Essays

India has been chosen not merely for the size and diversity of its population and the richness of its culture, but also because almost all of the themes that have been taken up in the general debates about Western science can be found there. Indeed, it could be argued that India's struggle for independence was, to a greater extent than elsewhere, also a struggle for the resurrection of Indian civilisation. At the very least, it can be said that traditional techniques and non-Western beliefs and customs were mobilized in the political struggle more explicitly than elsewhere. Under the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi the peoples of the Indian subcontinent were encouraged to revive traditional technical practices and even managed to put aside, for a time, some of their religious antagonisms in order to achieve national independence.

Gandhi, of course, was Western-trained and learned about Western philosophy and Western science while studying law in Britain. Perhaps most important for our purposes here is that Gandhi became acquainted with Western traditions of cultural criticism, associated with such names as Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau. The 'experiments with truth' that made up Gandhi's life were, in large measure, a conscious effort to combine these critical Western ideas with a very personal interpretation of Hindu belief. Gandhi embodied an alternative science and technology in his own person, but he was not particularly successful in writing about it or in institutionalising it. He has served, in post-independence India, as both a legend and personal model; and, as we shall see, his inspiration can be seen in a number of alternative activities in India today.

Gandhi was not alone in his attempts to develop alternative approaches to science and technology in colonial India, although it was his vision that has perhaps been most influential. Today, with the renewed interest in cultural visions, one has to be aware that commitment to traditions, too, can objectify by drawing a line between a culture and those who live by that culture, by setting up some as the true interpreters of a culture and the others as falsifiers, and by trying to defend the core ofa culture from its periphery.

Gandhi's critique of Western science was fundamental and comprehensive. He rejected Western science in terms of all three of our dimensions, recombining the romantic or poetic critique of secularisation with critiques of the institutionalised elitism and the 'technicist' orientation of Western science. It was the lack of morality, the lack of idealism of Western civilisation that Gandhi objected to; and Western science was, for him, a central part of that immoral value system.

The double nature of Gandhi's critique is important in understanding the subsequent Indian discourse(s) on Western and non-Western science. Unlike the Marxist or positivist leaders of most other independence movements in non-Western societies, Gandhi sought to develop an alternative way of life in which traditional techniques and non-Western beliefs had a central place. His critique of Western civilisation was thus not merely a critique of its immorality, but also of its epistemology. 'Traditional technology, too, was for him an ethically and cognitively better system of applied knowledge than modern technology. He rejected machine civilisation, not because he was a saint making occasional forays into the secular world, but because he was a political activist and thinker with strong moral concerns.'

India, of course, did not follow Gandhi's lead in the first two decades of independence. Instead, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, ambitious efforts were made to implant what Nehru called a scientific temper in Indian society. Nehru's scientism, and that of his leading scientific and political advisers, was deep and unambiguous.

For Nehru, Indian civilisation, with its superstitions and religious  strife, was m need of radical change; a 'scientific temper' needed to be imposed on Indian society, and his governments did their utmost to develop both scientific institutions and also a popular understanding and appreciation for science. Like other post- independence leaders in the third world, Nehru's attitude to Western science was positive; if there was a 'non-Western' component to his science policy, it was in seeking to apply scientific research in a planned, systematic way. From the late 1940s, scientific and technological research were organised roughly along the lines of the Soviet model, with central planning and strong state control over priorities and orientation.

The Indian experience of science policy up to the late 1960s, which was based on the close alliance between elite scientists and the political leadership, had the major objective to expand the infrastructural base for science, technology and education. The leadership of Nehru provided the necessary political will and economic assistance to ensure continuous expansion of scientific organisations and funding of science and technology.

As the 1960s progressed, a number of challenges emerged to the developmental strategies and emphases that had guided India since independence. The wars with China and Pakistan fostered nationalistic tendencies, and a variety of popular peasant movements began to wage struggles against the central and regional authorities. The international wave of student and anti- imperialist protest also played its part, so that, by the early 1970s, India was a society torn by inner conflict.

The revival of Gandhism was an important factor in the protests against the large dams and government-sponsored social forestry programmes as well as the emergence of environmental movements, especially the famous Chipko 'tree-huggers' in northern India. In 1978, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after having ruled the country through an unpopular State of Emergency, was defeated by the opposition Janata party, which in many ways tried to apply Gandhian ideas during its few short years in power, before being torn apart by internal dissension.

It was in this general spirit of criticism and change that the political scientist Rajni Kothari gathered together a number of Western-trained humanists and social scientists at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi. Kothari had been the chairman of the Social Science Research Council and had been a key actor in the infrastructure building of the Nehru era. In the 1970s, however, Kothari and his colleagues at CSDS grew increasingly disillusioned with the path that Indian development had taken, and began to reconsider the Gandhian intellectual legacy.

Indeed, throughout the country, perhaps particularly among science and engineering students, who were finding their knowledge increasingly irrelevant to the needs of their country, the received position about the crucial role of modern science in Indian development began to be questioned. It was particularly among engineering students that the appeal of appropriate technology seems to have been felt most strongly, and in the 1970s a number of different units were established.

Even more significant has been the emergence of a critique of Western science in the various new social movements themselves. On the one hand, there are the so-called people's science movements that have been particularly active in southern India, beginning with the founding of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) in 1962. Here the emphasis has been on critical popularisation, linlking science in selective ways to popular myths and traditions and bringing scientific expertise to bear on protests against government-sponsored irrigation and forestry projects. The people's science movements are not critical of Western science; rather they are critical of the ways in which Western science has been misused in Indian society.

What has emerged in other parts of India, as an outgrowth of the environmental movements in the forests and on tribal lands, has been a very different kind of alternative. Here the various critiques of Western science developed in the West have been 'recombined' in the praxis of environmental activism.

Particularly significant has been the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, which has produced widely read reports (in 1983 and 1985) on The State of India's Environment and produced a large number of magazine and newspaper articles through its press service. Together with the appropriate technology groups that are still dotted around the Indian countryside, the environmental movements represent a practical critique of Western science in India. Here, as elsewhere, the critique is Western-inspired and the critics Western-trained; but it has produced an ongoing dialogue with Indian traditions that is likely to grow in importance in the years ahead.