The Strange Fight over Science in India
Scientific narratives can jar common sense. Thus an electron can be at two places at the same time, even traveling simultaneously through two holes. Matter can collapse and then disappear altogether, and then reappear at some other place. A person traveling on a fast spaceship will find on his return that his twin who stayed home is grown older than him.
Consciousness can play strange tricks as described in Oliver Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat; or events occurring in one quick sequence may sometimes be rearranged in the wrong order by the mind.
But there are institutions in support of science, such as colleges, universities, research laboratories, and science journalists explain these puzzles and paradoxes to the layperson so that the general public remains supportive of the enterprise of science.
Now let’s come to India and look at its scientific tradition. The fight in the public sphere is whether any of it should be taught in schools and colleges.
There are entrenched forces that are dead set against teaching the history of Indian sciences. Worse, the Indian tradition is grossly misrepresented in the curriculum.
But is it okay to teach science only from the European lens?
Science as search for eternal truth
Science is the search for the laws of nature underlying the unceasing process of change.
Now the Indian tradition calls itself the Sanātana Dharma, “Eternal Truth”, which is the sciences of the outer and inner realities. It is empirical and open to questioning. Its formal framework is provided by Vedanta.
Vedanta is completely consistent with the deepest scientific theory, i.e. quantum physics; or perhaps one might say that quantum theory is consistent with Vedanta, as it is the larger subject.
Erwin Schrödinger, one of the two creators of quantum theory credited the Upanishads with the inspiration for the idea of superposition that is central to the theory.
The other creator of quantum theory was Werner Heisenberg, whose own involvement with Vedanta is given in this quote by Fritjof Capra: “In 1929, Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. “After these conversations with Tagore,” he said, “some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.” [Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, 1988, p.43]
According to Schrödinger’s biographer Walter Moore, there is a clear continuity between quantum theory and Vedanta:
The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.
Vedanta is scientific and rational, and it takes the universe to be governed by laws and considers consciousness (which it calls the Ātman or Śiva, based on specific sub-traditions) to be complementary to physical reality, quite as in the mainstream Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics the physical reality and consciousness are like the two sides of a coin.
Vedanta and the mind
Apart from being one with physics in its description of outer reality, Vedanta has much on consciousness and its workings through the mind. Unlike the naïve view that the mind is a kind of a black box with memories and reasoning, it adds a layer of the “causal mind” [Ᾱnandamaya kośa], which is normally inaccessible to the individual.
It is the causal mind (deep sleep state that is not reachable by the normal mind) which is directly illuminated by consciousness from where impressions flow to the dreaming state, where we access creativity. It also sets up the three-layered narrative of Indian texts, with layers of outer reality (ādhibhautika), inner reality (ādhidaivika), together with the perceptions of the Ātman (ādhyātmika) that Krishna addresses in Chapter 8 of the Bhagavad Gītā.
This structure explains not only how Srinivasa Ramanujan may have got his equations in dreams, but also how creative people in all places speak of key ideas in their work coming to them either when they were dozing, or in trance, or in vivid dreams.
If Vedanta is scientific, why isn’t it taught in Indian schools and colleges?
Because Indian academics are generally ignorant about India’s own history in the field of science. They didn’t learn it in school, so they don’t even know what it is.
Indian ideas are subtle (just like the ones in contemporary physics and neuroscience) and they need to be explained properly by a teacher. If you don’t teach them, and worse you misrepresent them, then students are likely to be misled into adopting harmful ideologies.
Indian kids are also not taught how to read Indian books such as the Purāṇas in which science is described in allegories.
Thus they don’t know what to make of stories such as the one in which Śiva is not invited by his father-in-law, Daksha Prajāpati to a sacrifice, and this so infuriates his wife, Satī, that she kills herself, and then, in anger, Śiva cuts off the head of Dakṣa Prajāpati.
This is an allegory on the shifting of the beginning of the year, or spring, from the Nakṣatra Mṛgaśīrṣa (another name for Prajāpati) to Rohiṇī in early 4th millennium BCE.
Since Śiva is Mahākāla, God of Time, the death of his wife Satī means that particular Age or Yuga had ended. The act of Śiva decapitating Prajāpati is the declaration that the year will not start with the Nakṣatra Mṛgaśīrṣa.
The science behind this is the precession of the earth’s polar axis, which is the continual change of direction of the North Pole with respect to the fixed background stars (the precessional period is about 26,000 years). Since there are 27 nakṣatras, the seasons shift one nakṣatra about 1,000 years.
Later Vedic books show the beginning of the year with Kṛttikā (early 2nd millennium BCE as in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa), Bharaṇī (early 1st millennium BCE), and Aśvinī (early 1st millennium CE as in the standard Siddhāntas)
What’s the fight over science?
Western scholars in the period before the birth of quantum theory and neuroscience, who did not understand the Indian scientific tradition because it dealt with concepts and categories that had not yet become part of the Western scholarship decided that none of the Indian sciences should be in school or college curriculum.
And that’s how it remains even now for NCERT has not broken free from the parameters that were set in the colonial period nearly a hundred years ago.
How does it matter?
It lays the youth open to be manipulated by simplistic ideologies and leads to self-hate and loss of self-confidence.
Despite the school curriculum poisoning the minds of the children against Indian scientific tradition, many do return and discover it later in their adulthood.
But there are some who for ever become its enemies. This is the origin of the animus to Indian customs, as was displayed by some in the ceremonies of the recent inauguration of the New Parliament Building in Delhi.
The hate that these enemies have for the sciences and culture of India is so visceral and deep, that they would deal with the devil to bring the country down.
Further readings
