Trouble is in store if we allow our faith-based culture to guide our scientific thoughts rather than place faith in science, Regional Science Centre and Planetarium director Manas Bagchi has said.
“This has similes in world history that should be treated as irrefutable lessons to learn,” he said while opening the Kozhikode district conference of the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad at Vadakara near here on Sunday.
Challenging narrative
Pointing out the observations of well-known archaeologist H.D. Sankalia that challenged the popular narrative about the Ramayana, Mr. Bagchi said the popular hegemonic culture had so successfully been able to impress upon many people that even scientific organisations were not ready to explore the myth around Ram Setu.
“Faith is more important than the fact finding has been the proclamation. The origin of Rama or the anthropological history could have been unearthed by Sankalia or his legacy. But modern India misses him or his scientific culture of sensibility,” said Mr. Bagchi.
He claimed that the de-linking of doing science from scientific enquiry in ancient India had led people to borrow experimental science mostly from the western world.
On production
“As our popular culture considered production as pollution, and the productive people as lower human beings, the productive human self-suffered from lack of self-respect, dignity as well as initiative. Our culture of spirituality treated reading and writing as the divinely ordained work only of the favoured group,” said Mr. Bagchi.
The productive castes were not allowed to learn reading and writing for a significant period. The ghettoisation of education, of reading and writing of texts, of the synthesisation and hybridisation of knowledge became a defining feature of the ruling class, thereby destroying the possibility of growth of common man’s science in India, he said.
Scientific output
Mr. Bagchi said that scientific knowledge was being generated faster than ever. “The global scientific output doubles roughly every nine years and we need science as a way to find solutions for all the challenges that we are facing now or in the near future. From bacterial resistance against antibiotics to global warming or food and energy security,” he said. But finding a technical solution was not the only challenge to make it work. “We have to build bridges between different disciplines, cultures, generations, science and society. A divisive differentiating philosophical base will always fall short of accepting science as the ultimate benchmark of all cultural practices,” added Mr. Bagchi.
