'Decolonizing' Science

"The Science Wars in India" by Meera Nanda, in Dissent (Winter 1997), 521 Fifth Ave., Ste. 1700, New York, N.Y. 10017.

Unmasking harmful "cultural constructs" is all the rage in the academic world. Lately attention has turned to science, attacked by Andrew Ross, Sandra Harding, and others as a Western "cultural construct" whose claim to a universally valid rationality is no more than a flimsy cover for imperialism and racism. These professors seem to think they are doing the oppressed of the Third World a big favor, observes Nanda, a science writer, but they are unwittingly opening an intellectual door for religious fundamentalists.

In India, Hindu nationalists have responded to the call for the "decolonizing" of science by aggressively promoting "Hindu ways of knowing." Nanda writes that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won 36 percent of the seats in the Indian parliament’s lower house last May, insists in its recent Humanistic Approach to Economic Development "that the cultural ethos of the Hindu Rashtra (nation) must... have the final authority over what aspects of ‘foreign’ science and technology are admitted into schools and other institutions." When the BJP came to power in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992, one of its first acts was to make the study of "Vedic mathematics" compulsory for high school students. In government-approved textbooks, standard algebra and calculus were replaced with 16 Sanskrit verses that merely provide formulas for quick computation.

History textbooks in India have also been rewritten as a result of the growing influence of Hindu nationalists in the state and central governments, Nanda says. The books now "celebrate all things Hindu (including even the caste system), propagate the myth of India as the original home of the ‘Aryan race,’ and deplore all ‘foreigners,’ including... Muslims. The history of Indian science and technology . . . is described as an unfolding of the Hindu genius," and the role of critical inquiry in science is given short shrift.

In India during the 1970s and ’80s, a "science-for-the-people" movement advocated the use of science as a means of social revolution, Nanda says. Those involved sought to employ scientific knowledge "to contest the dominant, largely Hindu world views on caste and women." But when influential intellectuals argue that scientific rationality itself is a "colonial construct," only the interests of Hindu nationalism are served.