This column is full of stories. Many people today may think of anecdotes as part of an obsolescent past. Stories, however, can be life-giving and form a fruitful pedagogy. This article is an attempt to use stories to create a new sociology of science. I want to illustrate that stories are not just imbued with an aesthetic value; they add to our sense of knowledge, too.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, science in India had a certain charm, a sense of magic, and a certain sense of aesthetic. One of the best examples I can think of is the work of scientists in the Raman group. One thinks in particular of K S Krishnan. Here are two stories I found while working on my book on the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s National Physical Laboratory.
The first one occurred in the early 1950s. Krishnan, NPL’s first director, is driving into office one morning in his old Studebaker car. He suddenly stops and jumps out excitedly as he sees a bunch of men cutting a tree in the NPL campus. He rushes towards them and asks, “Why are you cutting it?” They say, “The contractor and the architect asked us to, as the tree is asymmetrical.”
Shocked with the reply, Krishnan stood still for a while before replying, “I, too, have studied symmetry. You create symmetry not by cutting down a tree, but by planting a third one.” Krishnan celebrated this sense of aesthetic that dominated science.
I still remember Jawaharlal Nehru rushing from Parliament to the NPL office to gossip with Krishnan, with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar following close behind. They were among the scientists of that era who gave science a sense of celebration, a sense of eccentricity.
At that time, ecology almost served as science. And aesthetics almost served as a part of the ecology of justice.
One of the best stories I can think of in this context is one my father told me. We were sitting one evening out in the garden in Jamshedpur when the Tata Steel plant started pouring out slag, the molten-red by-product. A few minutes later, the nearby forest went up in flames as the tribals, while doing shifting cultivation, had set it on fire. My father watched the two phenomena—the forest fire and the molten steel—and suddenly said, “Each needs to respect the other—both need to survive, to talk to each other.”
He pointed out that if the tribal didn’t survive along with Tata’s tale, a deep sense of ecological defeat and injustice would be created. It must be noted that Tata Steel, in its early years, had a department of ‘tribal metallurgy’ that could polish steel in an exceptional, age-old way.
This sense of aesthetic and eccentricity dominated science in that era. It was not regimented. And in this context, I want to bring up a third series of idiosyncratic narratives.
One of the first stories is from a time I was sitting with my uncles— astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and meteorologist C Ramaswamy—and my father C Visvanathan, the metallurgist.
All of them were busy talking away till they suddenly pounced on the archaeological nature of the Indus Valley problem. They kept talking about it for hours. My aunt, who was sitting quietly listening to them for long, finally turned to me and said, “Look at these boys. They’re like voracious sparrows pouncing on data. They seem utterly happy. The only intrusion they seem to allow is the cup of coffee.” Indeed, for them, science was a source of happiness, a celebration.
The same kind of story comes up when we talk about the extraordinary scientist that was Satish Dhawan. Once, physicist G N Ramchandran came to meet Satish and made outrageous demands, yelling for an hour. Satish listened patiently and agreed to most of it. One of the younger scientists asked Satish, “Why are you tolerating him?” Satish smiled and said that his work and his tantrum offered a similar order of resilience. “When your tantrum reaches the quality of his science, I’ll tolerate you too.”
Another story is about Amulya Reddy, one of the great authorities on intermediate technology and an innovator of biogas. I once met Amulya outside my sister’s sari shop. He was delighted with the saris he had bought and proceeded to talk at length about their aesthetics. For him, expounding on a sari or on science was an aesthetic exercise.
Science, in a deep way, was a kind of aesthetic responsibility to such people. When you think of each of their stories, you realise the depth in a fundamental way. Science in India in that era might have been slightly disorganised. But it was deeply free, deeply independent and deeply aesthetic. It was a science that flourished with storytelling.
And storytelling became a part of what we would call science politics today. One of my friends recently told me we don’t do science anymore—we do science policy. Caught in the statement was not only the reality of compulsion, of relevance; there was also a sense that the eccentric nature of science had somehow diminished, that it had become a different kind of imagination.
I want to emphasise that it was not just the availability of eccentricity; it was the possibility of dissent that made science fascinating. But one has realised that, for all its aesthetics, science in India was also a failure at a moral level.
Two events marked this failure. One was Bhopal, the other was nuclear energy. I remember Praful Bidwai, the scientist and journalist, wrote a fascinating article how villagers were used to clean up nuclear waste and then sent off to anonymity.
Raja Ramanna accused Praful of being antinational when, in fact, he was being scientific to the core. This failure to respond to the dangers of nuclear energy and the failure to respond to the impending threat of Bhopal constituted two tragedies of the Indian scientific imagination.
One needs memory, one needs morality, one needs storytelling to capture the power of a science that, at the same time, is an ethical statement of reality.
That’s why we need storytelling and a science that goes beyond policy to fables, morals and parables—each of which would illustrate the power of an individual scientist to stand up to the indifference of policy as a statement of morality.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
