Scientific temper and decolonization: A personal journey

Nana with her newspaper

In my childhood, an old black and white picture hanging on the family wall stood as a reminder of the possibilities that was India. We knew to pay our respects to the hanging picture, alongside other pictures of ancestors who had passed on our way out the door. Paying homage to the hanging picture was particularly important before exams.  

My grandmother, we called her nana, would fondly recall the stories of her Jnan kaka (uncle in Bengali), the bespectacled man, dressed in a white shirt and with a smile, in the picture. She would recall the stories of growing up, of her doctor father, and her Jnan kaka, the scientist in the family. Those conversations would almost always underscore the nation building role of science in modern India. 

Sir Jnan Ghosh writing at his desk

In the picture, Jnan dadu as we would call him, following our parents, appeared more like a poet, perhaps an invitation to consider the poetic relevance of his role as an architect of the engineering foundation of postcolonial India.

When nana would share stories of her childhood, the conversations would turn to the question of the scientific temper. Sir Jnan Chandra Ghosh, the founding director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, was a maker, alongside P C Mahalanobis, Vikram Sarabhai, and Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar, in bringing to life the Nehruvian vision of cultivating the scientific temper.

For Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, the scientific temper, the capacity to critically interrogate knowledge claims, to engage rigorously with empirical evidence, and to pursue truth and new knowledge, formed the pillars of a decolonizing nation. The work of building a postcolonial nation emergent from the anti-colonial struggles was one of building the essential infrastructures of science to address the problems of food insecurity, poverty, lack of infrastructures in the aftermath of colonization. The project of postcolonial science in the newly independent nation was intrinsically tied to the socialist imaginary that shaped anticolonial struggles.

In his speech to the Indian Science Congress, noted Nehru, “It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of in-sanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.”

When I entered the IIT as a first-year student enrolled in the Bachelor of Technology (Honours) course in Agricultural Engineering, I was keenly aware of this legacy although I didn't quite come to understand the profound role of the IITs, and especially IIT Kharagpur, in the cultivation of the capacities for building the sciences, engineering and technology toward the struggle for decolonization in a newly independent postcolonial nation. This commitment to decolonization was perhaps most evident in the very space where the IIT was built, the Hijli detention camp that had imprisoned political prisoners participating in the struggle against British imperialism.

The motto of the Institute "Dedicated to the service of the nation" stood tall, emblazoned on the entryway, serving as a reminder of the transformative role of science in the service of the nation. 

Landless, dalit women farmers organized into sanghams planning seed planting

Over the last two decades, as I have worked on co-creating voice infrastructures at the margins of the global economy, one of the key emergent lessons I have learned from communities at the margins is the scientific temper held by communities, in the everyday struggles against the colonization of life form. The search for truth and new knowledge, the testing of evidence, the processes of trial and error to create and build knowledge claims lie at the heart of the decolonizing interventions created by local and indigenous communities (LICs). Community struggles for life and livelihood, struggles to sustain practices of agrarian life rooted in community knowledge, are often mobilized in the backdrop of the large-scale privatization of agricultural technology in the hands of global capital.

In the Global South, the struggle for decolonizing knowledge is one of foregrounding community-held science, often drawn from traditional knowledge systems through the processes of trial and error, experimentation, and critical analysis. In the backdrop of the onslaught of the corporatized model of neoliberal agriculture in India for instance, carried out in the form of privatized technologies imposed top-down, the decolonizing struggle of adivasi and dalit (oppressed caste) communities has been one of building infrastructures for traditional and local community knowledge of agriculture, sustaining practices of generating food rooted in symbiotic relationships with ecosystems. Indigenous communities globally offer the anchors for creating and sustaining ecosystems that are vital to planetary health and life. The practices undergirding these traditional and local community knowledge systems are rooted in the scientific temper, in deep engagement with evidence, in empirically grounded critical analysis, and in hard discipline of the mind/body.

Contrast the decolonizing struggles of LICs in the Global South with the Hindutva propaganda that colonizes claims to Indigeneity to serve the political agenda of Hindutva. Driven by the ideological claim to a Hindu rashtra (nation), replete with the monolithic constructions of a Hindu sanskriti (culture) and Hindu jati (race), Hindutva deploys the language of Indigeneity to serve and propagate its monotheistic framework. The monotheistic ideology of Hindutva is deeply colonial as it erases the claims to land, livelihood and knowledge of India's adivasi (Indigenous) people. The dangerous and facile claims to Indigeneity by Hindutva are politically situated within its overarching agenda of constructing a Hindu nation, legitimizing its caste structure and incorporating within it India's diverse adivasi communities while marking Muslims and Christians as the outside of the nation. The concept of traditional knowledge is co-opted and mobilized within this monolithic colonial ambition directed at othering. 

To secure its hegemony, the political ideology of Hindutva needs to take over institutions of learning and bring them within its folds. Rigorous scholarship that asks critical questions threatens any regime invested in the total capture of power. The ongoing attack of Hindutva on universities across India reflects this systematic and strategic effort toward reorganizing spaces of learning to serve Hindutva propaganda. Since the ascendance of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the social sciences and humanities have been systematically targeted as disciplines that study, interrogate, and raise critical questions about language, culture, inequality, oppression, injustice, social organization, economic systems, and politics. The orchestrated attacks on Hyderabad Central University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Jamia Milia Islamia launched since 2015 have been reflective of this broader strategy of dismantling and simultaneously re-organizing academia to serve the Hindutva agenda. 

The latest in this strategic work of re-organizing the academe is reflected in the form of a calendar produced by the Center of Excellence in Indian Knowledge System that has been built at IIT, Kharagpur. The calendar, proposing to recover the foundations of Indian knowledge systems, articulates its objectives as recognizing the secrets of the vedas, reinterpretation of the Indus valley civilization, and rebuttal of the Aryan Invasion myth. 

The front page of the calendar

Note here the colonizing propaganda work of Hindutva captured in the equating of Indian knowledge systems with the Vedas and the Indus valley civilization. This equivalence simultaneously erases the diverse cultural formations and ways of knowing that make up India, including the diverse ways of knowing of India's adivasi people that are continually subjected to colonization. The communicative inversion of setting up a colonizing ideology as decolonization is central to the propaganda of Hindutva, building the straw man of the Aryan Invasion myth. What exactly is the calendar seeking to rebut when the Aryan Invasion theory has long been challenged by serious historians, archeologists, and DNA studies? The rhetorical construction of the Aryan Invasion myth creates the justification for the mobilization of Hindutva propaganda, seemingly recovering, in the sense of "taking back," the study of Indian history from colonial structures.

Strategically obfuscating the evidence, ongoing disciplinary conversations, and debates in history, linguistics, archeology, and genetics about the patterns of migration in/to the Indian peninsula, the calendar does the propaganda work of claiming Indigeneity. This claim to Indigeneity serves the political goal of Hindutva in deploying a Hindu nation. The calendar's tall claim of recovering traditional Indian knowledge is established in the backdrop of the allusion to and summary dismissal of the current body of disciplinary conversations on migrations in the Indian peninsula by falsely portraying this literature as colonial or as reflective of a colonial approach. 

The communicative construction of traditional knowledge in the calendar, placed in the backdrop of supposedly rebutting the Aryan Invasion Myth, is not backed up by evidence, instead making superficial juxtapositions. It draws in random symbols, without references to contexts. Loose and ambiguous claims about dates are made, without the actual engagement with the rigorous study of dates in the literature. In its looseness and lack of rigor, the calendar makes a caricature of the scholarship on/of traditional knowledge systems, actually lending credence to the racist white supremacist attacks on the scholarship of traditional knowledge systems and decolonization scholarship.

To prop up the propaganda, references are made to an array of serious-sounding technological tools such as GPR Exploration, Lased-induced breakdown spectroscopy, photo-luminescence dating, paleo-radiology, computer tomography, micro-CT scans, Kirlian imagery, paleo-botany, advanced geo-hydrological exploration studies, Natural Language Processing, advanced satellite imagery, HMI (Human-Machine Interface), image processing, iconographic exploration (semantic and semiotic) etc. Here, the communicative construction of technology works ironically as a strategy for furthering the colonizing propaganda of Hindutva. 

Hindutva's co-option of the language of decolonization to perpetuate its colonizing agenda is a classic exemplar of communicative inversion. The calendar produced by IIT Kharagpur, capturing the overarching role of the Center of Excellence in Indian knowledge system in producing propaganda materials for Hindutva, legitimized by the IIT brand, is a reflection of the ongoing hegemonic colonization of decolonization struggles. Disengaged from the contextually situated and empirically-based scholarship of recovering traditional knowledge systems in LICs in India, Hindutva deploys the term "tradition" to perpetuate its hateful political agenda of othering. 

Tradition for Hindutva is the anchor to turning back, as the basis for resurrecting the past that mobilizes its agenda of othering. Tradition for Hindutva is an instrument for recovering lost glory of an ancient past, to be mobilized in the construction of Hindu rashtra. Tradition in Hindutva is anti-thetical to the future-oriented, empirically grounded work of traditional knowledge systems, drawing on the scientific temper within these knowledge systems.

Returning to the personal story, in familial conversations, the spirit of the scientific temper reflected by Sir Jnan Ghosh, is one that continually interrogates convenient assertions, asks difficult questions, and engages with deep empiricisms of everyday life. This scientific temper is a key resource in decolonization struggles as it offers the basis for challenging practically the colonizing processes that threaten lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The scientific temper is the resource that mobilizes anti-colonial struggles and builds equitable infrastructures that guarantee universal health, wellbeing, food security, access to shelter, ecosystems etc. 

Women organized into the millet network

To critically interrogate power and control of the colonizer necessitates reflexive praxis that is empirically grounded. The calendar on recovery of Indian knowledge systems produced by IIT Kharagpur is equally anti-thetical to this basic quest for the scientific temper and to the critical impulse of decolonizing scholarship rooted in the struggles for justice and equality.