by MEERA NANDA
From the Yale Babylon Collection, dated 1900 BCE. Across the diagonal is written 1 24 51 10 = 1 + 24/60 + 51/3600 + 10/2160000, which is 1.41421296 to 9 significant decimal figures, which is very close to the real figure. The length of the diagonal, on this assumption, is 30 times the square root of 2, which is 42 25 35 in base 60. The point really is that the Babylonians knew that the ratio of diagonal from side was exactly the square root of 2, and they knew how to find a good approximation of that number. PHOTO/Frontline
If there is one knowledge tradition that has come to practically define the modern age in all corners of the world, it is modern science. While Arabic, Indian and Chinese civilisations undoubtedly contributed to the enterprise of science, no one can deny that the radical transformations in world view and methods that culminated in the birth of modern science took place in the West through the 16th and 17th centuries. From its European home, the universally applicable methods and theories of modern science spread around the world, often riding on the coat-tails of colonial powers.
These two facts—that modern science was born in the West and came to the rest of the world through Western exploits—have been a source of deep angst verging on ressentiment for all proud and ancient civilisations in the East. But nowhere in the postcolonial world is this angst more deeply felt than in India, the land that bore the brunt of British colonialism for the longest duration.
The problem is this: We can neither live without modern science and the technologies it has spawned, nor can we make peace with the fact that this most fertile and powerful of all knowledge traditions is, after all, a melechha [“impure and/or “inferior” people of foreign extraction] tradition. It rankles with us that these impure, beef-eating “materialists”, a people lacking in our spiritual refinements, a people whose very claim to civilisation we delight in mocking, managed to beat the best of us when it came to nature-knowledge. So, while we hanker after science and pour enormous resources into becoming a “science superpower”, we simultaneously devalue its historical and cultural significance and decry its “materialism”, its “reductionism” and its “Eurocentrism”. We want the science of the materialist upstarts from the West but cannot let go of our sense of spiritual superiority which makes us think that we are entitled to the status of jagatguru [world teacher].
This lethal mixture of desire, envy and a sense of innate “Aryan” superiority has characterised India’s encounter with modern science and technology from the very start. Read any of the great works of the Hindu Renaissance—from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, Annie Besant (and fellow Theosophists), Sarvepalli Radhakrishanan, M.S. Golwalkar and countless other gurus, philosophers and propagandists—and you encounter this simmering science envy and wounded pride at work. The current crop of Hindu nationalists and their intellectual enablers are the progeny of these thinkers and display similar traits.
Vedas as the mother of science
The most recent formulation of this ressentiment is to be found in Rajiv Malhotra’s exhortation to Hindus to assert the “difference” (read “superiority”) of their dharmic traditions by “fitting modern science into the Vedic framework”. How is this feat to be accomplished? Malhotra proposes that we treat modern science as smriti—a human construct based on sensory knowledge and reasoning—of the Vedic shruti, the “eternal, absolute truth unfiltered by the human mind or context” received by our ancient seers in their “rishi state”. In practical terms, this would involve translating modern scientific concepts as mere subsets of Vedic categories: thus for example, physicists’ concept of energy—a precise and quantifiable capacity of a system to perform work—will have to be interpreted as a gross-level subtype of shakti, or “intelligent energy”, known to our yogic adepts; the entire field of physics, because it deals with causation, will become an “empirical” species of the karma theory; the Darwinian theory is merely a lower-level, materialistic rendering of the spiritual evolution taught in the Yoga Sutras, etc., etc. This way, we can have modern science and bask in our blessed rishi state too. Not just that, once we make the rivers of scientific knowledge flow into the ocean of the Vedas, the fondest dream of all Hindu nationalists will be fulfilled and India will achieve the status of World Guru.
Indeed, to claim an organic unity between the Vedic world view and modern science has been the agenda of Hindu nationalists from the very start. It is indeed an ingenious solution to our science envy: if modern science is nothing more than a minor tributary flowing into the ocean of Vedic spiritual science always-and-already known to our rishis, it is the West that should feel Veda envy. Not only is this balm for our wounded civilisational pride, this strategy of retrofitting science into the Vedas gives the latter a scientific sheen. Yet, in the end, Vedas-as-the-mother-of-science is a “magnificent dead end” (to borrow a phrase from Floris Cohen, a historian of science) as it has no potential whatsoever for asking new questions or providing new answers using methods that are accessible to non-rishis.
Distortion of the history of science
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