Gita Chadha is Professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. 

Ravinder Kaur is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

Renny Thomas is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.  

Sanjay Srivastava is a sociologist and a British Academy Global Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London. 

Sunandan K.N. is Associate Professor at School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. 

A brief note:

Science and technology, as we all know, have been central signifiers of Western European modernity. Aware of the overuse of these prefixes we use these as heuristic tools to situate a historical moment that spread to multiple geographies of the world, to be hybridized, contested and reinvented. With colonialism and imperialism, as we all know, these spread to non-Western worlds and became the raison d’etre, as some scholars have suggested, for the nation states of the global south, including India. In fact, in the Nehruvian paradigm of Indian modernity, the idea of scientific temper found new meanings for a liberal, rational imagination. The promise of science and technology was upheld as aspirational by people and nations; it became the sole arbiter of truth and led to what scholars like Popper and Husserl have called scientism. Though not as linear and neat as this account, it gives us a handle over the kernel of modernity.   

In the last few decades, particularly in the post-war era this has changed. Both science and technology face critical scrutiny and are no longer unexamined, leading to the emergence of the field of Critical Science Studies, a field that is rooted within the disciplines of philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology while also tapping into the intersections of these disciplines. Most importantly the field is rooted in movements for equity and justice, in and outside of academia. 

In today’s discussion, we would like to reflect upon the changing place of science in nation building in India- from the early promise – to the disenchantment – to the present appropriation of both science for the project of cultural nationalism and identity politics. We hope to simultaneously deliberate on issues of the gated nature of science, scientific institutions, communities and culture. We would like to explore the questions of gender and caste. This exercise is in no way aimed at producing a polemic between science and non-science or between the modern and the anti-modern. Our effort is to keep alive a critical re-examination, and probably, even a reclamation of the spirit of reason, especially in these times of unreason and we hope you will find this discussion useful.