“The applications of science are inevitable and unavoidable…But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not pre-conceived theory…[This] should be, a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting and associating with our fellowmen…It is the temper of a free man.”
– Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946)
“If we drink gau mutra of a desi cow, it cures us of the infections in our lungs. I am in a lot of pain but I drink gau mutra everyday. Because of this, I don’t have to take any medicines for corona and neither am I infected with corona and with god’s blessings, it will remain so as I am taking the right kind of medicines (gau mutra).”
– Lok Sabha MP Pragya Singh Thakur, press conference at Hedgewar Hospital, Bhopal, May 2021
Prelude to a Tragedy
Much as the 2020/21 coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods across the world, India, it is safe to say, has been having an exceptionally bad time of it. The nation is in a state of mourning, its rivers flowing with corpses that its forests did not have enough wood to burn. Just about everyone you know has a friend, a relative, someone in hospital, struggling for breath. Those of us lucky enough to escape the ravages of the disease huddle together in our houses, holding our loved ones close, hoping the storm will pass, not knowing if it will.
How did we come to this?
It is easy to forget now in the depths of our collective nightmare, but it didn’t have to be this way – from roughly December 27 to March 11, daily new cases were hovering around 20,000, although there had been a slight uptick since end-February. The first wave of the pandemic had seemed to break itself on our shores, inflicting the worst on our most vulnerable, slumdwellers and migrant-workers, as well as the elderly and the sickly. A two-month nationwide lockdown, the most extreme in the world by far, when there were only a few hundred cases in India seemed to have insulated the bulk of the population. But surely everyone knew a second wave was coming, as it does for all influenza-type epidemics?
A crucial reason why the second wave seems to have been so much more virulent than the first are the mutated variants of the coronavirus currently in circulation. The first of these, the UK variant B.1.1.7, was detected in September 2020, the South African variant B.1.351 and the Indian “double mutant” variant B.1.617 in October 2020.By December 10, Indian laboratories had swung into action – forming the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG) with a target of genomic sequencing of 5% of all cases in the country. The broader aim of this consortium was to gauge where more pernicious and infectious variants were transmitting, so people could be tested, treated or quarantined in hotspots appropriately, in line with measures that other, better-equipped countries were adopting. This target, however, proved far too ambitious for our frayed healthcare system – INSACOG was not even able to reach 1% as raw materials, reagents and supplies, as well as funding, was simply not provided, with senior researchers and their students going out into markets themselves to buy supplies out of their own pocket.
How did we come to this?
By early March, INSACOG had informed the Union Health Ministry as well as the Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba that almost 20−30% of cases in Maharashtra were double mutations, that a second wave was imminent and would be crippling unless drastic measures were taken. The National Centre for Disease Control too urged a lockdown by early April in private meetings with the government. Meanwhile, the government’s National Task Force for COVID-19, a group of 21 experts and government officials set up in April 2020 to provide scientific and technical guidance to the health ministry on the pandemic, did not meet between January and mid-April, despite warnings from members themselves about growing cases. When they did meet on April 15, they too urged a lockdown – the government however did not pay heed in time.
It would not be entirely accurate to say the government did nothing. There was, after all, the urgent matter of organizing multi-phase assembly and panchayat elections in several states through April, causing the deaths of over 1600 teachers and election duty officers in Uttar Pradesh alone. From January through April 2020, the Central Government and the Uttarakhand state government took painstaking care to organise the Haridwar Mahakumbh Mela, bringing the date forward from 2021 in consultation with astrologers foran event that saw 70 lakh pilgrims attending as well as three “shahi snans” (royal baths) in the Ganga river. On February 19, Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan as well as Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari attended a press conference alongside Patanjali founder Baba Ramdev, to advertise his ayurvedic Divya Coronil tablet, which despite no approval or backing from the CDSCO (India’s drug regulator), the IMA, or the WHO, was touted as the world’s first “evidence based” medicine for Covid-19.
Looking back, it seems almost surreal – the gradual unravelling of almost every institution of the country in the face of a crisis.
So, really, the question begs to be asked.
How did we come to this?
India is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, with a history of successful mass vaccination drives. Since 2014, the Central government has been at pains to tell us that India has always been a scientific powerhouse, being the true progenitors of plastic surgery, the Pythagorean theorem, flying machines and the concept of zero among others. This state of affairs is neither in keeping with the Nehruvian promise of nation-building, nor that of the liberalised 1990s, with the country on its way to becoming a hub of technology and computing.
In this essay, though, I will try to argue that the woefully insufficient response of the Government to the pandemic and its second wave is not merely some kind of apathy or an accident. Instead, it goes much deeper – to the core of how science is viewed by the rightwing political establishment in India, as well as by the country more generally. Its roots lie in the widespread legitimization of various kinds of pseudo-science masquerading as “Vedic” science, an effort which began in the nationalist movements of pre-Independence India. In the face of widespread misinformation in today’s media, and the “miracles” that surface every other day, it is easy to forget that science is not a magic pill for all our ills – it is, primarily, a method, a way of thinking. Without understanding the scope and limitations of science, or developing a “scientific temper”, as the Constitution exhorts us to do, we are doomed to a cycle of misery and helplessness when confronted with major crises.
Choosing Our Definitions
Socrates said that the hardest thing to do was to give the definition of something, so of course, let us first get those out of the way. First of all, what is science? Many definitions have been proposed over the years, as the philosophy of science has evolved. The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper famously stated that a scientific theory must be falsifiable, i.e. it must state the event, fact or experiment which can disprove it. Over the years, many other definitions have been presented – however, for our purpose, we shall use the definition by the American physicist Alan Sokal that Prof. Meera Nanda paraphrases in her book (Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science): “the two most notable features of scientific methodology are its critical spirit – that is, a commitment to put your beliefs to stringent tests and revising or discarding those ideas that fail the test; and falliblism, that is, the understanding that all our knowledge is open to revision in the light of better evidence.”
There is one more term we have used, which should be clarified before we go further: pseudoscience. Pseudoscience, to put it simply, is fake science. The word “pseudo” means “fake”, and so, pseudoscience, to put it rather bluntly, is “fake science”. It is different from a lie or a claim of magic as it “tries to gain legitimacy by wearing the trappings of science, but fails to abide by the rigorous methodology and standards of evidence that demarcate true science. For example, if I say I can make you levitate with my mind, I am making a claim of magic. If, however, I say I can make you levitate by bringing my brain waves in resonance with the vibrations of the air, i.e. when am making use of scientific jargon in the hope of making you believe my magical claim, I am practising pseudoscience. Needless to say, this is but a simplistic idea of what “pseudoscience” can mean. In the final section, I hope to delve somewhat deeper into how analogical or resemblance thinking, a crucial aspect of both science and Vedanta philosophy, is often used in service of pseudoscience.
But before that, let us take a step back, and reach into our own history to try and understand what “scientific methodology” really means.
History and Heritage
“Our scientists discovered the Pythagoras theorem, but we gave its credit to the Greeks. We all know that we knew bijaganit much before the Arabs, but selflessly we allowed it to be called Algebra … whether related to solar system, medicine, chemistry or earth sciences, we have shared all our knowledge selflessly…”
– Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan, speech at the Indian National Science Congress, 2015
“Heritage is not “bad” history. In fact, heritage is not history at all; while it borrows from and enlivens historical study, heritage is not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it; not an effort to know what actually happened, but a profession of faith in the past tailored to present day purposes…what counts is not checkable fact but credulous allegiance. Commitment and bonding demand uncritical endorsement and preclude dissenting voices… prejudiced pride in the past is not a sorry consequence of heritage; it is its essential purpose.”
– David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
The academic discourse around philosophy of science in India, its role in nation-building or policymaking, has been historically dominated by two schools of thought (to generalize a little): the rationalist/technocrats, embodied by people such as the diplomat PN Haksar or nuclear physicist Dr Raja Ramanna, and the humanists , led by psychologist and sociologist Prof. Ashis Nandy. To go into this discourse would be the matter of a wholly different essay – but to put a simplistic spin on it, the following generalization sums it up well enough: if India launches a shuttle to the moon, the humanists would be the ones arguing that it was a waste of money, and funds should be have been diverted to the more urgent task of feeding people/improving agriculture, while the rationalist/technocrats would argue that scientific progress is its own crucial mission and we cannot afford to not aim high.
Right now, however, science policymaking in India is dominated by what can only be called the Make India Great Again school of thought. These are the people who believe that all of modern science is an “echo” of Vedanta philosophy, as Swami Vivekananda famously said, and that this knowledge has been hidden from the world due to colonialism, racism and an Abrahamanic conspiracy. In the next sections, we shall explore the ways in which science has been appropriated in modern India in the service of a nationalist agenda.
The quote by Dr Harsh Vardhan about the Indians generously giving away their right to the Pythagorean theorem is a classic example on its own.
Interestingly, he isn’t even completely wrong about this one.
So then, did we invent the Pythagoras’ theorem?
The answer to the above question, as with most things in history, is “it’s complicated”. The sulvasutras are a companion text or appendix to the Vedas, often called a Vedanga, which lay out certain technical details of various rituals, primarily the construction of fire-altars for various sacrifices. These altars would need to be made larger as the ritual went on, in precise patterns, necessitating the need to understand geometry quite well. It is in one of these texts by the priest-craftsman Baudhayana, that we find the following statement: “The cord stretched on the diagonal of an oblong (dirgha chaturasra) produces both areas which the cords forming the longer and the shorter side of an oblong produce separately”, which is a complicated way of saying “a squared plus b squared is equal to c squared”, where a, b and c are the sides of a right-angled triangle and c is the length of the hypotenuse. Baudhayana was born around 800 BC – over 200 years before the birth of Pythagoras in 570 BC.
Surely this means Dr Harsh Vardhan was right?
Not quite.The first statement of the Pythagoras theorem was not found in the Baudhayana Sulvasutra, but in two Mesopotamian clay tablets called Plimpton 322 and YBC 7289, which both date around 1800 BC, about a thousand years before Baudhayana. Even Pythagoras, who traveled to Egypt and Mesopotamia as a young man, seems to have picked up the basic idea from them. As it is, Pythagoras never claimed to have discovered the theorem, nor do his fellow Greeks. The first proof of the theorem, in fact, comes from the Chinese, who also seemed to have independently discovered it and called it the “gou-gu” theorem.
This, however, does not diminish the achievements of ancient Indian mathematicians – they may not have been ahead of their sister civilisations, but were right alongside them in exploring the intricacies of mathematics.
The problem with Dr. Harsh Vardhan’s claim, however is, not factual dubiousness. It is, rather, the fact that this murky claim is staked with an agenda – to assert that Indians have some “special”, innate faculty for science, and that by remembering our “heritage”, we can relearn how to become a scientific powerhouse. This is a hopeless dream, primarily because there is nothing in common between modern science and the “science” of any ancient civilisation, including India. And the reason is the Scientific Revolution of the 16th-18th centuries.
The Scientific Revolution
During this period in Europe, beginning especially with the work of Galileo Galilei, our methods of doing science underwent a sea change, encapsulated by the following transformations:
- Mathematization of nature, or understanding nature through mathematics
- The crucial role of precise direct and indirect experimentation to check the validity of the theory
- Development of a mechanistic world view which required no divine intervention and explained natural phenomena purely on the basis of immutable natural laws and tiny particles in motion
- The blurring of lines between manual and intellectual labour, which finally turned natural philosophy into physics
As the historian Dr James R. Voelkel says, “in this period, for example, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the earth went around the sun, Johannes Kepler derived his laws of planetary motion, Galileo Galilei described the law of falling bodies as well as inventing modern astronomy, William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, Robert Boyle carried out his experiments with the air pump, and Isaac Newton developed classical mechanics, optics and universal gravitation.”
The scientists of this era adopted certain empirical facts and mathematical formulae known to past generations, but the way they thought about these things (what is often called the episteme of the era), was radically different from anything that had come before. It is the difference between asking “why does God create fire?” or asking “how does the oxidation of certain molecules cause combustion?” As Prof. Nanda writes, “Of course the nature of the natural world (its composition, the fundamental laws governing its operations) has not changed, but the conceptual categories, methodological criteria and the aims of inquiry have undergone such a radical transformation that it is safe to say with Thomas Kuhn that the ancients and the modern scientists practically live in different worlds.” As should be clear by now, to say that scholars of ancient India (or any pre-modern civilisation) already had the answers to the questions of modern science is laughably false – not only would they not have had the answers, they wouldn’t even have understood the questions.
The Needham Question
Now, why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe at this particular time, and nowhere else? This is the crux of the Needham question in the history of science: “Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?, and why it had not developed in Chinese (or Indian) civilization which in the previous many centuries was much more efficient than occidental in applying natural knowledge to practical needs?”
And yet this quantum leap in scientific epistemology happened in Europe, and other previously advanced civilisations were extremely slow to come round to this way of thinking.
While a number of reasons have been proposed (industrial technological demands of a capitalist economy, the scholastic traditions of Catholicism, even pure dumb luck), I want to focus here on a cultural factor: the willingness to contradict dogma. The four greatest exponents of the Scientific Revolution, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, and later, even Darwin, were all deeply devout, practising Christians. Yet, when their work contradicted the dogma of the Church and the Aristotelian academia, , they remained staunchly faithful to their truths, debating or even reinterpreting Scripture, rather than rejecting their scientific findings. Eventually their newfound knowledge, over a period of many years, overturned orthodox convictions. This, however did not happen in India, as challenges to the primacy of the Vedic notion of consciousness or “spirit” failed.
As Nanda says, “history of Indian science abounds in examples of self-censorship by otherwise fine minds; whenever they perceived a contradiction between the Puranas and the mathematical astronomy of the Siddhantas, for example, some of our well-known astronomers allowed the Puranas to overrule the Siddhantas. Disheartening examples include Brahmagupta in the 17th century opposing Aryabhata’s theory of eclipses in favor of Rahu and Ketu, as well as Yajnesvara Rode in the 17th century “crushing the contradictions” that the Copernican astronomy posed to the Puranic worldview.” The authority of the Vedas and Puranas was absolute – this resistance to change and the primacy of Scriptural dictates has been a facet of Hindu, and more generally, Indian society for ages.
Yuval Noah Harari puts it quite succinctly in his book Sapiens, “The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions…. Even more critically, modern science accepts that the things we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is beyond challenge.” In light of this, any claims that the Vedas contain all worthwhile knowledge is antithetical to the very spirit of modern science. There is no science without radical skepticism.
The conflict between Vedic philosophy and progressive scientific thinking in India however, had its real cincher centuries later. When in the wake of a nation-wide struggle for independence, and a bid to create a unified religion for India – the lines of conflict between philosophy and science began to be erased subtly.
Swami Vivekananda’s Magical Thinking
“Modern science is but an echo of the spiritual flights of Vedanta philosophy.”
– Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume One
“Those who have one foot in the scientific and the other in the religious domain risk losing their foothold in both.”
– Wouter Hanegraff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought
Stop me if you’ve heard this floating around before: Hinduism is the most “scientific” religion of all, and there is no conflict between modern science and traditional Hindu and more generally Indian belief systems. Agehananda Bharati, the Austriaborn Hindu monk said, a common belief of modern Hindus is that “ ‘x = scientific’ – and hence by implication ‘modern’, where x can be any trait linked to the Indian tradition.” But we have mentioned before, claiming the validation of science without subjecting your claims to the scientific method of empirical verification is a dangerous game. As Prof. Nanda says, “It robs the x of its spiritual-cultural meaning, while robbing modern science of its distinctive methodology and worldview. While this illusion may boost our national pride, it can only create a culture that lacks any core beliefs whatsoever.” As we look at our elected officials championing cow urine and cow dung and untested ayurvedic products in the face of a deadly global pandemic, the above warnings seem prescient and stark.
This notion of Hinduism as a scientific religion is not a new one, but goes back to the period often called the Hindu Renaissance, (also sometimes called the Bengal Renaissance), which began around the mid-19th century, and reached its acme in the writings and philosophy of Swami Vivekananda. To challenge the present atmosphere of unwavering faith then, we must first delve into the cognitive biases and logical fallacies behind these claims of a “scientific religion”.
Like Resembles Like
Let me paraphrase a famous thought experiment from the Nobel Prize winning behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman – in this experiment, assume that Shahrukh has been picked from a statistically representative sample of Indian society. “An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows: “Shahrukh is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Is Shahrukh more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?”
If you answered farmer, congratulations, you have a gift for logical thinking. Most people however will say librarian, due to the resemblance of Shahrukh’s personality to the stereotypical librarian. However, at least 10% of India is comprised of farmers, whereas librarians wouldn’t be even a fraction of a percent, so statistically it is much more likely that someone of Shahrukh’s personality would be a farmer. This experiment, as well as dozens of others by Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, showed that human beings are prone to all kinds of logical fallacies and cognitive biases. This particular bias is called the representativeness heuristic, and is an example of what is called resemblance thinking. – essentially, this means that we are prone to making judgements using mental shortcuts, and more specifically, by projecting any given problem to an already existing framework in our minds. Human beings evolved to be great at finding patterns in limited data – being good at this meant the difference between seeing the tiger hidden in the forest a split second too late or just in time. However, when dealing with large datasets, our intuition fails us horribly.
And yet finding patterns and resemblances is deep-rooted in our psyche, which is why religions of all civilisations make prominent use of it. As Prof. Nanda writes, in the pre-modern era, “humanity everywhere lived in a magical world in which all that happened in the heavens above (the macrocosm), was reflected in the earthly life of humans below (the microcosm).” Trying to understand these resemblances between the spiritual and material domains was extremely important, as one could then manipulate the material world to obtain spiritual favours – what omens for human affairs did the stars carry, what ritual sacrifices or incantations would appease a certain god?
The problem, by now, may be obvious to you – these resemblances, often had no basis in logic. A classic example is how the planet Mars, because of its blood-red colour, is supposed to cause war and bloodshed – this is, of course, rubbish. Or how people with long “lifelines” on their palms are said to be long-lived – again, there is no evidence of this. This is not to say that scientific thinking itself should be free from nurturing patterns – Charles Darwin himself found certain resemblances between the artificial selection of favourable traits by breeders and Thomas Malthus’ theory of human population growth and the struggle for existence, and used it to develop his theory of natural selection. Of course, Darwin then spent the next twenty years collecting and rigorously correlating his propositions against experimental data to be sure of his findings. This kind of rigour, however, is alien to pseudoscience.
But simply to point out the biases in the so-called scientific Vedic philosophy, is to remain naïve about our own history.
Raja Yoga and the Swami
To understand Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy, we have to understand the historical context in which the Swami propounded his synthesis of a Hindu religion. Around the mid- 19th century, both the United States, in which Vivekananda travelled, networked and lectured about Hinduism for 4 years, as well as his native Bengal, were in ferment. All along the East Coast of the US, as Prof. Nanda writes, “rapid industrialization had brought with it ideas of progress and individualism that fuelled a revolt against Calvinist ideas of sinfulness of man and the need for God’s grace for salvation. Moreover, the bloody civil war had claimed countless lives, and people grieving for their loved ones were seeking solace in spiritualism which promised communication with the dead.” This was a time when various alternative religions (such as Theosophy, Christian Science, Mesmerism etc.), and the public’s appetite to go outside the Church for their spiritual needs, was thriving. What all these neo-religions had in common was a desire for synthesis of the spiritualism of the old religions, married to the spirit of a now-dominant scientific paradigm.
At the same time, in Bengal, there emerged a predominantly Hindu Bengali elite, personified by the likes of Raja Rammohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore, who, having had a Western education, “were restless: not altogether religious and not altogether secular… they simultaneously felt the need to defend the tradition of their forefathers, especially against the colonial critics, and at the same time, felt a compulsion to modernize and reform the religious tradition they were born into.” There was a shared crisis of faith on two continents, leading to cross-pollination of ideas between thinkers and ideologues on both sides, for example Unitarian Christians and the Brahmo Samaj. The goal of both seemed to be to adopt elements from both Hinduism and esoteric Christianity, a disavowal of Revelation or Scripture in favour of first-hand spiritual experience and emphasizing harmony between science and religion.
It was into this charged environment that young Narendranath Dutta, a Bengali boy from a middle-class family was thrust, and who received an apprenticeship in this neo-religious movement through his contact with the Freemasons, the Brahmo Samaj and later Keshub Chunder Sen’s Nava Vidhan (or New Dispensation), eventually becoming a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, the man who spent his whole life looking for direct experience or proof of God, and eventually coming to the conclusion that all spiritual paths lead to the one God. After Ramakrishna’s death, Vivekananda became leader of all the disciples and decided instead to venture out to the United States to spread word of his religious philosophy.
It is during his travels lecturing, networking and fundraising in the United States that he developed and propagated his synthesis of a neo-Hinduism which would not only be in complete harmony with modern science, but also be superior to it, as he famously stated at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (interestingly, at the same event, Angarika Dharmapala from Sri Lanka and Soen Shaku from Japan, also spoke, citing Buddhism as the most scientific religion of all.
But how exactly does the Swami claim this harmony between ideas of the soul and Brahman with the mechanistic worldview of modern science? It is achieved primarily through overlaying scientific terminology over the resemblance thinking of the pre-modern religion. For example, in his best-selling translation and commentary on Patanjali’s Raja Yoga (Patanjali the ancient Indian sage, not the multinational corporation), he compares the metaphysical concepts of prana and akasha with the Newtonian concepts of energy and ether, “Prana is not exactly breath. It is the name for the energy that is in the universe. Whatever you see in the universe, whatever moves or works, or has life, is a manifestation of this prana. The sum total of the energy displayed in the universe is called prana … just as akasha is the infinite, omnipresent material of the universe, so is prana the infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe.”
Now, in itself, there is not much to dispute in this deeply philosophical analogy. But then, he goes on to write, “suppose a man understood the prana perfectly and could control it, what powers of earth would not be his? He would be able to move the sun and the stars out of their place, to control everything in the universe, from the atoms to the biggest suns, because he would control the prana.” In no uncertain terms, the Swami here is defending magic, occult powers of control of mind over matter. He defends all these powers as a simple matter of “doing samyama”, which amounts to “directing the mind to a particular object and fixing it there and keeping it there for a long time”, and that by “by making samyama on the relationship between akasha (space) and the body and by becoming light as cotton wool through meditation on them, the yogi goes through the skies.”
In other, more relatable, words – he is talking directly of telekinesis, telepathy, and the likes.
While Patanjali wrote Raja Yoga two thousand years earlier and made no claim towards science, Vivekananda’s claim of harmony between science and Hinduism, made centuries later, rests primarily on these very unsubstantiated, poetic resemblances between ether and akasha, or energy and prana. It is of course a different matter that the existence of ether (which had previously been thought to permeate the entire universe) had already been disproved by the MichelsonMorley experiment, nine years before the publication of Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga in 1896, so the argument is even thinner than it first appears.
Making Sense of It All
So then, how do we seek to understand the legacy and philosophy of Swami Vivekananda? It is important here to note that he was far from alone in making claims of magic for his religion – the Theosophists, through Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled and Shrinivas Iyengar’s translation of Hathayoga Pradipika, were the first to introduce these resemblances between prana/akasha and energy/ether, while the various spiritual movements of the era made similarly motivated claims of communicating with the dead, manipulating “animal magnetism” etc. In this environment, the Swami’s claims of the power of yoga and Vedanta Hinduism would hardly have seemed outlandish. It is also important to understand that his mission was not simply a theological one, but also political – it was a bid to create a unified religious identity to fuel a nationalistic agenda, to provide validation to indigenous means of knowledge production in the face of colonial forces. A century later, and well into the era of independence he helped usher in, however, we must find ourselves able to conclude that much of his theology lapsed into pseudoscience.
Instead, Vivekananda’s philosophy has been given many a modern twist by the likes of Deepak Chopra, Swami Nithyananda and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev – people who have appropriated modern concepts from quantum physics and cosmology, to once again indulge in unsubstantiated, resemblance-seeking, pseudoscientific claims. And increasingly, ideologues such as these have the ear of the government when it comes to scientific policy.
PN Haksar said in 1981, “even science and technology are being offered not as methods of enquiry or value systems but as magical cures for our ills.” Clearly not much has changed in 40 years. Even today, there is widespread vaccine hesitancy amongst the population and a strong desire to accept the wisdom of quacks and witch doctors over legitimate medical advice. Of course, this is in large part due to the breakdown of trust between the citizen and the state, inaccessibility of healthcare and amenities to vast sections of the country, and ossified institutions failing to live up to their mandate – but is is also an embarrassing failure of science education.
Now, more than ever, it is critical that we engage meaningfully with the methods and limitations of science, that we take the opinion of our scientific experts seriously, and that we commit once more to the development of scientific temper in every Indian.