WITH THE GSLV-D1 launch, India has entered into a multi-billion dollar commercial satellite launch business. As the nation celebrates this ‘quantum jump’ in the satellite launching capabilities, we are reminded that India is now part of an elite club of
powerful/privileged nations. Indeed, from Pokhran to Sriharikota, science is celebrated everywhere. As we are led to believe, the celebration of science is fundamentally the celebration of power and knowledge.
Historically speaking, this worship of science is not surprising. Science was, in fact, an integral component of nation-making. Science, it was thought, would lead the post-colonial State to modernise a traditional society. Although Gandhi with his
alternative notion of swaraj expressed his anxieties about science (particularly if the unrestrained growth of technology meant the decline in ‘soul-force’), Nehru, the determined modernist, was pretty clear about his agenda: the need for massive
development in science and technology.
And even today the story of this grand optimism (or the master narrative of science) that Nehru authored continues. From big dams to atomic explosion, from internationally known institutes of science and technology to space research — India, it is
asserted, is a major techno-scientific force to reckon with.
Yet, the growth of science and its concrete/visible gains — be it in the field of communications or power generation, medical research or heavy industry — notwithstanding, a series of questions haunts us.
Have we really learnt how to relate to science, and alter our modes of living and seeing the world? Or are we seduced only by the externality of science — its magic, miracles and technological spectacles? Do we live with science? Or do we just reduce
science into yet another index for measuring ‘development’?
An authentic response to these questions would, however, require an examination of the critiques of science that have emerged in our age. To begin with, science, it is alleged, is instrumental. It treats nature as merely a ‘resource’ to be used and
manipulated for mankind’s perpetual material well-being (recall the propositions of Francis Bacon). It destroys the possibility of a harmonic/organic relationship between human species and nature.
Science, as its enemies would argue, speaks the language of violence and victory, not love and understanding. Therefore, a piece of military technology or an anti-environmental developmental project, it is said, is not the aberration of an otherwise noble
science. Instead, it is rooted in the instrumental character of science itself.
It is also argued that science is colonial and hegemonic. It systematically destroys and annihilates alternative traditions of knowledge. In the name of ‘reason’ and ‘progress’, science seems to have caused severe damage to the diversity of civilisational
forms and knowledge systems (say, the hegemonic victory of modern medicine and eventual marginalisation of alternative medical knowledge).
And, finally, the critics of science believe that although science has replaced black magic, it has meanwhile become yet another (but fashionable) magic manifesting itself in the ever-expanding technological products: from a computer that even a nursery
child plays with to the scanning machine that a doctor needs for diagnosis, from the GSLV launch about which the TV news reader speaks with wonder and excitement to the latest military technology that thrills the nation on the eve of the Republic Day
parade. It is further argued that the technologist as a magician is terribly powerful. We lose our voice amidst the miracles of technology.
These critiques, despite their ‘extremist’ orientations, are not altogether meaningless. As the Narmada Bachao Andolan has demonstrated, the instrumental character of science has often been seen to be in alliance with a developmental model that destroys
nature, displaces people, and breaks the symbiotic relationship between culture and environment. Likewise, as some sensitive historians have shown, science — on the eve of colonial modernity — did legitimise the arrogance of colonisers, their pride in
‘objective’ knowledge, the way they used to disregard the entire Indo-Persian culture (what else could explain the phenomenon called Thomas Babington Macaulay?)
In our times we see the reduction of science into a mere tool for getting an entry into the gorgeous technological empire. Our bright students, it has to be realised, do not study science for its own sake. Science, they have been told, has got a master
narrative of techno-material success — the narrative that the IITs (and IT) tend to mythologise.
Yet, as we insist, these critiques should not be allowed to make us anti-scientific. Because there is another important story — the liberating story of science. Science illuminates the world. We come to know more and more about how nature functions. Even
applied science or technology can also be enabling, not necessarily constraining.
With deep socio-cultural imagination, we can give emancipatory meaning to technology — say, computers for distant education (not for depriving the labour force of livelihood), or ultrasound for appropriate medical diagnosis (not for sex-discrimination, and
intensifying the patriarchal prejudice against women).
The challenge is to alter the character of science — from instrumental, deterministic and hegemonic knowledge to an aesthetic process of understanding. Perhaps the paradigm shift — from Newton’s determinism to Einstein’s relativity — indicated the
beginning of this process.
In this context it is important to speak of the characteristics of liberating science. First, what characterises it is dissent: dissent against dogmas, rigid beliefs and practices. Science would not have grown had it not questioned the dominant/established
truths, and seen beyond. The liberating science ought to be distinguished from the establishment science that speaks either the language of the State or the techno-corporate empire.
Second, science means criticality. Science does by no means mean objective/secure knowledge. What, however, distinguishes it is, as Karl Popper argued with absolute brilliance, criticality: the perpetual urge to refute or falsify a set of conjectures and
replace it by a new one.
This means that science requires the cultivation of a mindset that, far from being exclusivist, is dialogic and open to criticism. Indeed, the liberating science with its criticality and openness,has to be distinguished from scientism, or the dogma —- “I
am a scientist, and hence I monopolise truth; I need not listen to others.”
Third, science means humbleness: “I may be wrong, you may be correct. Let us have a dialogue.” It was this humility that we saw in a revealing dialogue between Tagore and Einstein. Science, in fact, is not an antithesis of poetry or spirituality. Instead,
all these traditions get enriched, and we grow wiser. In other words, the liberating science is not hegemonic, but humble, dialogic and self-reflexive.
It is, therefore, obvious that science is an attitude to life (not just what specialists do in their labs). And this life-philosophy celebrates a society that is plural, democratic and egalitarian. Science does not, therefore, remain merely big science:
nuclear explosion, space research or genetic engineering. Far from remaining a mega event taking place out there, it enters the deep soul of each of us. Science becomes people’s science.
Perhaps only with this intimate and liberating science can we create a sane-society, and overcome some of the oppressive contradictions prevalent in our times: Hindu fundamentalists reconciling their spirituality with nuclear bombs, IIT graduates
rediscovering their caste identities in the process of choosing their life-partners, and the presence of a gorgeous cyber world in Hyderabad amidst widespread violence, suicides, starvation and exploitation in rural Andhra Pradesh.
The author is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University
