The unexceptionable notion that there should be no holy cows in intelligent, sober public debate is undermined by its compromised proponents
'Everything is political’, used to be the default position right up there with ‘define your premise’ in collegiate debates for many from the privileged, public school classes who came of age anytime between the 1960s to the 1990s. It is a striking example of our intellectual atrophy and the unlamented death of the public intellectual, which in itself is a logical corollary to the decline of the ‘learned professions’ in India, that both bon mots still serve as acceptable responses to serious argument in the public sphere.
Not that any of this matters to those who use slander to suit their a priori assumptions and/or ideological positions, more often than not linked to continuing as card-carrying members of an eco-system of patronage, ensuring a stake in intergenerational privilege or finding self-worth in belonging to echo chambers — poor sods, with self-esteem issues to boot, quite frankly. But each to their own and it doesn’t matter whose flag they are flying.
All of which is a rather roundabout but adequately signposted way to bring us to the insistence of Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development in charge of Higher Education Satyapal Singh (MA/MBA/PhD) that human beings did not descend from apes and that Charles Darwin got it all wrong. In making this assertion, Minister Singh is following in the footsteps of not just Creationists of the Abrahamic religious schools but also the late Giani Zail Singh, former President of India, who is said to have expressed the same sentiment in far more colourful language. Of course, the age of 24x7 television, social media and door-stepping journalism had not yet dawned when President Singh held forth so the story is considered apocryphal. The point remains: There is a long and hoary tradition of a rejection of certain Western natural/social sciences’ constructs in these parts, some meaningful, others meaningless and a few just rank silly. The sallies of both Singhs, President and Minister, fall squarely in the last category.
The good news is that the establishment in both cases was quick to slap down these airing of half-baked hypotheses despite their very different approaches to the knowledge claims of Western science and its propagation first within an imperial, then colonial and finally secularised Christian contextual framework. Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar took no time in telling off Satyapal Singh — refrain from making such statements, do not dilute science and there will be no seminar to debunk the theory of evolution. Similarly, from what one hears, the Indira Gandhi regime got Zail Singh to back off pretty rapidly. And while no authority can control what any person thinks or says in private, in both cases the jokes industry took over to ensure mockery did what opprobrium cannot.
The damage statements like those of the Singhs do, however, is inflicted not so much on those imbued with an acute sense of self-loathing safely ensconced in the Western intellectual tradition, which is glorious in its own way, of course, especially in the natural sciences, but to those who would attempt serious work of some academic rigour on the hits and misses of the Indic knowledge quest. It is not enough to merely state that the Vedas, Upanishads and tens of other major and minor traditions including, say, the Ayurvedic emanating from the lived experience of traditional forest-dwellers, are the repository of ancient wisdom, which they undoubtedly are, but to produce contemporary work which validates such claims and is not dependent on but is willing to engage with Western academic structures and institutions. And there is no point complaining that such works are ignored because till there is consistent, quality produce from an alternative, independently developed research programme in the Indic natural sciences — Cf. the pioneering work done by SN Balagangadhara in the social sciences — only the ranks of the conspiracy theorists will be simpatico.
Philosophical precepts, scientific doctrine and their actualisation (very roughly, mantra, tantra, yantra) and the Mimamsa discipline for rational, logical analysis ought not to be surrendered to the by-products of Macaulay’s Minute whose apparently unconsciously colonised minds have absorbed whole, perhaps due to circumstance, every Western natural/social sciences’ principle which is then sought to be mindlessly ‘applied’ to the Indic knowledge tradition. Will someone please tell this lot that these are parallel traditions and each can learn from the other if governments focus on undoing the damage caused by the proselytising impulse of the last few hundred years, not by replacing well-developed systems wherever their origin or whatever their alleged malintent but by midwifing robust research programmes, putting in place ruthlessly high quality institutional systems and enhancing human/physical infrastructure after due rigour for the Indic sciences across the academic landscape in a nuanced mannerIJ
At the other end of the spectrum, are the Indic knowledge-quest deniers for whom recognition is kosher only when it comes from Western knowledge systems, structures and institutions. This bunch includes the anti-colonial, nationalist stream in the world of science. So, for example, the undoubted neglect of the work of a Jagdish Chandra Bose in the era of overt colonisation, as opposed to the residual colonialism that survives in the secularised Christian knowledge system most work in today, was taken up by many and thanks to their efforts he was rehabilitated in the scientific record. He was a brilliant Indian who excelled in the sciences and was not necessarily a scholar of the Indic sciences; the latter category awaits its Bose, as it were.
There are, it must be conceded but never condoned, grounds for the arrogance of the deniers if those repulsed by their orthodoxy have to take recourse to the Satyapal Singhs and other outliers to counter them. Equally, there is no justification for false pride among their high priests because they have worked actively through state institutions post-1947 to crush instead of encouraging the spirit of questioning/inquiry, which is very basis of social and natural sciences research irrespective of provenance, when emanating from an alternative tradition. Those, therefore, who truly wish to take on the reigning orthodoxies in the knowledge domain must learn to roll with punches and having developed the capacity to take a thorough beating a la Mohammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy to use a pugilistic analogy though Marquis of Queensbury rules may not apply, counter-attack only when a substantive punch can be packed and the opponent is already exhausted by the work put in to establish purported domination.
Except it should not be an imitative fight to establish the ‘superiority’ of one system or tradition over another but a means to add to the cornucopia of human knowledge.
(The writer is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer)
