The circular from UGC on mandatory inclusion of ‘Indian Knowledge System’ in their curriculum that is doing the rounds of the country’s institutions of higher learning has been accepted with muted grouses and outrage.But the public protests of the serious academics seem to be petering out.Perhaps for lack of wider support and this government’s customary disdain for any kind of public opinion.
Now as the base of vibrant and rich traditions of different cultures integrated summarily and roughly into a unified system by a priestly order of Vedanta adherents some eight to nine centuries ago,Indian knowledge systems,like the Greek and the Chinese or the Perso-Arabic, are certainly worthy of serious study.But should it be made compulsory?
The danger of such an imposition to serious sustained study and research is obvious.Suppose a senior scholar is training a team of students for discovering a new element through experiments with a particle accelerator.What good will it do if he is compelled to divide his time between studying the Pancha Mahabhuta of ancient Indian chemistry and his actual area of interest?It will at best distract and at worst confuse his mind.
So the contributions of Indian scientists,mathematicians and logicians and philosophers had better be studied as part of the history of science witmedieval Since products of Indian mathematics, chemistry,physics, metallurgy,Engineering etc had entered European epistemic system through prolific Arabic sources throughout the late medieval and early Renaissance periods through translations, it is quite possible that certain seminal ideas of such disciplines attributed now to European geniuses had actually been of Indian origin.And the celebrated European savants might themselves have been quite unaware of such connections. Tracing such links could be an interesting and fruitful study.But that does not mean that the vulgar and partisan approach of claiming the origin of any and every new scientific theory in the Vedas is only partisan poppycock.Its fallacy is exposed by the fact that such exponents of Vedic omniscience are incapable of discovering any nugget of new knowledge by poring on the Vedas alone.
The best thing to do is to form a high-powered commission of first-rate masters of the discipline,Sanskrit scholars with some grounding in science for a certain number of modern sciences to examine if they really have something new of serious significance for such sciences.
Otherwise the student strident claims of entirely original and path-breaking pertinence will be just pompous and vain rhetoric .(More to follow).
As said earlier it is somewhat obfuscating to seek to squeeze together in a narrow room all the divergent knowledge systems of ancient India.For example in philosophy Samkhyo which originally must have been ay yy Godless system and the distinctively spiritual and idealistic Vedanta hardly have any affinity.Purva Mimansa strenuously refutes the very concept of Godhead and advocates the practice of magical sacrificial yajnas prescribed by the Vedas.It must have been done by the priestly order for social rather than logical and theoretical reasons.The attempt has a precedent in the Buddhist Congresses where proliferating Buddhist schools had been kept together and sought to be reconciled against their grain.
Be that as it may Vedanta and Bhakti strained their ingenuity by turning founders of hostile schools into incarnations of the supreme God Vishnu.The safe Kapila and the Buddha who had shrugged off questions about God and creation as pointless and idle were ruthlessly if scandalously transmogrified into such Avataras. Jnana(knowledge of supreme idealistic truth through contemplative discipline),Karna( pursuit of worldly duties as sacrifices),and Bhakti(total surrender of self in dedication to God in prayer,music and meditation) thus became various paths to reach the same goal.
Thus it turns out that the tremendous ideological project of medieval Brahminism has been revived or reconfigured in our time by Hindutva ideologues in a new guise.As in those days the innumerable ethnic groups and cultures had been forced into the straightjacket of so many multiple variants(sub-castes) of the four main Varnas under divine dispensation,(“I am the creator of the four Varnas according to their merits and their functions”:BHAGAVAD GEETA.)
In the same manner Hindutva forces are having and puffing with the exertion to unite multitudinous India into an homogenous India.However castes in this refurbished order are not abolished as necessary variety in unity but mentally bracketed out.
But as Gramsci realised through observation and direct experience of fascism hegemony has in the last instance to be maintained by force.Particularly when there are powerful new ideological and political forces challenge it.Hence. the state turning to violence as its principal and defining instrument.Hence the clear and firm directive of the SMRTIS or the ‘DHARMA SHASTRAS’ which are codes laid down and upheld by the priestly order that this is the ‘Dharma’;that must be upheld by the political power of the king with his RAJ DANDA ,a metaphor for state power.
The GEETA is thus much less concerned with the war in the MAHABHARATA than with the actual tensions in state and social tectonics.Certain royal inscriptions of medieval times explicitly and with subdued menace invoke this power as the ultimate guarantor of social stability.
The necessary development and proliferation of different classes,social divisions,and schools of thought even when under the same roof constantly threatens the stability of the structural unity of society. Ideology is the cement that holds the multiplicity together and the political order is the engineer that ensures its durability through interventions.
It also follows therefore that an unavoidable feature of a state is its complementary plurality within the unity,and the Constitution is the instrument that provides for the unity.It is the statement of the common goal and modalities of function that bind the plurality.
Therefore it cannot be maintained that the state stands for monolithic unity alone.It is fascism alone that claims and works for such unity and therefore there is little surprise that it uses internal and external violence relentlessly to keep the unity in place.Too much clamour about just ONE INDIAN POLITICS,ONE INDIAN LANGUAGE(AND CULTURE) AND ONE INDIAN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM may justifiably arouse suspicion of unbridled despotism of just one force representing just one class or
social section.
Next we come to the issue of an inviolably pure and pristine civilization,which leads to just one knowledge system.Such an idea had been quite influential from the last decades of the 19th century to the thirties of the 20th century.A ver itable monument of this idea worked out to cover every aspect of a civilization from its moral values to its basic epistemic concepts to its warfare was the fascinating and prophetic if pompous ouvre DOWNFALL OF THE WEST by the German author Oswald Spengler.It had a deep and lasting influence on Nazi leaders and ideoiogues.
It had strengthened their conviction that they had been entrusted by destiny to rescue Europe from impending ravages of barbarous hordes of the East,esp.in the form of Bolshevism. Though the Nazis had drawn Germany down the abyss with them the idea of civilizational monads spatially isolated from one another persists in milder form.in the works of Arnold Toynbee and the epigoni of the ‘Annalen’ school.like Fernand Braudel.A jingoistic variant may have been Huntington’s now eclipsed CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS.
Actually no civilization develops under its own steam.Various streams of culture flow into it to form its elements and structure as is borne out by history. Europe is not just a channel originating with Greece. Greece herself owed a lot to the churning during the heydays of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,and Semitic cultures,as Martin Bernal shows in his BLACK ATHENA, (1987-2007)which while overstated does hold a grain of truth.
There is definite and now fairly well-documented evidence that late medieval and Renaissance owed much to the steady and considerable outflow of translations from Arab scientific treatises which themselves had drawn much sustenance from India and Greece.Such borrowings also provoked native reactions and then eventual assimilation through debates and discussions.And Indian civilization had the same character of assimilation and synthesis in its formative period.We also hold that its substantial heterogeneity within a flexible shell of structure could have been the result of such multiple origins.In ancient times while the Vedas was the foundation of Hindu religion and thought,the Puranas must have borrowed substantially from ideas prevailing among the inhabitants of Indus Valley region who were probably of Dravidian provenance.
The much maligned Mughals under Akbar the Great had commissioned the enormous Encyclopedia of Hindu thought and lore AKBAR NAMA, collected and translated through help of scores of Brahmin priests.Akbar had placed it in the royal library with a view to familiarising the Mughal court with the knowledge and lore of its vast multitudes of subjects.The contributions of Amir Khusrau to Indian music and poetry and the growth of Urdu,very much an Indian language,and colloquial Hindusthani bear witness to a process of synthesis and assimilation.
Should we set about weeding out all traces of the ‘Western knowledge system’ from our curriculae and scientific and technological practice as well as our epistemic sphere?
That wil be a tall order.The powerful Hindutva forces understand very well that if they abandon it they will face financial ruin thanks to the collapse of their corporate patrons and political harakiri thanks to the resulting chaos in the economy.Even the sage of ISRO dares not hope to send a spacecraft up by ‘dhyan’ and propitiation of gods alone,unlike celebrated worshippers of this or that god.
As for moral and social knowledge the invocation of native wisdom is now primarily devoted to dumbing down ideas and manipulating people’s minds to secure the political power of the new masters.It needs no detailed argument and documents to prove it to any conscious person who is already not hypnotised.The empowering ideas like individual dignity,rule of law and equality under law are still the safeguards against blatant tyranny.They are the principal weapons to resist the spreading contamination of reason by utterly selfish and monstrous forces that are bent on unhindered and unrestricted acquisition of total power over men’s minds and lives.The unquestionable, unchallengeable authority of political and spiritual tin-gods is the main reason behind this pernicious
propaganda against Western Knowledge system.
To correct a simplified historical notion the British imperialists did not destroy and extinguish the Indigenous of my system of knowledge.With the loss of patronage from the increasingly blinkered and superstitious native rulers under colonialism and the stultifying effects of caste and orthodoxy it was already dying for lack of Oxygem.Adam White a colonial officer had lamented this atrophy of indigenous knowledge and its poverty-stricken and neglected proponents for whom he had expressed deep admiration and sympathy in his voluminous report.Macaulay the rising star in British liberal establishment was driven not so much by search for knowledge as by a thirst for wealth and power for his class and country.He was eager with his arbitrary power to over-rule the opinion of a powerful and influential group of Orientalists like Horace Human Wilson etc mainly in the interest of immediate material concern.The language in which he rubbishes native knowledge clearly smacks of that greed over-riding any concern for justice.So what the British gave Indians as a gracious boon had been only a truncated and emasculated version of their knowledge system.But Indians like Sir Jagadish Ch.Bose,Prafulla Ch.Ray and C.V.Raman had overcome the usual colonial bureaucratic barricades to excel in that knowledge and win acclaim,proving that within given colonial limits too that system of knowledge indeed had universal qualities.
The limitations of that system of knowledge as it came to Indians under colonial rule had been penetratingly grasped and expressed by thinkers like Tagore,Gandhi and a few other outstanding people.They also.had understanding and admiration for the liberating power of Western stress on public demonstration and peer review and criticism of theories on offer.Indian system suffers from overemphasis on intuition,which makes it vulnerable to unguarded speculation and fantasy.If I.sm not mistaken what Hardy and his team helped Ramanujan to train in had been the vital importance of demonstration and proof.
The advocates of a plural and incommensurate knowledge systems,instead of universal tried and tested norms and methods during the postmodernist rebellion, actually undermined the authority of scientific knowledge and the fruitfulness of reason based on public demonstration.True,the objective rational system has certain in-built limits.But that is the insuperable condition of knowledge.At any given moment man does not have complete and perfect knowledge of any phenomenon.But as he persists,over time and through various revolutions in the order of scientific research,man acquires greater. and deeper knowledge.As the dangerous and destructive power of technological bias which is turning nature into a quicksand for man from an inexhaustible source of wealth and power had early been grasped by the scientific community.Only the monomaniac accumulators of personal riches and power over others have stalled the timely and desirable introduction of limiting and regenerating steps,as the blithe and blatant disregard by the groups of plutocratic governments like G-7 and G-20 of mandatory climate rules painstakingly formulated by the Inter-govermental Commission Of Climate Justice have demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt.Dangers of rampant individualism to the total oblivion of social good are certainly not the necessary consequences of the Western Knowledge System.People like Trump and Musk are not the icons of that system but its rogues who bring it into undeserved ignominy.As early as Darwin’s propounding of the theory of Evolution fellow-scientist Wallace had been observing the toll that imperialist toll of severe damage of nature to the ruin of man in Borneo.
Actually it is on the cards that like Trump,Musk and Bezos,the vociferous peddlers of exclusive Indian insight in knowledge of man as well as nature are also pursuing purely mundane goals of Monopoly in wealth,power and absolute authority to determine the destiny of their fellowmen.
ADDENDUM
I apologise to my readers for the unintended misprints and errors.My autocorrect is on an overdrive.As if a spook is controlling it.If I intend to type ‘scientist’,it completes ‘scholar’!And if I cross it out it rules me out and puts back ‘scholar’ again in rugged determination.
There are so many errors it will be tiresome to correct them.I humbly ask them to just ignore them.
To revert to my intention here,there is a hushed reference among advocates of a native Indian thought to an address to teachers and students of a college in Kolkata some decades before independence entitled ‘SWARAJ IN IDEAS’ by legendary Indian Kant scholar K.C.Bhattacharya.It is thought to have shown the way to developing such epistemic autonomy.
I procured a copy and went through it several times carefully.All I found there is a lament for native sterility and. intellectual dependency and a forceful plea for Indians to think for themselves.If any reader has found anything else I urge him to share it with me on pages of CounterCurrents.
I should like to add here that the basic distinction of Western System of Knowledge is the way it had been influenced by modern science,even when there is a revulsion against it.I believe we cannot shrug it off as marginal in our search for knowledge too.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
