The Science Wars in India

...New history textbooks celebrate all things Hindu (including even the caste system), propagate the myth of India as the original home of the "Aryan race," and deplore all "foreigners," including the Muslims...

...These reverse Orientalists who glorify whatever the Western powers devalued are walking through the door that the critics of Orientalism opened for them...

...The chief minister ordered the slum to be demolished...

...Configuration (2:301-330, 1994...

...In this context, is it any surprise at all that the Hindu nationalists have been able to position themselves as the true defenders of non-Western ways of knowing...

...Because the West's ethnoscience has been molded on the twin templates of capitalist greed and imperialist expansion, she believes that it is "incapable of producing the kinds of knowledge needed for sustainable human life under democratic conditions," especially in societies with different natural and social orders...

...They are "different" accounts that different social orders produce in order to cope with their culture- and language-bound perceptions of reality...

...It is described as an unfolding of the Hindu genius, although material accomplishments (ancient technologies, for example) are emphasized over the penchant for critical inquiry that exists in some Indian traditions...

...Making the content and rationality of science an epiphenomenon of the wider cultural and social structures is no doubt useful for exposing the play of power in supposedly objective accounts of the world...

...a world where all can live by their own lights...

...But constructionists simply refuse to play ball with philosophers—one more symptom, I presume, of the skepticism toward all abstractions that has come to define the post-all academy...

...Under the growing influence of religious nationalists in the state and central governments, the earlier emphases on secularism is being reversed...

...A left movement that was not so busy establishing "respect" for non-Western knowledge would never have allowed the power-wielders to hide behind indigenous "experts...

...The interpretive turn allows the left to create in discourse what it is unable to realize in the rough and tumble of real politics: a world where all ideologies have been deconstructed, revealed, and readied for overthrow...

...Does the project of de-Westernizing science deserve the support of my fellow progressive intellectuals...

...Finally, I am told that I am an incorrigible modernist if I believe that Western science has any democracy-enhancing potential in my part of the world...

...It is time the left critics of science ask: why is it that the religious right in India (and to a far more dangerous extent in Islamic countries) has been able to appropriate the theoretical language and conclusions of their intellectual labors...

...The alliance brings together some of the most avant-garde scholars in U.S...

...Hindu nationalists have heeded the call for "decolonizing" science, and responded with aggressive propaganda for "Hindu ways of knowing," which they present as the locally embedded alternative to the alien and colonizing Western science...

...What fuels the antipathy of science critics toward those who wish to defend the traditional virtues of scientific realism, including the idea that although not free from cultural biases, scientific reasoning does incrementally lead to WINTER • 1997 • 79 Science Wars in India knowledge that corresponds to the actual state of affairs in the world...

...As a one-time biologist, science writer, and a partisan of science-for-the-people movements in India and in the United States, I have watched with increasing unease the transnational alliance that has emerged around the idea that the rationality of modern science encodes Western and imperialistic social-cultural values, and is therefore inimical to the interests of non-Western peoples...

...One cannot avoid a shock of recognition when one reads, for instance, the BJP's recent Humanistic Approach to Economic Development, which insists that the cultural ethos of the Hindu Rashtra (nation) must become "a light onto itself," and have the final authority over what aspects of "foreign" science and technology are admitted into schools and other institutions...

...It is quite likely that when confronted with the blatant nationalism driving such attempts, those who criticize modern science as a "Western" implant often try to distance themselves from the BJP's zeal for institutionalizing Vedic knowledge...

...Knowers in different cultures can pick and choose sciences and combine them in a "knowledge collage" that serves whatever particular goal might be of interest to them at any given time...

...The Revenge of Athena (London: Mansell, 1988...

...As for my suggestion that if we want justice, we must challenge the irrationality of ideas that lead to injustice, I am told that there is no need for proving that Vastu Shastra is wrong and modern science correct...

...Constructivist theories of science have cleared a discursive and political space that the nationalistic right is only too eager to move into...

...I have not come across any critique of Vedic mathematics from any of the intellectuals who have been so vocal in their criticism of "WestWINTER • 1997 • 81 Science Wars in India ern" science...

...N. T. Rama Rao, the late chief minister of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, sought the help of a traditional Vastu Shastri to help him out of some political rough weather, and was told that his troubles would vanish if he entered his office from an east-facing gate...

...See Andrew Ross, " Introduction," Social Text (46-47 Spring/Summer, 1996), p.4...

...The flowering of a vigorous people's science movement in India through the seventies and the eighties, which openly advocated "Western" science for social revolution, motivated me to give up a career in biotechnology and become a science popularizer instead...

...If the Indian left were as active in the people's science movement as it used to be, it would have led an agitation not only against the demolition of people's homes, but also against the superstition that was used to justify it...

...love, but also anger...

...But the fact remains that the BJP is not doing anything that those who see modern science as "inherently Western" have not themselves clamored for in the past...

...As even a cursory reading of their work will show, the left academics who defend some variant of cultural relativism as "liberatory" believe that claims of universality of modern science prevent Westerners from fully empathizing with the moral and cognitive logics of others...

...4 See Sandra Harding, " Science is 'Good to Think With'," Social Text (46-47, Spring/Summer, 1996...

...Themselves leading the charge for "decolonizing knowledge," what principled argument could the alliance of left-leaning and neo-Gandhian critics of modern science have offered when the Hindu fundamentalist parties began to replace modern mathematics with so-called "Vedic mathematics" in public schools...

...In a case like this, modern science and social justice were clearly pulling in the same direction, and the left could easily have made the pure irrationality of Vastu Shastra an opportunity for consciousness raising...

...I plead guilty to believing that modern science is not something to be deconstructed and overcome...

...But I contend that those insiders whose interest in a fuller, freer life has long been frustrated by the oppressive elements of local, "situated" knowledge—women, the "lower castes," and working people—need a richer kind of empathy that includes respect, but also critique...

...Isn't this appropriation reason enough to rethink some of their basic assumptions regarding science as social "all the way down...

...The two examples of the right's "Hinduization" of science and politics that I will discuss—the introduction of Vedic mathematics in public schools and the spread of "Vastu shastra" (ancient Indian material science)— do indeed meet the criteria of decolonized science advocated by left theorists: both are opposed to "Eurocentric Northern" ways of knowing...

...Such denials are surprising, for it has been shown many times over that any account of knowledge that makes the standards of validity (for example, logic, experiment, and evidence) internal to a culturally conditioned consensus cannot escape epistemological and judgmental relativism...

...Although they see the injustice of the situation, they do not see why I am so exercised about the irrationality that led to it...

...As the short-lived BJP government failed to come up with the two-thirds majority needed, it had to hand the reins of power to a coalition of center-left parties...

...I am told that this desire to prove that traditional 82 • DISSENT knowledge is an incorrect representation of nature is a sign of a scientistic mind-set, a hangover from my training in biology that I must overcome if I do not want to re-engineer the society of my birth on technocratic lines...

...Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the old, bold slogans of "science for social revolution" gave way to a parochial, almost obsessive compulsion to search and destroy any contaminating traces of the Western/colonial "episteme...

...Another illustration of the co-option of the left's advocacy for indigenous knowledges by the powers-that-be is the recent craze for Vastu Shastra, the Sanskrit name for the ancient Vedic rules that govern the construction of sacred buildings on the basis of the "auspiciousness" of space...

...Hasn't one encountered similar appeals for integration of values and politics in knowledge-seeking activities in more academic, self-described "progressive" critiques of science...

...A good example is the well-known "Penang Declaration on Science and Technology" signed by prominent proponents of ethno-sciences in 1988...

...And yet, cultural critics of science continue to deny that they have erased the line between science and nonscience...

...One of BJP's first acts after coming to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992 was to make the study of Vedic mathematics compulsory for high school students...

...the teaching of science should never be divorced from the value-system of the indigenous civilization...

...What follows here is an appeal by an "Other," in whose name many contemporary left theorists justify their interpretive turn, to think about how their epistemological egalitarianism affects the urgent task of transforming oppressive social structures and cultural values in nonWestern societies...

...WINTER • 1997 • 83...

...The inverse relationship between an explosion of high theory and a decline in political efficacy appears to be as true today as it was when Perry Anderson first observed it nearly two decades ago in his Considerations of Western Marxism...

...Explicitly stating an interest in "awakening national pride" among students, the government-approved textbooks replaced standard algebra and calculus with sixteen Sanskrit verses proclaimed by their author, Jagadguru Swami Shri Bharati Krishna Tirathji Maharaj, the high priest of Puri, to be of Vedic origin...

...The only opposition to the communalization of education has come from scientists, mathematicians, and other intellectuals associated with the people's science movements...

...But that has not stopped BJP and other revivalist cultural movements in India from equating Jagadguru with Ramanujan in their hagiographies of Indian knowledge systems...

...According to Ross, only when we attenuate the claims of empirical rationality— and recognize "different ways of doing science, ways that downgrade methodology, experiment, and manufacturing in favor of local environments, cultural values, and principles of social justice"—can we begin to move toward true diversity of knowledge systems.' Sandra Harding extends the empathy argument to non-Western "Others" when she claims that modern science is an "ethnoscience" of the West, with no more global purchase than any other culturally specific, local knowledge system...

...Those of us associated with the people's science movements of the 1970s and the 1980s could use modern scientific knowledge to contest the dominant, largely Hindu world views on caste and women, precisely because we could claim that the content of science was not Western in any substantive way, and that it gave us a picture of the natural world that was as true for us in India as it was for anyone living anywhere on this planet...

...When the academic critics argue that scientific rationality must be subordinated to cultural instrumentalities, the religious right finds in it an affirmation of its own cultural chauvinism...

...universities with the neopopulist, cultural-nationalist, "postcolonial" intellectuals from the third world, most notably India...

...Andrew Ross, for instance, seems to believe that supporting popular beliefs, say, in alternative medicine (his example) is a sign of "democratization from below," while those who demand that the popular beliefs be scientifically tested are elitist...

...I am told that seeing the two culturally bound descriptions of space at par with each other is progressive in itself, for then neither can claim to know the absolute truth, and thus tradition will lose its hold on people's mind...

...Notes 1 The Hindu-nationalist BJP won 194 (about 36 percent) of the 543 seats in the lower house of India's Parliament in the general elections held in May 1996, with the secular Congress party trailing with only 139 seats (25 percent...

...The Hindu right's views on science and technology mentioned in this paper are gleaned from press reports from India...

...It is this deference to the existing "forms of life" that makes the project of constructing different ethno-sciences for different peoples so hospitable to all kinds of conservative social forces...

...both are "situated knowledges" of non-Western people...

...The alternative is staring us all in the face...

...The irony is that the largely academic critics who offer sophisticated theoretical justifications for indigenous sciences have the material resources and the opportunities to escape being grounded in them...

...However, most observers don't expect the current coalition government to last for long, and anticipate that BJP will emerge even stronger in the next elections...

...The oppressed Others do not need patronizing affirmations of their ways of knowing, as much as they need ways to challenge these ways of knowing...

...Indeed, the cluster of ideas that postmodernist intellectuals deploy to deconstruct the supposedly Eurocentric assumptions of modern science appears with high frequency in the discourse of Hindu fundamentalist parties...

...For a representative science critique from a Western multicultural perspective, see Sandra Harding, "Is Science Multicultural...

...It must have an active role in progressive politics...

...The students should also develop a critical faculty so that they may judge the cultural and ideological bias of western science and technology...

...The tools that deconstruct also construct...

...Thus, in Harding's "borderlands," the appropriation of modern science by other cultures can only be defended for pragmatic or political reasons, not on epistemological grounds.' For Harding, as for many other advocates of multicultural science, the impulse to empathize with non-Western "Others" requires that knowledge systems not be rank-ordered in terms of better or worse accounts of reality...

...I tried out this case on my social constructionist friends here in the United States...

...It is called religious fundamentalism, and it is not pretty...

...Correspondingly, the cosmopolitan vision of socialism and secularism gave way to communitarian fantasies of Gandhian village republics—which sound much more egalitarian than they have ever been in reality...

...The key word of my diagnosis is "empathy...

...Its increased popularity represents a defeat of the ideals of secularism and modernity that India set for itself after its indeScience Wars in India pendence from the British...

...I will argue that the recent rise in political and cultural visibility of the religious right (the Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP, and its affiliates) in my native India' should give pause to all those academics in the West and in the third world who describe the rationality of "Western" science itself as a source of imperialism and racism...

...But when science is joined to culture at the hip in the constructivist fashion, it also opens the door to the so-called "ethno-sciences"—"Hindu science," "Islamic science," "third world women's science"— wherein scientific rationality is subordinated to the "forms of life" of different communities...

...Thus, when the secular and mostly left-inclined critics claim—in the language and tone that Alan Sokal managed to feign so convincingly in his Social Text hoax of last year—that scientific facts cannot be judged as objectively true or false, but only from within the "regime of truth" established by social power, the religious right reads in it a justification for its demand that the validity of Hindu science be judged only on its "own terms...

...The history of Indian science and technology is not exempt...

...But on the east side of his office there was a slum through which his car could not pass...

...There was a time, not so long ago, when popularizing science was considered a progressive cause, and science was seen as a weapon against ancestral authority...

...2 For representative postcolonial science critiques, see Ashis Nandy (ed...

...But their personal politics and good intentions are not the issue here...

...The BJP may be on the wrong side of the egalitarian ideals espoused by science critics, but it is by no means on the wrong side of their constructivist logic...

...Prominent Indian mathematicians and historians who have examined these verses believe that there is nothing Vedic about them, and that the Jagadguru has tried to pass off a set of clever formulas for quick computation as a piece of ancient wisdom...

...Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1988...

...The declaration is silent on the biases of indigenous civilizations...

...We have our superstitions in the West, they tell me...

...Those who are most ardent about locally situated knowledges are the least embedded locally: most of them have one foot in the transnational academic world to which they regularly escape...

...Until the last decade or so, the BJP was considered a communal party, a pariah with barely 2 percent of seats in the parliament...

...The problem with introducing supposedly indigenous and ancient knowledge is not that it is indigenous and ancient: there can, of course, be instances of ancient lore that can help us see a contemporary problem in a new light...

...If the practice of this Hindu science were limited to the nouveau riche in Delhi and Bombay, who build their houses to maximize the "positive energy" that comes with spatial correctness, one could ignore it...

...But last June we witnessed how cultural ideas can play a role in politics...

...But when a small but highly influential group of Indian intellectuals, borrowing heavily from Western critics of the Enlightenment, began to argue that scientific rationality itself is a colonial construct, the people's science movements were left with no principled defense against accusations that popularization of modern science means internal colonization...

...I know that they have no sympathy whatsoever for the anti-Muslim and anti-Christian platform of the Hindu right...

...Ziauddin Sardar (ed...

...They do not need to be told that modern science is no less of a cultural narrative than their local knowledges, 80 • DISSENT Science Wars in India for they need the findings of modern science, understood as transcultural truths, in order to expose and challenge local knowledges...

...5 Reproduced in Ziauddin Sardar (see note 2...

...What is an issue is the unintended impact of their theories on the lives of distant strangers...

...Interestingly, the ruthlessness with which the critics interrogate "Western" science is matched in intensity only by their charity and solicitousness toward non-Western, pre-scientific ways of knowing.' I do not for a moment believe, and neither should I be read as claiming, that the cultural critics of science knowingly speak for the Hindu right...

...The question I want to pose in the light of the BJP's victory is whether such knowledge is a step forward for women, minorities, and the desperately poor in non-Western societies...

...Did not Nancy Reagan consult astrologers...

...In fact, both from personal association and from their written works, I know these critics to be motivated by deeply egalitarian, radically democratic, and staunchly antiracist sentiments...

...The real issue is that the supposed Vedic mathematics, as many progressive Indian mathematicians and critics have argued, offers students mere tools for computation in place of the allegedly "Western" algebraic equations of which they are instances...

...And interpreting how we interpret the world, and how the non-Western "Others" interpret it, and how we interpret others' interpretations . . . and ad infinitum...

...When the existing social values are allowed to decide the validity of knowledge, knowledge loses whatever power it has to critique these often oppressive values...

...Indeed, the right could not have wished for a more fashionable neighborhood to pitch its own tent in...

...Among many other demands, the declaration calls for a system of education that "appreciates the value of indigenous scientific and technological culture...

...Vedic mathematics and other projects for Hinduization of education does not personally affect most of the academic critics of science, for their own children hardly ever attend the state-run schools that cater to the poor or the BJP-run schools that cater to small businesses...

...In the name of national pride, students are being deprived of conceptual tools that are crucial in solving the real-world mathematical problems they will encounter as scientists and engineers...

...If, as the critics charge, the very logic of modern science is a cultural expression of a Western "will to power," then the Hindu nationalists justifiably consider it their patriotic duty to resist modern science, and to replace it with ways of knowing informed by the imagined Hindu values of holism, communitarianism, and androgyny...

...How has the left become so alienated from the institutional practices of natural science that it can find no use for them, in their present form, for progressive politics...

...After all this, I should hardly be surprised when I hear my position labeled as that of the "antidemocratic right," as it often is within the radical circles of science critics...

...I submit that the moment the Indian left began to talk the language of cultural constructionism, it lost the battle to the Hindu nationalists...

...The BJP's rise to national prominence is truly impressive— and frightening...

...History curricula have always been favorite targets of religious nationalists...

...If the critics see science as a dystopian, arrogant and "God's-eye view of the world," supposedly transcending the material lives and beliefs of people, the BJP is only too happy to offer a supposedly humbler and more situated "Mother India's view of the world...

...Hinduization is not limited to mathematics alone...

...Limiting myself only to the recent battles in the "science wars," I believe I have a rough diagnosis of the left's disenchantment with science...

...The Hindu right has proclaimed the twenty-first century a "Hindu century" on the theoretical grounds made respectable by left critics of sci78 • DISSENT Science Wars in India ence...

...The need to empathize with other cultures in a multicultural world, Harding insists, requires that we give up the dream of a "one true science," and begin to live with a "borderland epistemology"— an epistemology that "values the distinctive understandings of nature that different cultures have resources to generate...

...No doubt this empathy with the long-oppressed Others is liberatory for Western outsiders...