The Historical Origins of Hindu Supremacist Claims About Modern Science
"We knew it already, always, and forever"
These are highly ironic times. Young activists who passionately talk about peace and social justice are dismissed as brainwashed and anti-national, while persons who are truly indoctrinated (with Hindu supremacist notions) occupy high and powerful positions. This disappointing discrepancy has once again reared its head in some statements by the present chief of the Indian Space Research Organization, S. Somanath. What he recently said at a public function has been summarized as: “principles of [modern] science originated in the Vedas, but [were] repackaged as western discoveries”. An article in the wonderful news magazine The Wire alerted me to this recent incident. But, well, this is an all-too-familiar story, on which I wrote in the past for The Wire and Quora. It is mildly amusing that such writings and commentaries continue to remain relevant.
There are a great many Indians, including many in the diaspora, who believe that most of modern science was “already invented” by people in ancient and medieval India. Such claims were made, for example, at the 2019 session of the Indian Science Congress (which in the past has been a pretty decent, professional affair): “[Hindus] had stem-cell technology and test-tube babies thousands of years ago.” It is also worth noting that many Indians (including myself) have grown up hearing, from our elders, how Hindu traditions and rituals have a “scientific basis”, and how the Vedas (which are Hindu scriptures written sometime between 1500–500 BCE) contain “proof” that early Hindus “already knew” modern science.
Laughably, many of these claims are based on references to magical and supernatural events in ancient Hindu scriptures and other writings. For example, the above claim, that people in premodern India “knew” stem-cell technology, comes from references in a Hindu epic of a woman giving birth to 100 babies. The rest of the claims originate from a juvenile understanding of and attitude toward logical thinking and historical analysis (something which I discussed in an article on Ayurveda in India). Both these categories of assertions about science and premodern India and/or Hinduism of course share a common pattern of absurd claim-making.
A simple thought experiment will help to drive home the profound ludicrousness of such claims. The Harry Potter books were written in the 1990s and 2000s, with translated copies available in multiple languages including Hindi. Let us suppose that sometime in the near future, human civilization is destroyed (maybe the current worldwide trends of hate & violence finally reach their logical end?). A millennium later, let’s say some Hindi-speaking persons — going by the aggressive Hindi imperialism in India, it is possible that only this Indian language will survive in the future — discover scattered pages of a copy of a translated Hindi-language Harry Potter book.
Now, in this scenario in 3200 CE, what if these folks used the example of Quidditch to claim that Indian people “knew” way back in the 2000s how to fly sitting on a piece of wood? Or claim that their ancestors knew the “science” of constructing a house which looked tiny from the outside but was enormously spacious within? Some wild enthusiast might also point out similarities between the name Harry and Lord Hari, and between Quidditch and kabaddi.
Exasperating, right?
Now while every irrational claim is fastidiously met with rightful criticism from rational-minded Indians, we must also understand when and why exactly we even began making such absurd claims. Of course there is the notorious Indian habit of confusing mythology and fables with history and real events (superbly spoofed by Varun Grover here), but are there any other, more profound forces at play? Unsurprisingly, as with most other aspects of Hindu supremacist and Brahmanical thinking, the answer lies in British colonial influence.
It has been only 70 years since India shook off British colonial domination, but most Indians still have little idea of what colonialism was. The simple understanding is that it was a foreign rule by foreigners, that it was an arrogant and violent display of power, and that it was an awful state of affairs to be in for Indians. (The truth is messier of course: e.g., this superb video explanation by India Ink shows how colonialism was such a blessing for a good number of elite Indians.) One reason we do not think beyond these simple analyses is that we are hardly exposed to anything different and more comprehensive in schools, or families, or in discussions with those around us. Besides, in today’s world the possibility of patient, nuance-filled conversations has been reduced further.
To understand better the historical origins of over-the-top Hindu supremacist claims about modern science, we need to pay attention to an aspect of colonialism that infrequently enters mainstream public discussions: the ideology of colonialism, or the justification for it provided by those who supported it. (Let’s not forget that there have always been those in Britain who were vehemently opposed to the colonial project in India.) Two phrases will be helpful here: the White Man’s Burden, and the civilizing mission. They kind of refer to the same concepts. To quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The legitimacy of colonialism has been a longstanding concern for political and moral philosophers in the Western tradition. In the nineteenth century, the tension between liberal thought and colonial practice became particularly acute, as dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith. Ironically, in the same period when most political philosophers began to defend the principles of universalism and equality, the same individuals still defended the legitimacy of colonialism and imperialism. One way of reconciling those apparently opposed principles was the argument known as the “civilizing mission,” which suggested that a temporary period of political dependence or tutelage was necessary in order for “uncivilized” societies to advance to the point where they were capable of sustaining liberal institutions and self-government.
The best, as well as the most notorious, example of the pursuit of the so-called civilizing mission in India is Thomas Macaualay’s 1835 Minute on Education, in which he argued that the only education worth imparting to Indians was Western-style education:
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.
Thus for decades — in fact for more than a century — people on the subcontinent were told, over and over again, that they were inferior to white people, and their cultures were inferior to European cultures. Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography provides a fascinating glimpse of that world. He recounts a little doggerel that was written by a local poet in the Gujarati town where he grew up: “Behold the mighty Englishman/ He rules the Indian small,/ Because being a meat-eater/ He is five cubits tall.” These lines were popular in Gujarat during Gandhi’s childhood in the 1870s, hinting at an extensive permeation of Thomas Macaulay’s British supremacist ideas.
Basically, if you were a South Asian in the 1800s, especially an urban-based privileged-caste and -class person, the discourse around you was filled with a positive portrayal of the British “civilizing mission” and the “White Man’s burden”. There was also overwhelming material evidence of British and European dominance, including military prowess and scientific innovations. To use historian Sudipta Kaviraj’s words, colonialism “triggered an immense intellectual assault” on India. Special targets of this assault were South Asian religions and religion-based cultures, which were frequently compared unfavorably with Christianity.
But then, this British and Christian dismissal of Indian cultures led to interesting consequences. Many educated Hindus — almost all from the privileged castes — were spurred to radically review and reformulate their religion and traditions. They began reappraising Hinduism and reconciling it with the ideals most associated with supposedly self-evident European superiority: rationalism and science. In a seminal book on ‘science and the imagination of modern India’, historian Gyan Prakash shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, “discussions and debates around Hindu religion and society acknowledged the authority of science.”
So elite Hindus generally acknowledged the superiority of European science in the 1800s. That did not, however, completely diminish the authority that ancient Hindu texts exercised on the minds of many of these young men coming from the privileged castes. Upper-caste Hindus who wrote extensively about Hindu cultures in the nineteenth century bowed with equal reverence before the authority of modern science AND of ancient Hindu texts. Thus an unusual, not to mention strange and eventually destructive, concoction of religion and science began brewing in the elite Indian cauldron of discourse. [For religion and science in contemporary India, see Renny Thomas’s important book on the subject.]
As an example, let's look at an excerpt from Bankin Chandra Chattopadhyay's (1838-1894, author of Vande Mataram) writings:
“It must be acknowledged that the Hindu worship of three gods [Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva] is more natural and more in accord with science than the Christian religion… If, like the Hindus, one accepts the doctrine of karma or maya, it would then be in accord with science.”
[Excerpted from Gyan Prakash’s book]
Prakash neatly sums up this new, nineteenth century way of looking at Hindu traditions:
“Hindu intelligentsia began to identify a body of scientific knowledge in particular Indian texts and traditions. Denying that science was alien to India, they argued that the ancient Hindus had originated scientific knowledge. This view earned widespread support among the Western-educated elite and became a key nationalistic belief. Religious reformers, litterateurs, philosophers, and practicing scientists alike spoke repeatedly and obsessively of a forgotten but true knowledge fashioned by the ancient Hindus.”
Faced with constant assaults on their [casteism-infused] traditions, the then Hindu elites found solace and self-respect in ancient Sanskrit texts and clearly didn’t find anything much “scientific” in contemporary Indian ways of living. Of course their conservative, Brahmanism-dictated upbringing taught them a very narrow view of Indian people and Indian history, belittling and dehumanizing most others around them. That rendered these elites blind to the scientific knowledge and skills present abundantly in the less privileged worlds of Indian artists, masons, midwives, bonesetters, laborers, potters, craftspeople, etc., since these peoples and groups belonged to the non-elite Bahujan castes or non-Hindu communities including Adivasis.
This obsession with the past in general and with Sanskrit texts in particular, which upper-caste Hindus introduced into our public discourse in the 1800s, has unfortunately lived on and was never fully abandoned in India even after formal end of colonialism. Today, the irony is that some in India are resorting to those makeshift reformulations, or what linguist and historian Ramkrishna Bhandarkar (1837–1925) termed an “extravagant admiration for ancient Hindus,” even 70 years after independence. This after countless genuine scientific achievements in so many fields of study, and despite a widespread awareness about genuine premodern scientific achievements through the work of historians of science, is particularly tragic.
In these times, Bhandarkar’s 1918 prescription holds truer than ever:
“We must not cease to read our Sanskrit and vernacular works for the pleasure and instruction they afford to us. But we must take care that our partiality for them in this respect does not obscure our judgment when we have to examine them critically.”
Finally, we also must remember that the Vedas and the Sanskrit epics were accorded significance in all those nineteenth-century reformulations of Hinduism and “Indian culture” primarily because, due to historical contingencies, these developments occurred first within elite Hindu circles in Bengal and northern India. Considering India’s vibrant and deep-rooted diversity, it is possible that people from other regions of the subcontinent and with different social and cultural backgrounds, would have responded to British colonialism’s intellectual assault quite differently, perhaps even confidently and inclusively. But alas.