduct research in various fields from atomic sciences to biological sciences. Unlike other parts of the world where research was conducted mostly in universities, in India research was done in these research labs and institutions. Science and technology were seen as the markers of modernity, and Nehru was confident that science and scientific rationality would eradicate all the problems India was facing. Science was perceived not merely as a source of progress and development, but also as a way to eradicate the so-called primitive beliefs and traditions in India.

The following discussion demonstrates the ways in which the categories of science and technology were perceived as a metaphor of modernity, and how the project of scientific temper was presented to imagine a society based on scientific rationality. It aims to discuss Nehru’s vision of Indian modernity, and how different sections responded to his vision.

For a ‘scientific’ India: science, rationality, and scientific temper

Societies and cultures were classified as primitive and modern on the basis of the absence and presence of science and technology. As Shiv Visvanathan put it aptly, “Other civilizations or tribal cultures are seen as ‘contemporary ancestors’, the past the West has already lived out. The West, the modern west, is, in turn, the future these societies will encounter.”¹ This lack of ‘contemporaneity’ was justified by the West to civilise the Orient. This construction of Other was necessary for the West to imagine themselves as superior beings. As Renato Rosaldo pointed out in a different context, “Imperialist nostalgia occurs alongside a peculiar sense of mission, ‘the white man’s burden,’ where civilised nations stand duty-bound to uplift the so-called savage ones.”²

The denial of contemporaneity worked in many ways. It is one of the major ways to construct an Other identity. By denying, for instance, the presence of rationality, materialism, and science in India, the West justified their act of ‘introducing’ science to India which eventually enabled them to ‘civilise’ and ‘rationalise’ the ‘irrational’ Indians. Construction of this otherness helped them to dominate and eventually allowed them to create a superior identity for western science and rationality. This can be described as what Johannes Fabian calls denial of coevalness.³ Following that, one can argue that notions of modernity and non-modernity are based on the absence and presence of science.

The notion of being primitive and non-modern prompted many newly independent nations to focus on the development of science and technology as it was perceived as the marker of modernity.⁴ Many newly independent nations attempted to adopt this scientific modernity as the only way to catch up with the modern west. For instance, Nehru considered science as a way of making people modern which allowed them to free themselves from the clutches of ‘primitive’ life.

Tradition and modernity

Science as a way of resolving various problems became a standard justification in many of the projects undertaken by the Indian Government under the leadership of Nehru. Tradition was considered to be a burden for the process of scientific modernity and modernity required separation from India’s tradition.

When Nehru proposed the idea of scientific temper, he intended to ‘modernise’ the people who had the historical burden of being ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’. David Arnold writes about his intellectual influences,

Nehru’s long years in prison in the 1930’s and 1940’s enabled him to read extensively on history, science, philosophy, and current affairs. His writings made extensive references to the western scientists, philosophers, and social theorists who influenced his own thinking – including Bertrand Russell (to whom he possibly owed the expression “scientific temper”), J. D. Bernal (especially for his Social Function of Science), P. M. S. Blackett (a scientific advisor to Nehru after 1947), and Laurence Hogben (whose Science for Citizens he called an “astonishingly good book”).These like-minded intellectuals nurtured and reinforced Nehru’s belief that science was not only authoritative but had a unique capacity to effect far reaching socio-economic changes.⁵

Likewise, S. Gopal also notes that Nehru was influenced by the writings of radical scientists of the thirties – Bernal, Needham, Huxley, Waddington, Higben, and Haldane.⁶

David Arnold argues that while Nehru was very proud of ancient Indian achievements in science and technology, he also emphasised the value of its syncretic interaction with other civilisations, including those of the Muslims and the British.⁷ In his Glimpses of World History, he began to write about the importance of science and scientific temper. In one of the last chapters titled “Science Goes Ahead” (Chapter 182), he writes, “I have written to you at great length about political happenings, and a little about the economic changes that took place all over the world during the post-war years. In this letter I want to write about other matters and especially about science and its effects.”⁸ Arnold notes,

a belief in the authority of science as the highest form of secular knowledge was invoked in order to instill legitimate pride in indigenous achievement and to laud the contribution ancient and medieval India made to the wider world of science, but Nehru qualified this with the recognition that India could not make progress, in the present still more than in the past, from a position of epistemic isolation.⁹

The preference for western science over Indian systems of medicine and knowledge, and the perception that these systems lacked scientific method, led Nehru to classify Ayurveda and Unani as superstitious beliefs. Nehru strongly argued that these knowledge systems had to be ‘modernised’ using ‘scientific method’. As Peter Gottschalk wrote, “Nehru’s dichotomous characterization of India and the West reflects an assumption central to many British efforts to know India, Indians, and their religions: the perceived contrast between science as the defining quality of British civilization and religion as that of Indian civilization.”¹⁰

Science, scientific method, and rationality: the case of Ayurveda

Nehru was a spokesperson of modern science and technology and saw elements of emancipation in it. For him, scientific method was the only way to validate any systems of knowledge. Scientific and technological institutions and labs were seen as the foundation of modern India. The massive institutionalisation of science and technology invited anger from politicians and leaders of his time as these projects had ignored Indian systems of medicine like Ayurveda.¹¹

On 8 March 1948, the question of the negligence of Ayurvedic systems by the Government of India under the leadership of Nehru was raised by V. C. Kesava Rao in the Constituent Assembly of India. The question was addressed to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Minister of Health, about the Government’s failure to promote the study of Ayurvedic medicine. He enquired whether the Government proposed to institute a chair for the comparative study of Ayurvedic and Allopathic systems in one of the centrally administered universities.¹² Nehru commenting on this question spoke:

Government looks upon this matter not as one of supporting Ayurvedic, Unani, Allopathic, Homeopathic or any system: they look upon it as supporting science and the method of science. If by supporting the method of science, Unani prospers, well and good and Government will support it. But if Unani or Ayurveda is opposed to science, it will not be supported. It is the method that counts. These names are labels for various types of medicines. The whole progress of the last two hundred years in medicine, which has been labeled in various ways, has been owing to the application of the method of science. Any system might have failed occasionally, but Government does not propose to swerve by a hair’s breadth from that principle. In so far as the application of that method of science to Allopathy, Homeopathy, Ayurvedic or Unani systems helps them, we shall help them to the uttermost limit. But in so far as the system is opposed to the method of science it will not be helped by Government. Government has no doubt that the Unani and Ayurveda medicines are very good and therefore they can be used. But any system having secret medicines is bad and we are not going to encourage such a system whether it is Ayurveda, Unani or the rest. The subject should therefore be looked upon from the point of view of bringing in all methods of approach in regard to the curing or prevention of disease from the scientific viewpoint and taking full advantage of all that Ayurveda or Unani system or any other system has to offer.¹³

The binary notions of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ played out in Nehru’s imagination of the world. In order to become ‘modern’ the existing knowledge systems were asked to prove their ‘scientificity’. There were people who thought Nehru lacked an understanding of the ‘Indian knowledge system’. For instance, Biswanath Das¹⁴ asked if Nehru possessed any understanding of the epistemological status of indigenous systems of knowledge.¹⁵ He asked,

May I know whether Government is aware of the fact that the Ayurvedic system of treatment is a science full in itself and stands by itself? May I ask why while the other systems of treatment, namely Allopathy and other systems, are having State patronage in this country by instituting graduate, post-graduate and research courses and studies and Ayurveda is having nothing?¹⁶

This question was in response to Nehru’s statement that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Science, rationality, and scientific temper in postcolonial India
• 2 Beyond disenchantment: Scientists, laboratories, and religion
• 3 The making of scientist-believers
• 4 Being atheistic, being scientific: Scientists as atheists
• 5 Caste, religion, and the laboratory life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index