by AMITABHA BASU
IMAGE/Scroll.in
The Sangh Parivar has always tried to project a revival of the ‘glorious ancient Hindu past’ as the way forward for our country.
For them, to wax eloquent about Hindu India’s past scientific achievements is the hallmark of true nationalism. At the same time, they talk about development and economic growth, aided by modern science and technology, for India to become a great and powerful nation. “The most crucial components of a modern worldview – rationality and the practice of critique – are ignored and rejected in favour of blind faith in Sanatana Dharma and a revival of a supposedly Vedic past.”
The ball was set rolling in late 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself who declared at the opening ceremony of a hospital in Mumbai that modern medical achievements – plastic surgery, cloning and in-vitro fertilisation – were all practised in India’s ancient past, that Lord Ganesha’s elephant head is proof that advanced transplant surgery existed, and that the way Kunti conceived in the Mahabharata was evidence of the practice of in-vitro fertilisation.
His Sangh Parivar colleagues followed with a slew of similar claims about ancient Indian science.
The Indian Science Congress held in early 2015 saw several such instances:
- An IAS officer started his presentation by blowing a conch shell for 2 minutes and claimed that the sound could cure many human disorders.
- An invited lecture sought to project Lord Shiva as the ‘greatest environmentalist in the world’.
- At the symposium on Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit, ‘evidence’ was laid out that sophisticated flying vehicles existed in Vedic times : as large as modern-day jumbo jets, with radar and advanced guidance and tracking systems; their pilots wore magic suits and they were capable of interplanetary travel. The authors claimed that their work is based on the Maharshi Bhardwaj Vaimanika Sastra, a text they say was written around 400 BC. But scholars at the IISc in Bangalore say it was actually written between 1900 and 1922.
It is therefore not surprising that 2009 Chemistry Nobel laureate V Ramakrishnan described the Congress as a ‘circus’ and vowed never to attend one again.
Noted biologist P M Bhargava, founder of CCMB, Hyderabad, also exasperatedly said that the event had deteriorated over the years and was now ‘an absolute waste of money’.
The claims of interplanetary spaceships so incensed Dr. R P Gandhiraman, a NASA scientist, that he collected hundreds of signatures from other scientists around the world on a petition demanding that the session be cancelled. “We as a scientific community should be seriously concerned about the infiltration of pseudo-science in science curricula with the backing of influential political parties …Giving a scientific platform for a pseudo-science talk is worse than a systematic attack that has been carried out by politically powerful pseudo-science propagandists in the recent past. If we scientists remain passive, we are betraying not only the science, but also our children.”
An exhibit was inaugurated by the Minister of Culture, Mahesh Sharma, in Delhi’s Rabindra Bhavan, entitled Cultural Continuity from Rig Veda to Robotics.
Here was a display of plastic placards decorated with calendar art and tele-serial imaginings of the Mahabharata, coupled with crude info-graphics informing us that by correlating references to the planets and stars in the Sanskrit epics with astronomy software, the historicity of Lord Ram, and the narratives of the Ramayana and Mahabharata had now been firmly established. To wit: the “fall of Duryodhan in mace battle” occurred at 06:50 on November 14, 3139 BC. Ram himself was born on January 10, 5014 BC. “Around 12 to 1 noontime.”
We do not by any means wish to imply that glorifying the scientific achievements of ancient India is simply communal Hindu propaganda, to be disdainfully dismissed. On the contrary, we should be proud of our ancient scientific heritage.
However, we have to carefully sift genuine and legitimate science from mythology and imaginative speculation. ”There is no doubt that an ancient tradition of excellence in science existed in India. Scholars believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation, that flourished 2,500 years before the Christian era, used a system of weights and measures based on an awareness of the decimal system. It is clear too that the cities of this civilisation could not have been built without knowledge of simple geometry….”
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)