Opinion In a time where anticolonialism is parochialism, looking at J P S Uberoi’s swaraj

It is important to note the differences between the contemporary campaign for “decolonisation of the academy” that is backed by state power today and the “avowed and conscious” intellectual nationalism that JPS Uberoi advocated. For JPS, the need for nationalism in science arises because though the “aim and method of science are no doubt uniform throughout the world, but the problem of science in relation to society is not.” Thus, universal science needs to be pursued differently in different social circumstances, particularly those involving material inequalities. Hence, science in a poor country must be different from science in rich countries, despite aspiring to the same ideals.

Intellectual swaraj for JPS is defined as an active stance that takes its socio-political location seriously while still aspiring for the universals of Science with a capital S. “Indigenous science” is to be recognised by the attitudes it adopts towards problems and puzzles, not by the indigeneity claimed for its authors or concepts. Truly scientific indigenous concepts will be the byproducts of indigenous programmes of research and discovery – they will not be found fully fashioned and ready-to-use in our great and ancient culture.

The differences are made sharper when one considers JPS’s criticism of another famous text that is being claimed as a manifesto by Hindu nationalists today, namely the 1931 lecture titled “Swaraj in Ideas” by the philosopher Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya. Dismissing Bhattacharya’s essay as “a somewhat trite statement”, Uberoi takes issue with its statement of the problem which “does not stand outside – let alone bring into question – the master system of classification” of Western knowledge that separate the arts and the sciences, or knowledge, belief and action. This leads Bhattacharya to concede the world of (natural) science to the West, confining “Indian” ideas to family life, religion, a distinctive style of doing history, philosophy or literature, or “practical life” in conformity with the ideals and beliefs of the masses. JPS ends his critique with this sentence: “Swaraj, or the freedom and the sovereignty of self-rule and self-reform, will be achieved through a simultaneous re-examination of the foundations of science, art or culture and politics, their divisions and interrelations with philosophy, or it will not be achieved at all in the world of thought.”

Read today, Uberoi’s critique may seem unduly harsh, particularly in light of Bhattacharya’s warnings against “the danger of national conceit and the unthinking glorification of everything in our culture and the depreciation of everything in other cultures”, even if these are deemed to “require less stressing”. On the other hand, it is instructive to note the difference in ambition between the two. For Uberoi, any topic at all – including Western ones — can be the object of an indigenous (or Indian) science. As he writes in his book that tries to revive interest in the German thinker Goethe as a natural scientist (rather than the literary figure he is in the Western tradition): “India as a culture area will be nowhere… in the world of knowledge… if it does not first defy the European monopoly on the scientific method, established in modern times. It is no solution to propose to wait until we should ourselves become Europeans. We must recognise other ‘non-standard’ methods of the organisation of knowledge in the sciences and the arts, within and without the university, and other principles of the relation of knowledge to life, whether European or non-European.”

To appreciate why JPS and his brand of indigenous knowledge will be missed we only have to look at what passes in the name of indigeneity today. To start with the obvious contrasts, consider the proposal to reject “Western” definitions of anaemia (in women) or stunting (among children) in favour of indigenous ones, which will presumably make our health statistics look better; and compare it to the pride with which the national growth rate of the gross domestic product (GDP) is said to be one of the highest in the world in recent times. If there are reasons to question definitions of anaemia, are there no reasons to question GDP as the preeminent measure of national economic health?

At a deeper level, the claim to indigeneity today seems to be accompanied by an implicit claim for exemption from critical scrutiny and the tacit expectation of loud celebration. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of dominant ideas of indigeneity today is that they tend to be selective, singular, and systematically exclusionary in what they choose to sanctify as indigenous. While this may be the reality of our time, we can take perverse heart in one of JPS Uberoi’s one-liners: “I am not interested in reality; I am interested in the truth”.

The writer is visiting professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal