Big Science determines the rules in the field of science. The Chandrayaan mission is an example of Big Science. Between Big Science and Big Media, we invite the spectacle and exhibit. Chandrayaan as a ritual repeats the rhetoric of science, making scientific temper the official ideology of the nation state. The pluralism of science gets lost in the monolithic methods of construction. The challenge is this: how can we pluralise science? In line with this, I would like to narrate a few anecdotes.
These anecdotes are about modest projects without the research grants that science seems to command. Their modesty lies not in the narrative but also in the money they seem to involve.Two years ago, there was a meeting in Chirala, a town in Andhra Pradesh, between a group of local weavers and European historians of science. While the weavers sat on the ground, the historians sat on chairs, physically and mentally distant. Suddenly, a Dutch historian suggested that they all sit on the floor. The mood changed, and two sets of experts from two different milieus met as equals. It was a cross-cultural seminar where the groups tried to translate their philosophies with each other.
What followed was even more exciting. One of the weavers told the historian, “You have not only stolen our technology but our epistemology.” Few suspected that the weaver could articulate a formal theory of knowledge. Weavers are upset because the government has dubbed their industry as a fading one. Over 13 million weavers are deprived of the right to articulate their theories and world views that stem from their experience in the craft. So, they are looking for an epistemologist to work with them outside the ambit of the government. As one trade union leader put it: “Show us how to survive with such governance, and help us build a science institute beyond official science.”
There is a certain sense of the philosophical in the life-giving nature of weaving. Dastkar in Andhra Pradesh, a public charitable trust which aims to promote artisan industries suited to ownership by primary producers, is trying to revive weaving and the use of indigenous colour.
It’s interesting that these projects emerge from the informal sector of science. Sumitra Vasudev, a leading musicologist, met me at a seminar and said, “You have to differentiate between orality and print.”
Orality, she said, was not a mechanical regurgitation of memory. Although orality was embedded in memory, it possessed an epistemic domain of its own. Memory, she pointed out, did not imply the Macaulayite technique of rote memory, but was creativity and invention. It is ironic that in this information age, orality and memory are being suppressed as epistemologies. To remember is to theorise. This is an argument that goes back to Albert Lord’s book, A Singer of Tales, a classic about Balkan legends.
Sumitra is the lead fellow of an informal project on orality, where researchers seek to recover the theoretical role of memory in an information society where theory is getting erased. Carnatic musicologists have done much to contribute to this theoretical recovery. They have shown the relation between orality, memory, epistemology and community. Musicians become their own epistemologists to elaborate the creativity of their music.
Recently, I came across a set of papers debating the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. I analysed 10 debates by 10 different groups. What was fascinating was that ordinary people, activists, craftsmen, and scholars had literally become knowledge panchayats, with their ideas going farther than science ever could. One group argued that information in a digital form could not create a commons of sharing. They pointed out that the commons was an epistemology of sharing, not a mechanical resource base for accumulation. While the papers were informal, the scholarship was deep. It is a pity that there is little access to such nuggets of reflective knowledge, of laymen challenging expertise to rework the theories of knowledge. It is interesting to see how the consumer not only becomes a historian of science but an everyday expert in technology. A different kind of intelligence is embodied in the democratic imagination. Democracy needs to combine cognition and community.
An equally fascinating idea was proposed by architect and urbanologist Thomas Mical vis-a-vis the intellectual life in Bengaluru. He felt that the city and its knowledge system was divided like C P Snow’s The Two Cultures. The sciences and the humanities rarely gossiped together. Mical proposed the idea of a new Anthropocene lab, where there would be a new Earth Charter that would go beyond global technocratic diktats. He also explained how the interaction of the knowledge systems would create a holism that is more life-giving for the Earth.
Mical’s approach to interdisciplinarity and the Earth aimed to unite an intellectually divided city and create a new system of thought. Mical visualised the city as an interactive community and an interdisciplinary system. The interacting alchemy transformed both knowledge and the urban system. Bengaluru started creating new imaginaries of knowledge for itself. One is waiting with excitement to see how this pans out.
All these projects, while rich in thought, are poor in money. What sustains them is a commitment to knowledge and democracy, which is impressive. It tells us that it’s time we formalise the idea of the knowledge panchayat as a ritual process. Democracy needs not just scientific innovation but these panchayats.
We need to ritualise the process of thought in playful ways and still make sure such institutions are neither clerical nor authoritarian. The inventiveness of such entities weaves democracy and science together, adding not only to the imagination of knowledge but also to the diversities of science. It challenges Big Science with a sense of playfulness.
In the decades to come, these might be the new landmarks of a creative society, creating an impressive world which intertwines colour and nature. In a wonderful way, the history of science is adding to the creative idea of science. It’s a story we must recite with gratitude.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations