In October 2021, a video surfaced that showed the Hindu Godman Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in conversation with several established scientists from India’s premier institutions. The video starts with a picture of the renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger and moves on to define the term “Upanishad”, which, according to the video, means “sitting close to the master”. Then, Ravi Shankar appears on screen, sitting on a bench, while the scientists sit on the ground, at a considerable distance. Who the “master” becomes abundantly clear to me at this point. What I fail to understand is how these scientists – pursuers of objective truths and discoverers of nature’s many mysteries – decide to concede to this self-appointed master.
It is with this confusion that I turned to anthropologist Renny Thomas’ new book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment, published by Routledge in 2021. I have followed Thomas’ work for quite some time now, and his 2020 paper “Brahmins as scientists and science as Brahmins’ calling: Caste in an Indian scientific research institute” has been particularly influential in contextualising the practice of science in India in the caste location of the practitioners. Science and Religion in India continue to do the same, constantly articulating the unique relationships that scientists at a reputed science research institute in India have with their belief (or non-belief) in religion through the lens of caste. However, as I would argue in this review, the book does much more.
In the introduction, Thomas informs readers of his methods, which primarily constitute ethnographic and archival research and the central thesis of his work: that the relationship between science and religion in India must be articulated in a language that transgresses the binary of “conflict” and “complementarity”. But “conflict” and “complementarity” are not the only categories that Thomas transgresses; right in his introduction, he talks about how despite gaining access to a research laboratory as a part of an established scientist’s research group in the institute, he does not become a complete “insider”. In the transgression and questioning of these categories, the relationships that Thomas talks about – that of science and religion in India, and that of Thomas and the laboratory – appear almost queer.
Chapter 1 of the book narrates the history of modern science in postcolonial India, marked by Nehru’s uncritical acceptance of science as the vehicle of modernity. Thomas includes a striking image from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), a marble stone with an inscription of Nehru’s statement “I too have worshipped at the shrine of science”. Through his historiography, Thomas narrates a tale of how science becomes an ideology of the state, and how inculcating scientific temper transforms from being “a moral responsibility” to “a legal obligation” with the 42nd Amendment to the Indian constitution (1976). In this history, what is of paramount importance is the conflation of rationality and science, where the scientific method was portrayed as “the only way to enter into the universal identity of a rational being”.
Chapters 2 and 3 see Thomas evaluating the intricacies of scientists and their religious lives. We encounter Raja Ramanna and CNR Rao, two distinguished scientists, who have both been vocal about their faith. For example, Thomas quotes Rao saying that “it is essential to pray to have a definite way of life, to have guidelines for ourselves, and to live harmoniously in this world”. Here, religion appears to define the limits of scientific inquiry and apply ethical constraints to the life of a scientist; in this sense, religion complements the practice of science. However, as has been previously pointed out, the discussion transcends the categories of either conflict or complementarity as we are introduced to narratives from several other scientists in the institute where Thomas did the majority of his fieldwork. For example, we are introduced to one MR Iyer who shatters the belief that science is primarily a professional practice while religion is a personal one. We are also introduced to Vishnuvardhan, a believer who is of the opinion that science is not the only method of approaching and understanding reality. The refrain in many of these narratives is the belief of many scientists that proving the existence of God is not necessary. Does this mean that these scientists are not sufficiently rational, or does this indicate an attempt to rationalise the coexistence of at least two different selves – one of the scientist and the other of the believer?
We find an answer in chapter 3, when Thomas introduces us to the term “scientist-believer”, essentially breaking down the artificial boundary between the two hypothetical selves mentioned above. In a separate conversation with the philosopher of science Sundar Sarukkai, he mentioned to me that science is a subculture of its own. Thomas’ work reinforces this statement by highlighting how several of the scientists who he interviewed held themselves as more logical and rational believers of religion as compared with lay believers, marking a unique relationship with their beliefs. This unique relationship gets articulated through unique geographies of prayer, where certain scientists mention not visiting the sanctum sanctorum of temples or the de-ritualization of the act of praying. Further, Thomas’ ethnography reveals how some scientists translate acts of faith – like fasting – to acts of science. It is at this point that Thomas cautions us about the Brahminical undercurrents of these narratives; according to Thomas, certain Hindu Brahminical religious practices become articulated as “cultural”, while practices from other religions become articulated as “religious”. This articulation universalizes certain Hindu Brahminical rituals as the overarching “culture” of the country, something that Thomas cautions his readers to be careful of.
Chapter 4 of the book looks into the lives of scientists that consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or materialists. This non-belief, however, is not detached from a “religious or cultural ethos”, where even non-believer scientists continue to wear their sacred threads and practice vehement vegetarianism (once again rationalising this practice as scientific). Atheism is articulated, once again, through geography and architecture; for example, we are introduced to the scientist Rajiv who talks about how each action has a special place, and scientific institutions are the places for scientific research. We are also introduced to several non-believer scientists who continue to visit temples, which they claim to do for reasons of architectural appreciation rather than religious belief. This articulation depoliticizes the act of visiting a temple, and at the same time, allows non-believer scientists to exist in a religious and cultural ethos without subverting either.
Chapter 5 of the book – along with the Introduction and the Conclusion – is, in my humble opinion, the most important section of the book, one that contextualises Thomas’ insights in the all-pervasive lived reality of caste. In this chapter, Thomas shows how caste shapes the construction of science as a “meritorious and neutral category”, while at the same time posits Brahmins as the natural inheritors of scientific knowledge. Further, the chapter also discusses the caste lives of Brahmin scientists, expressed through institutionalised vegetarianism, construction of non-Brahmins as impatient and geared towards profit, and knowledge of Vedas, classical music and dance – which mark the cultural capital that distinguishes Brahmin scientists from non-Brahmins. Thomas also points out how a Dalit/Bahujan vs. Casteless binary is created in the research institution, where Brahmin scientists deny caste and caste privilege using the language of “merit”, effectively rendering themselves “casteless” in their own imagination. Thomas’ book shows that this imagination is not a singular incident in one research institution, but a defining characteristic of modern science in postcolonial India.
As Vasudevan Mukunth, editor of The Wire Science has pointed out in his comments on Thomas’ book, the strength of Thomas’ book lies in its accessibility. Even as Thomas dabbles in Foucault and Bourdieu (among others), he makes both his ethnography and theorisation amazingly comprehensible to a lay reader. This book, like Mukunth, has argued, should be read by undergraduate students – and anybody who is interested and enthusiastic about science.
I also see a great pedagogical future for the book. Laboratory ethnography is a rare course of study in India, and Thomas’ book lays the method bare to its readers. The book is a reminder for both scientists and anthropologists to be self-reflexive and acknowledge the many ways in which knowledge production intersects with the social and the political.
My only critique of the book concerns Thomas’ historiography, which stops quite abruptly with a discussion about the well-known debate between proponents of “scientific temper” and “humanistic temper”, marked by Ashish Nandy’s 1981 response to “A Statement on Scientific Temper” (1981) with his “Counter-Statement on Humanistic Temper”. Several trajectories do not find a space in this historiography, viz. the People’s Science Movements, the Women’s Health Movements in the Emergency and the post-Emergency periods, and the public-health movements surrounding the HIV/AIDS pandemic in India. The People’s Science Movements often find a potential for social justice in the universalization of the scientific enterprise and distinguish between “religion” and “superstition” as is seen in the case of Narendra Dabholkar, whose assassination also marks the celebration of the National Scientific Temper Day in India. The only reference to the People’s Science Movement that I could find in the book was Johannes Quacks’ ethnography of the Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, an organisation that Dabholkar founded in 1989 to eradicate superstition in Maharashtra. The Women’s Health Movements, often critiquing the state-sanctioned objectification of women’s bodies, and the HIV/AIDS movements that critique the construction of a certain state-sanctioned notion of universal morality through the marginalisation of certain genders and sexualities, might have provided interesting insights towards the nexus between the modern-day nation state and the post-colonial scientific enterprise. That said, this critique in no way overshadows Thomas’ seminal contribution, which distinguishes Thomas as a sharp critic and a glowing ethnographer.
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Sayantan Datta (they/them) are a queer-trans science journalist. They write at the intersections of science, gender, sexuality, caste and health. They are associated with the feminist multimedia science collective, TheLifeofScience.com, and also teach writing and communication at Krea University, Andhra Pradesh.