Click:日本大学総合ランキング2024最新リスト
PM Modi addresses the Science Congress.
The Science
Congress and Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), held in India every January,
attract Nobel Laureates and inspire
youngsters to dream. The Science Congress is inaugurated by the Prime Minister,
a tradition started by Jawaharlal Nehru, who ensured that India’s Constitution
included a reference to the “scientific temper”. JLF invariably invites the
state governor or the chief minister to guarantee official support.
The two
prestigious events are divided by the gulf highlighted by C P Snow in his
famous lecture The Two Cultures. One assumes that the
Science Congress will have content as foreign to that of a literature festival
as light to a coal mine. However, since the arrival of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister, the Science Congress regularly features Hindu mythology that is usually included in JLF’s fare.
The all-pervading
influence of politics permeates events and institutions in India. It disrupts
unity but also yokes strange bed-fellows together. No firestorm is caused when
some speakers at the Science Congress undermine the importance of evidence. Similarly,
at JLF those arriving to drink deep into the Pierian springs put up with
politicians and the crowds running for food, fashion and selfies. Purity and
authenticity become debatable issues.
JLF does
not take the risk of presenting only pure literature. It bows to the market for
confrontational debates created by the TV channels showing political
cockfights. The invited political stalwarts propagate at JLF their partisan
views and see passion shooting up at their sessions. Poets cannot compete with
politicians.
The JLF agenda
has accordingly been fine-tuned. In a balancing act, the opponents of freedom
of expression are given an equal opportunity to have their say. If bigots have
heated arguments with liberals, so much the better. On a couple of occasions in
the past, crusaders belonging to one religion or the other influenced the
festival’s agenda. They spared JLF this year, having successfully vetoed the
speakers’ lists at two other literature festivals.
A kind of osmosis
This time one
saw a kind of osmosis between the Science Congress and Jaipur Literature
Festival. Both events are the largest of their kind in the world. JLF has withstood competition from other literature
festivals but sensed a new danger from the Science Congress featuring fiction
based on Hindu mythology, especially the two epics — Ramayan and Mahabharat.
The Science
Congress, held a few days before JLF, got tremendous publicity, not due to a
path-breaking scientific paper but because of some entertaining lectures and
outlandish claims about science in ancient India! A university vice-chancellor
claimed that stem cell technology existed in India thousands of years ago and
that one hundred Kauravas of the Mahabharat were created from a single embryo
that was split into parts grown in separate earthen containers! He said ancient
India had mastered aviation technology with the help of the Rig Veda and demon
king Ravana had 24 types of aircraft. Also, the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu
predated Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
This
scientist was in good company as another speaker claimed that the theories of
Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were wrong and would be disproved. As a result
of the new work, gravitational waves should be renamed as Modi Waves named
after the Prime Minister and a gravitational lens effect should be named after
the science minister.
Science CongressThe science
minister told the same forum last year that Stephen Hawking had proved that a
Vedic theory is far superior to Einstein’s famous equation. The minister follows
a trend set by the Prime Minister who said Lord Ganesh having an elephant’s
head was an illustration of ancient India’s expertise in plastic surgery. A BJP
chief minister once claimed that India had the internet during the Mahabharat
war. A BJP chief minister once claimed that India
had the internet during the Mahabharat war.
Some Indian
scientists, having measured the force of the political wind, want to banish the
principle of empirical evidence from their discipline. They seem keen to bridge
the gulf between science and superstition. A journalist wrote that “India’s
ruling party has empowered a clutch of people to vocalise their pseudo-scientific
beliefs without fear of ridicule, leave alone consequence”. Provoked by this
trend, he had commented that a country with aspirations akin to India’s on the
science front might have shunned a man unhinged in his opinions of science but
in India such a minister is protected by a culture that exalts and makes
excuses for political and bureaucratic patronage.
The foray
of the Science Congress into mythology was obviously not appreciated by the two
JLF directors, both writers. The Science Congress poached on the festival’s
territory. As if angered by the onslaught on ‘scientific temper’, they decided
that JLF must stress the critical importance of evidence-based facts! Every
action has its equal and opposite reaction. With the Science Congress selling
fiction, JLF dived into the sea of facts and featured scientific disciplines
ranging from genetics to cosmology.
Keynote address by Nobel Laureate Sir Venki Ramakrishnan. 2019 Jaipur Literary Festival.So, the keynote
address at JLF was delivered by Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He is a
structural biologist and the first Indian president of the Royal Society of
Great Britain. Citing the Royal
Society’s motto Nullius in verba (Latin for
"on the word of no one" or "take nobody's word for it"), he
said: “In science, it does not matter who you are
or where something is written, but an idea is accepted because it is testable
by experiments that can be reproduced by anyone anywhere in the world with the
required training and expertise.”
This aspect of science, he said, took root as
a result of the enlightenment in Europe and the freedom it fostered to think
and speak out against authority. In an era of fake news, where even the
existence of objective truth is questioned, there is much at stake. Science,
with its insistence on evidence-based facts, offers a counter to some of the
threats today.
In a session on his book Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, Sir
Venki threw light on the enormous ancient molecular machine, the ribosome, that
decodes genetic information to build all life forms.
Cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan spoke on the
nature of our universe. She talked about the stellar graveyard instead of
reciting an elegy written in a country churchyard. The JLF audience that comes
to understand the enigma of arrival heard about the enigma of the Black Hole.
Prof. Natarajan maps the Heavens, not the mind of a fictional hero. She lit up
the large screens to show the universe — illumined galaxy cluster, distorted
light-rays and the tiny-looking earth. Exposed to her hour-long presentation,
one tends to view in a different light the contentious issues of migration,
boundary walls and the religious “Other”. In literary sessions too, one kept
hearing that the novel has no boundaries and that the migrant is the everyman
of the present century.
Priyamvada Natarjan speaks at the 2019 Jaipur Literary Festival.The JLF sessions
on scientific topics were immensely popular. The youngsters mobbed eminent
scientists as if they are film stars or cricketers. A girl in school uniform
who attended a presentation by Priyamvada Natarajan told her: “Ma’m, I have
done research on you and I want to be a cosmologist!”
A slide being shown by the cosmologist Natarajan at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
Scientists are silent – so who
dissents?
In the scientific sessions, questions came up
from the audience about the strange statements made at the recent Science
Congress. Sir Venki said these were not made by serious scientists. Once
earlier, he had said that the Science Congress had been turned into a circus.
Someone commented that faith was holding up scientific progress in India. What else
can one expect when a High Court judge merrily announces his scientific theory
that peacocks do not mate but procreate
through tear drops?
Unfortunately, the autonomous institutions of
learning and professional organisations do not speak up when political leaders and
others make stupid statements related to science. The community of scientists in India
is a bit constrained because most of the scientific research is done in the
public sector. When some young scientists organised a protest against the state’s
anti-science policies, the government banned participation by its scientists.
Science is
characterised by “organised scepticism” but scientists watch in silence when
superstition holds sway, or freedom of expression is threatened. Dissent comes
from writers, poets and artists. They
are watched with suspicion by a political establishment determined to push
through a uniform agenda and one single narrative. The Modi Government had its first
taste of dissent when eminent writers protested against the attack on freedom
of expression by returning their state awards.
Writers and
lovers of literature harbour a healthy disrespect for authority. Inevitably, at
JLF there was much to displease the state-supported vigilante groups ever
looking to nip dissent in the bud. At a session on the Moghul rulers’
contribution to arts, architecture and music in India, someone raised the issue
of the destruction of Hindu temples by the Moghul rulers. The historian said
the destruction of temples was not invented by a Moghul emperor and much before
him, warring Hindu kings trying to expand their kingdoms used to do the same.
It was not a matter of religion but of political domination. Writers and
lovers of literature harbour a healthy disrespect for authority.
Another
politically-sensitive subject came up in an evolutionary biologist’s talk.
Fortunately, no Hindu right-winger was present to challenge the findings about the
origin of the Aryans or the migrants patterns in ancient India. David Reich, the
Harvard professor named by Nature
magazine as one of 10 people who matter in all of science, escaped hostile
attention at JLF. The session on “Ancient DNA: Who We are and How We got Here”
brought together eminent geneticists and paleoanthropologists Daniel E.
Liberman and David Reich. They discussed “the emerging picture that is one of
many waves of ancient human migrations where all populations living today are a
mix of ancient ones and often carry a genetic component from archaic humans”.
The Story of the Human Body with Daniel Liberman and Tony Joseph at JLF.Talking to
these scientists was Indian journalist Tony Joseph whose book The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We
Came From covers the finding that the Indian civilisation is the result of
multiple ancient migrations. It describes how new research using ancient DNA is
rewriting the prehistory of India.
Joseph has earlier commented on the study led by geneticist David Reich
titled The Genomic Formation of South and
Central Asia.
He wrote
that the findings will be unpalatable to many Hindu nationalists who have been
attacking eminent historians defending the theory of Aryan migration. For them,
there is a cost to admitting that the Aryans were not the first inhabitants of
India and that the Harrapan civilisation existed long before their arrival. It
would mean acknowledging that Aryans and their Vedic culture were not the
singular fountainhead of Indian civilisation and that their earliest sources
lay elsewhere.
“The idea
of mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu
nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the
additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as
latter-day Muslim conquerors of India.”
By a sheer
coincidence, this scientific study’s key theme figured at JLF’s inauguration. British poet Ruth Padel did
not come to defend her great-great-grand-father Charles Darwin who some sought
to diminish at the Science Congress. She came to read poems. One of these recited
at the opening session bridged the gap between the two cultures. More than that,
The First Cell on Earth conveyed a message
that might well curb the growing insanity:
“Born in a deep-sea vent, synthesised
by lightning in a reducing atmosphere
or carried here by meteorite, we’re all
from somewhere else…”
Priyamvada Natarjan and fans. 2019 JLF.