METHOD OF SCIENCE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: INDIAN EXPERIENCE
METHOD OF SCIENCE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: INDIAN EXPERIENCE
By Sadhna Saxena, Faculty of Education, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007, India. E-mail: Sadhna1954@gmail.com
In her recent book Nanda (2009) writes about the rise of religiosity in India amongst all religions in the post liberalisation phase. In this book she says that India has 2.5 million places of worship but only 1.5 million schools and 75,000 hospitals.
Not just religiosity, the country has worst kind of poverty, malnutrition and gender bias where modern technology is used by the educated and prosperous people to abort female foetuses.
Whatever happened to the hope of building a more egalitarian and just society by inculcating scientific temper and attitude amongst the general public through science education is the key question that this paper is engaging with. ‘Scientific temper’ was an intensely debated issue in India in the decades of seventies and eighties.
The introduction of the term ‘scientific temper’ in the post independence period is credited to Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Based on Nehruvian vision ‘A Statement of Scientific Temper’ was released by a team of intellectuals and scientists which underlined the target of catching up with the rest of the world with the help of science and technology.
The statement sparked a vigorous debate on the method of science, its relevance in social inquiry and contempt towards indigenous knowledge. Despite the critique and debates on the statement on scientific temper several groups called ‘people’s science movement groups’, committed to the cause of taking knowledge of science to the people for challenging superstitions and bringing social transformation, emerged in different parts of India in the eighties.
The period also witnessed the emergence of a strong women’s movement in India. Its scathing critique of the reductionist approach to women’s health and of the government’s health programmes that reduced women’s health to mere reproductive health and population control also encompassed the critique the rationalist paradigm of people’s science movement.
It raised the issues of unscientific and unethical trials conducted on women’s bodies to control population all under the guise of women’s health. Briefly, there were few identifiable strands that dominated the discourse of science and society interface.
First, one of the predominant strands could be grouped under the people’s science movement groups. These groups primarily functioned with in the realm of taking knowledge of science and method of science to the people.
The second strand that consisted of groups that critiqued science as ‘western science’ which, they claimed, rejected marginalised people’s experience based knowledge.
The extreme elements in such strand actually closely aligned with the social constructivist ideologies and rejected philosophy of universalism and realism.
There was a third strand also, marginalised though within this discourse, that did critiqued the state and its development policies/model yet justifying the inevitability of the method of science in achieving the goals of social justice and equality and equity.
This paper is an attempt in analysing the work of these various Indian groups: the ones that questioned the universality of science, its method and relevance of the same in social enquiry and also the ones that claimed to take science and the method of science to the people for social transfromation.
In the course of this it is trying to engage with questions such as, if method of science and science can overcome ideology of the state? Or that the science has the capacity to engage with the issues of ideology and also effect ideology?
©Typologos.com 2011
