Nostalgia is a concept often misused to create distance. It captures with transparency the beauty of an era, and then distances itself from it. Nostalgia distances utopia and perfection from reality. One senses this when one talks about the early days of Indian science. What marked it was the conviviality of the eccentricity, creativity and play.
Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and first biographer of Jagadish Chandra Bose, captured one such slice when he said what Indian science needs was good myth. A child fed with powerful myths by five is a potential scientist in two decades. Bose, in that sense, was a legend. I remember a cousin of mine who attended Nobel laureate William Shockley’s lectures at Princeton. Shockley said Bose was a genius and then added, “The rest is toilet paper.”
The same sense of play and confidence could be seen in C V Raman’s career. Few people realise that the Indian Nobel winner declared he was getting the prize six months ahead of the declaration and arranged for his travel to Stockholm. There, with a quiet intensity, he informed the audience that he was receiving the prize on behalf of a free India and not the colonial regime.
There is an aftermath to this story that is even more hilarious. After researching flowers for a decade, Raman told his wife he deserved a second Nobel. Lokkasundari looked at him and retorted, “With one Nobel, you were intolerable. With the second you will be impossible.”
Raman had a sense of science as play. He was critical of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research when the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was established—his speech was simple. He merely said, “These are tools for the burial of scientific instruments.” He had a different sense of social relevance. He claimed he would rather discover one more property of a diamond than worry about its industrial uses.
Raman’s perspective has to be understood in detail in its ethical and aesthetic aspect. It is best to indulge in storytelling.
The first is the story of K S Krishnan, Raman’s colleague when the NPL was coming up. It was early morning and the architect had ordered a tree to be cut down. Krishnan was driving up from the gate and stopped to ask the workers, “Why are you cutting down the tree?” They replied that it was asymmetrical. Krishnan smiled thoughtfully, saying, “I have also studied symmetry—you create it by adding a third tree, not by cutting one down.”
The same spirit prevailed at the Raman Research Institute, where a tree could not be cut down to make way for buildings. But probably a sense of science in its ideal sense was offered by my father after his return from Hiroshima.
He was silent for the first week, then he said, “Maybe the response to nuclear energy was a different technology.” He and his professional colleagues thought that the bicycle was iconic of technological thought. It represented both simplicity and caring. It is a pity the next generation worked on bicycles as a product rather than a metaphor. As a result, India failed to offer an alternative to the nuclear world.
This sense of play behind science and technology was not naïve. I remember once discussing the fate of hockey with my father. The story begins with the Berlin Olympics. The Indians went to the field wearing canvas shoes and the first minutes were goalless. The scene became different when the play was barefoot. India defeated Germany 8-1. But the West quickly developed astroturf, on which you could not play barefoot.
My father said Dhyan Chand scored twice, first by refusing to salute Hitler and second by pummeling the baseline. But my father warned that science, by changing epistemologies, changes the grammar of the game. We need to rethink alternatives to outthink the West.
Beyond play, there was a sense of craft, discipline, even an obsession with speed, time and accuracy. I remember my father bought me an electric train when I was nine. I excitedly wrote to my grandfather that my electric train ran at 500 miles an hour. Quick came the reply, “Your train could not possibly run at 500 miles an hour. Please calculate the exact speed and inform me at the earliest.” I never wrote a formal letter to him again.
I must add that politicians too had a tremendous grasp of technology. I remember NPL in its first years. Once a week, Nehru would drop in at the NPL canteen to gossip with Krishnan about science. Gandhi and Tagore helped raise money for J C Bose’s lab. They even helped create and think of agriculture as a source of livelihood and epistemology.
One forgets Gandhi was no Luddite. The loudspeaker was introduced for the first time in a Gandhian rally. Gandhi’s charkha was not outdated but a completely new model developed by Polish theosophist Maurice Frydman. One must add that Madan Mohan Malaviya had an immense understanding of industry and technology. It is a pity one does not encounter these movements when we read the history of science today.
The sense of science was Ludic and civilisational. Patrick Geddes in fact felt India had developed a post-Germanic science and politics. He cited the examples of Bose and Gandhi, as the gumboots of war made little sense for either of them. Their sense of peace went beyond war to non-violence. Geddes and Bose dreamt of how interdisciplinarity could create peace. One misses this with experiments today.
Thinking of the era and contrasting it to today, one senses a colossal bureaucratisation of science. Once, science was a civilisational answer to a question. Today, it encourages a technical answer to a technical question. This is why Gandhi made the autobiography a part of the experiment. One could not destroy the self and erase it as a part of the scientific method and its ethical choices.
India needs to dream of science in a different way. For this, we have to liberate our universities. We have to go beyond parochialism of specialisation, and say with the poet that piecemeal peace is poor peace.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations (svcsds@gmail.com)
(Views are personal)