Author: Ophelia Benson

The Underlying Belief System

Gail Omvedt speaks of a “a distorted image of farmers held by a section of the urban elite” in India as well as in developed countries. This mythic image:

depicts them romantically but demeaningly as backward, tradition-loving, innocent and helpless creatures carrying on their occupation for love of the land and the soil, and as practitioners of a “way of life” rather than a toilsome income-earning occupation. These imagined farmers have to be protected from market forces and the attacks of multinationals, from the seductions of commercialization and the enslavement of technologies (Omvedt 1998).

Modern agriculture and the food supply it provides, along with modern medicine and the pharmaceuticals and technological devices it uses and the science on which it is based, have become a villains of choice for many who find the trends of the last half of the 20th and beginnings of the 21st century to be a danger to human health and well being, as well as ecologically destructive. Given that the 20th century witnessed the greatest increase in human life expectancy the world has ever experienced, while accommodating a roughly 350% increase in population, there is a strange and almost perverse irony to this anti-modern mania, since it is generally accepted that improved nutrition and such medical interventions as immunization and anti-biotics are major factors for human health and longevity. Other important factors contributing to the expansion of human life such as chlorination of water, use of pesticides to reduce or eliminate disease vectors, refrigeration, pasteurization and other forms of sterilization and preservation are all products of modern science and technology. Most of these have also had their critics, and still do.

Not all of those who oppose one or more of these aspects of modernity necessarily oppose them all, but many do, as there is an underlying belief system that links them together. It should be made clear at the outset, that we are not talking about critics who seek to improve upon food production and medical care but those who consider our current ways of doing things to be so fundamentally flawed that they have to be overthrown root and branch. A further irony is that as critics of modern science, technology and agronomy become more vehement, the public level of knowledge about these subjects has not fared as well as the endeavors themselves. Maybe it is not so ironic, as one increasingly wonders what was learned about the disciplines of modern inquiry by those who have degrees under the rubric of Science and Technology Studies or Critical Inquiry. I have colleagues in my own university who wouldn’t know a cow patty from a rice paddy if they stepped in one but nevertheless claim expertise in “sustainable agriculture.”

Harvesting and eventually transforming plants means that we have to act to maintain their continuity by some form of compensation. According to Wood and Lenné:

Harvesting of plant parts – particularly the reproductive parts – for human food would decrease the competitive ability of targeted plants. Unless there was some compensation for this, the population of the food plant would decline in competition with non-food plants; there would be less food for gatherers the following season…Simply, if we eat the plant’s reproductive strategy, it will not be able to compete with less useful species. To maintain the food supply, we need to compensate the plants in some way. With compensation, the food species could expand at the expense of non-food plants, giving us a more assured food supply (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 20-21).

To Wood and Lenné, “compensation is the key to the coevolution of food plants and human exploitation” (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 21). After describing the compensatory mechanisms of agriculture, they conclude that “agriculture is therefore a combination of ways in which we help food-providing species to compete making more and more plants dependent on our `sufferance or favor’” (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 21).

The Green Revolution in agriculture has to be seen as one of the great achievements of our time. It has been the driving force behind the spectacular increases in global food supply over the last half century. Yet a variety of myths have arisen about it that have become so deeply imbedded in conventional wisdom that one does not need to be a Luddite or mossback reactionary to accept them as unchallenged fact. What is truly extraordinary is that each of these myths is exactly contrary to what can clearly be demonstrated was the case. There still remain some like Vandana Shiva who either deny the gains in output or who maintain that they are achievable with a reversion to earlier, more “organic” forms of agriculture. But to deny the output gains of the Green Revolution is so contrary to fact that only the most extreme zealots believe it. Most accept the fact of the increases in output but claim that they came at an unacceptably high price. Of course, we can always counter that the price of not increasing yields would have been a combination of massive famine and environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale as a result of attempting to bring ever more land under cultivation.

The presumed costs of the Green Revolution are that the HYV (high yielding varieties) of seeds “require” more fertilizer, water and pesticides (when in fact they outperform the traditional varieties at nearly any level of inputs) and that they have given rise to a dangerous monoculture leading also to a decline in non-grain products with a resulting worsening of the nutrition of poor people. Part of the anti-globalization mythology is that the Green Revolution gave rise to greater inequality of income and possibly even left the poor worse off. The data on the Green Revolution and the growth in global food production generally has accumulated and been frequently analyzed and it is clear that each of these beliefs is egregiously wrong. Let us examine each of these beliefs, starting with the issue of water needs.

Water and Fertilizer

The modern rice varieties have about a threefold increase in water productivity compared with traditional varieties. Progress in extending these achievements to other crops has been considerable and will probably accelerate following identification of underlying genes…Genetic engineering, if properly integrated in breeding programs and applied in a safe manner, can further contribute to the development of drought tolerant varieties and to increase the water use efficiency…Overall, The best estimates are that “the water needs for food per capita halved between 1961 and 2001” (FAO 2003 28).

Higher yields “require” more fertilizer, as the more nutrient is extracted from the soil, the more has to be replaced. Norman Borlaug in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech states: “If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the Green Revolution, then chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust … The new varieties not only respond to much heavier dosages of fertilizer than the old ones but are also much more efficient in their use” (Borlaug 1970).

The old tall-strawed varieties would produce only ten kilos of additional grains for each kilogram of nitrogen applied, while the new varieties can produce 20 to 25 kilograms or more of additional grain per kilogram of nitrogen applied (Borlaug 1970).

Not only are the Green Revolution plants more efficient in fertilizer use, but equally important has been the improvement in the use and application of fertilizer. For example, there has been a 36% increase in “N efficiency use in maize” in the United States over the last 21 years as a result of improved knowledge and technology (Blair and Blair 2003). Even Europe with its obscene agricultural subsidies and the environmental problems resulting from over-use of fertilizer, has seen yields rise faster than fertilizer application (Fresco 2003). Imagine the potential increases in efficiencies that could be realized if the agricultural subsidies in Europe and the United States were removed. In other parts of the world such as Latin America and Africa, the problem is not too much fertilizer but not enough. Genetic engineering offers further opportunities for more efficient fertilizer use by increasing the photosynthetic efficiency of plants.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the “nutrient balance is negative for most crops and cropping systems.”

The end result is not just loss of soil fertility. The physical and biological structure of the soils will also be degraded including reduction in soil organic matter levels and hence of carbon sequestration, lower moisture holding capacity and greater vulnerability to erosion (Norse 2003).

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer costs money, so as one would expect, farmers attempt to become more efficient in its use. The best measure of this is the ratio of nitrogen in the fertilizer applied to the nitrogen in the crop. This ratio fell for American farmers by 2% a year from 1986 to 1995. Further, there is no evidence that bulk deposition of nitrogen, which is of environmental concern because of run-off into rivers and streams, has been increasing (Frink et al. 1999). Another measure of increasing efficiency in nitrogen use is the feed-to-meat ratio. As we have just shown, the synthetic nitrogen-to-nitrogen in the crop has been falling and now, in turn, the “calculated feed to produce a unit of meat fell at an annual rate of 0.9%” from 1967 to 1992 (Waggoner and Ausubel 2002). With increasing crop yields per acre, “cropland for grain-fed animals to produce meat for Americans shrank 2.2% annually” (Waggoner and Ausubel 2002).

It is important to note here that the global demand for animal products – meat, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken etc. – is increasing at a faster rate than population and the basic demand for food. For example, while grain production was increasing 2.7 times over the last forty years, production of broiler chickens increased slightly more than six times from 8 billion to 49 billion. More efficient cultivation of maize as an animal feed will be an essential component for continuing to provide the nutrients that are improving the health for much of the world’s population. As an historical note, the diffusion of maize into Europe following its maritime contact with the Americas, is credited with providing the yield necessary for expansion of animal production and consumption which in turn is considered an important causal factor in the expansion of life expectancies that followed (Scott and Duncan 2002).

India’s need for synthetic fertilizer long predates the Green Revolution’s increased use of it. Historically there was a large difference between the nutrients extracted from the soil in India and the “organic” nutrients available to be returned to it. In the 1960s, each year cultivated crops in India were removing:

3 million tons of nitrogen, 1.5 million tons of phosphorus oxide and 3.5 million tons of potash…8 million tons of plant food. The organic sources of the plant food returned to the soil is hardly 1.8 million tons of nitrogen, 0.60 tons of phosphorus oxide and 1.8 million tons of potash…4.2 million tons of plant food (Randhawa 1983, Vol.3, 314-317, using data from Agarwal 1965, 7, 12, 13, 14, 214, cited in DeGregori 2003b)

Randhawa adds: “Even allowing for the biological and other natural processes for recuperation of fertility, the balance ie tremendous” with nearly twice as much nutrient being withdrawn from the soil as was being returned to it (Randhawa 1983 317, cited in DeGregori 2003b).

Similarly for Africa: Soil fertility depletion on smallholder farms, together with the concomitant problems of weeds, pests and diseases, is the fundamental biophysical root cause for declining per capita food production in sub-Saharan Africa (Kelemu et al. 2003, see also Sánchez et al. 1997).

The annual loss of nutrient in Africa is “equivalent to US $4000 million in fertilizer.” These are rates of nutrient depletion that “are several times higher than Africa’s (excluding Rep. of South Africa) annual fertilizer consumption, which is 0.8 million t N, 0.26 million t P and 0.2 million t K” (Kelemu 2t al. 2003, see also FAO 1994 and Smalling et al. 1997). The “traditional way” of overcoming soil nutrient depletion by applying mineral fertilizer is rendered difficult by fertilizer cost which is “2 to 6 times as much as those in Europe, North America or Asia” (Kelemu et al. 2003). Thus there is a need to use the tools of modern plant molecular biology to develop cultivars that are more efficient in nitrogen use (Rao and Cramer 2003, see also ECA 2002).

Disease Resistance

The Green Revolution seeds turn out to be more disease resistant (as plant breeders have added multiple disease resistant genes – gene stacking), requiring less pesticides. “Increasingly, scientists breed for polygenic (as opposed to monogenic) resistance by accumulating diverse, multiple genes from new sources and genes controlling different mechanisms of resistance within single varieties (Smale 1997, 1265, see also Cox and Wood 1999, 46). The coefficient of variation for rice production has been steadily decreasing for the last forty years which would seem to indicate the new technologies in agricultural production are not as fragile as some would have us believe (Lenné and Wood 1999, see also Wood and Lenné 1999a&b and Evenson and Gollin 1997). This has also been the case for wheat. “Yield stability, resistance to rusts, pedigree complexity, and the number of modern cultivars in farmers’ fields have all increased since the early years of the Green Revolution” (Smale and McBride 1996).

Modern “monoculture” is central to the unverified claims about modern varieties being less disease resistant (DeGregori 2003c). The “natural ecosystems” from which important cereals were domesticated were often moncultures – “extensive, massive stands in primary habitats, where they are dominant annuals.” This includes the “direct ancestors of our cereals Hordeum spontaneum (for barley), Triticum boeoticum (for einkorn wheat) and Triticum dicoccoides (for emmer wheat)” which “are common wild plants in the Near East” (Wood and Lenné 1999, 445). This was not unique to the Near East but was a prevailing pattern of the time. In the transition from Pleistocene to the Holocene, “climatic changes in seasonal regimes decreased diversity, increased zonation of plant communities, and caused a shift in net antiherbivory defense strategies” (Guthrie 1984, 260, cited in DeGregori 2003c). The “ecological richness of late Pleistocene” in many of the areas that humans were first to develop agriculture, gave way to “relative ecological homogeneity during the succeeding Holocene” (Guthrie 1984, 251, cited in DeGregori 2003c).

Critics of modern agriculture who fear the susceptibility to disease from monculture, continually hark back to the southern corn-leaf blight in the U.S. in 1970 since they cannot come up with any other comparable loss in the last half century in corn or wheat or rice, the staples that provide about two-thirds of the world’s food production. The $1 billion in losses of about 15 to 25% of the 1970 corn crop was substantial, but these loses should be considered against the fact that corn yields had more than doubled over the previous two decades and that the crop year following the blight was one of record yields. When not using the corn blight, the critics go back over 150 years to the Irish potato famine. And they simply ignore the crop losses and famine that have been the lot of humankind since the begining of conventional, largely “organic” agriculture.

The Utility of the Genome

Targeted genome sequencing by methylation filtration offers a lower cost method for gaining valuable information about food crops for plant breeding where the more expensive approach of sequencing the entire genome might not be financially warranted (Palmer et al. 2003 and Whitelaw et al. 2003).

If one seeks to understand plant diversity at the genomic level, an argument can be made for increased diversity. “Some modern varieties of rice and wheat have very comprehensive pedigrees and can be highly genetically diverse. For example, `IR 66′ has 42 landraces in its parentage with multiple disease and pest resistances, drought tolerance and earliness” while another variety has 49 landraces including multiple disease and pest resistances (Hargrove et al. 1988, cited in Polaszek, Riches and Lenné 1999, 288). Thanks to modern plant breeding, wheat has a diversity which it previously lacked. “Wheat lacks diversity because it evolved through a natural genetic bottleneck. It has always teetered on precariously narrow genetic base” (Cox 1998, cited in Cox and Wood 1999, 44-45). Bread wheat was the accidental “unnatural” crossing of einkorn and then emmer wheat with another species. The latter, tetraploid emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum) somehow crossed with a weedy diploid goatgrass (Aegilops tauschii) (Cox and Wood 1999, 45). What was done by nature could not be done by humans until we could grow rescued embryos in an artificial medium. Modern wheat now has a number of resistant genes that have been derived from other species, giving it a greater diversity and vastly greater disease resistance. And this increased resistance has produced results.

In their study of the “wheat’s origins and the flows of germplasm between various regions of the world,” Smale and McBride examine “patterns of bread wheat diversity in farmers’ fields and evidence of genetic variation from breeding programs.”

Findings suggest that the often-invoked dichotomy between the gene-poor North and the gene-rich South has little validity for wheat. Findings also suggest that yield stability, resistance to rusts, pedigree complexity, and the number of modern cultivars in farmers’ fields have all increased since the early years of the Green Revolution (Smale and McBride 1996, Abstract, see also CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo). 1996, Rice et al. 1998, Smale 1997, Smale, ed. 1998, Smale et al. 1996 & 2002 and Gollin and Smale 1998).

In the Indian Punjab in the 1950s, “the area planted to a single cultivar was high. … In the high potential zones, semidwarf wheats generally replaced the tall cultivars that had been released by the Indian national breeding program from the early 1900s … if any long term trend is observable since 1947, it has not been upward” (Smale 1997, 1261). Citing Howard and Howard, Smale adds that “according to government records, Indian landraces, which were planted to millions of contiguous hectares, were notably susceptible to rust. Average annual losses were estimated in one document at 10% of the value of the crop” (Smale 1997, 1261).

If the myths about the alleged “failure” of the Green Revolution were simply about the past, there would be little need to expend much effort to refute them except to set the historical record straight. The fact is that the “failure” of the Green Revolution has become one of the axioms of those opposed to the continued use of science and technology to improve our food supply, particularly using biotechnology for what has been named as the “double Green Revolution” and as a basis for promoting alternate forms of agriculture.

Safety of the Food Supply

Our food supply remains safer than it ever has been. Proponents of “organic agriculture” and many consumers believe that “organic agriculture” is “pesticide free” even though there is a USDA website for approved pesticides for “organic agriculture” including synthetic pesticides (USDA 2002, http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/NationalList/FinalRule.html). Purists who oppose “transgenic” plant breeding because it is somehow “unnatural” nevertheless have yet to raise any objections, to the best of my knowledge, to plants that are the result of mutation breeding using carcinogenic chemicals or gamma rays or the use of techniques such as altering the ploidy or chromosomal structure by crossing diploids and haploids, tissue culture or somoclonal variation, embryo rescue, protoplastic cell fusion etc, etc. Of course, if they did object, they would have problems finding anything to eat. And we must never forget that these mutation-bred plants are very much a part of the crops of the “organic” farmers whose supposed opposition to synthetic pesticides requires them to use varieties that are more resistant to disease infestation. Yet these same farmers oppose the transgenic plants (particularly when used in conjunction with conservation tillage) that have most effectively provided pest resistance, increasing output and reducing pesticide use as well as reducing fuel use, water loss, and soil erosion, and conserving biodiversity.

Critics argue that inserting a gene from one species into another is “unnatural,” but then worry that the transgene will in nature jump to other species. (We should add that the restriction endonucleases and ligases [both are enzymes] used to cut and re-ligate the cohesive ends of DNA for recombinant DNA technology were first observed in nature as were the plasmids [circular pieces of DNA outside the chromosome] as a means to encode a gene. They were not the product of mad scientists.) What basis then in fact or theory is there to call gene flow from transgenic crops, “contamination?”

There is the fear that transgenic resistance genes will outcross with the non-food crop plants or transfer resistance genes to a bacteria (“jumping genes”). Breeding in genes for resistance by means other than transgenics seems to arouse no fears that these same genes will outcross with weeds, creating so-called superweeds that are no longer deterred by the pesticides. (For the last 40 years, hundreds of millions of hectares have been planted in modern varieties of wheat and rice and yet there is not a single verifiable case of a dwarfing gene migrating to neighboring species.) Without question, gene flow from transgenic crops will happen in one form or another as it has happened with planted crops since the beginning of agriculture.

“Defying the expectations of scientists monitoring transgenic crops such as corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins derived from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), target insect pests have developed little or no resistance to Bt crops thus far, according to US Department of Agriculture’s funded scientists” (Fox 2003, 958, see also Tabashnik et al. 2003a&b and Mendelsohn et al. 2003). Ironically, the diamondback moth “evolved resistance to Bt sprays used by organic growers, but no pest has evolved resistance to transgenic Bt crops in the field” (Fox 2003, see also DeGregori 2003a, 115-116). The irony is of course that it is the organic growers who have vociferously complained that the transgenic Bt varieties would lead to the emergence of super bugs resistant to their Bt spray.

Then there is the fear that transgenic genes will move about the genome, land in the wrong place or interact with other genes leading to the expression of other characteristics (called pleiotropy) such as a dangerous toxin or allergen. Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her discovery of chromosomal instability fifty years ago. Plant geneticists have yet to observe any greater chromosomal instability in transgenics but they have in the products of tissue culture which has been absolutely essential, particularly in developing countries for breeding plants resistance to a particular disease.

The use of tissue culture in plant breeding has also often resulted in somaclonal variation of plant lines and irregular phenotypes or field performance. Somaclonal variations are mutational and chromosomal instabilities of embryonic plants regenerated from tissue cultures (Haslberger 2003).
Unfortunately, these “chromosomal instabilities” persist for some time not only in the original crop but in future crops in which it is part of the breeding stock.
These instabilities may result from activation of dormant transposons in the chromosome. The consequent genetic variability is known to persist for many generations and is difficult to eliminate by backcrossing (Haslberger 2003).
It is interesting to note that in searching for the possible “unintended consequences” of rDNA. a committee of the Codex Alimentarious found the most serious unintended outcomes were in crops from “traditional breeding.”
a traditionally bred squash caused food poisoning, a pest-resistant celery variety produced rashes in agricultural workers (which was subsequently found to contain sevenfold more carcinogenic psoralens than control celery) and a potato variety Lenape contained very high levels of toxic solanine (Haslberger 2003).

These varieties are no longer cultivated (Kirschmann and Suber 1998, Ames and Gold 1990, Beier 1990 and Prakash 2001). The most recent episode was an outbreak of “killer zucchini” which produced the “only food scare in recent history in New Zealand” and interestingly it “stemmed from the farming methods of organic farmers and others who use unconventional farming practices” (LSN 2003). In February 2003, Zucchini with “high levels of natural toxins” were sold on the vegetable market and resulted in “several recorded cases of people suffering food poisoning” (LSN 2003). We often worry about the toxicity resulting from spraying crops but we rarely worry about those from not spraying them.

An examination of common factors shows the levels of toxin apparently increased among zucchini growers who did not spray their crops. Unusual climatic conditions meant there were huge numbers of aphids about in January and insect predation is sometimes associated with increased levels of toxins in plants (LSN 2003).

In this case, there was a “clear link between increased toxin levels and older open-pollinating varieties of seeds” (LSN 2003). It is “likely zucchini grown from saved seed will therefore be more vulnerable to toxin build-up” (LSN 2003). The scientists who reviewed the “killer zucchini” case were very clear that the “most likely cause of the build up of toxins is a genetic weakness in older varieties.” However worthy the farmer’s intentions may have been, “the growers’ decision to use older varieties and to save seeds is likely to have resulted in a health risk for consumers – something which has never happened with crops derived from genetic modification” (LSN 2003).

Transgenic crop breeding is the most predictable form of plant breeding ever devised by humans and is therefore the safest. Yet it is also the only form of plant breeding that is regulated, largely because it is the only form of plant breeding for which it is reasonably possible to test prior to widespread use. (Using rDNA to create plants that express a vaccine or pharmaceutical has tremendous potential for benefiting those most in need. However, given the many possibilities of harm, those producing a vaccine or pharmaceutical via transgenic breeding must operate in terms of strict protocols, careful segregation in growing, and careful oversight and regulation.)

In spite of vociferous opposition, the planting of transgenic crops is increasing worldwide, more in developed countries than developing countries, as farmers find that higher final output from either increased yield or reduced crop loss or both, makes it worthwhile to pay a premium for commercial transgenic seeds.

Other Environmental Hazards

After the furor over the alleged threat to the Monarch butterfly from transgenic maize was shown to be a tempest in a teapot, it is clear that the most serious threat to the Monarch butterfly is from the destruction of its winter forest habitat in Mexico by poor farmers clearing small plots to raise crops to feed their families. Higher sustainable yields on existing farms including the use of transgenics and/or more rewarding non-farm employment would greatly aid the protection of the forest habitat and the preservation of the Monarch butterfly.

Whatever the environmental problems of the much maligned Green Revolution technologies in wheat and rice, and they are real, the increased yields from these and related gains from modern agronomy in other crops such as hybrid maize have had the effect of minimizing the amount of land that had to be brought under cultivation. It is widely understood that the single most important cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. In the last forty years of the twentieth century, the world’s population slightly more than doubled from about 3 billion to over 6 billion people while global food supply increased to about 270 percent of its 1960 level, resulting in a 30 to 40 percent increase in per capita output. This was achieved even though the land under cultivation increased from 1.4 billion hectares to only 1.5 billion hectares.

the yield-increasing, land-saving nature of the Green Revolution has reduced the pressure to put more land under the plow. Indeed, the recent data bear out this interpretation: Indian food grain output has continued to grow at a healthy rate of 3 percent annually through … 1981-1991 while the land under cultivation has actually decreased annually (Nanda 2003, 243 citing Sawant and Achuthan 1995; Hanumantha Rao 1994).

The enhanced Green Revolution yields in the primary food/calories source, makes more land available for a variety of other crops and greater diversity in the population’s diet. This is counter to the conventional wisdom about the Green Revolution and its impact upon diet and nutrition. Sawant and Achuthan found the “decisively superior performance of non-foodgrains vis-a-vis foodgrains” to be the “most striking feature of India’s agricultural growth in the recent period (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-3). For 1981-1992 in India, the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of non-foodgrains of 4.3 per cent “exceeded significantly that of foodgrains” at 2.92 per cent. Though there was annual decline of O.26% in the area of foodgrain cultivation, “it is important to recognize that foodgrains output continued to grow at the rate of 2.92 per cent as the growth in yield per hectare exceeded 3 percent” for a CAGR of 3.19 per cent, all of which indicates an “an increasing shift of land from foodgrains to non-foodgrains” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-3). “The entire output growth in this period can, therefore be attributed to the increase in yields per hectare” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 12).

Impact on Poverty

The most important contribution of technological change in Indian agriculture since the mid-sixties consists in making Indian agriculture progressive and dynamic by making farmers increasingly conscious of science and technology (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 51).

After surveying a wide range of crops in India, Sawant and Achuthan conclude that there is “evidence in support of a wider, greater diffusion of technology in recent years to a large number of crops not benefited in the early phase of the green revolution” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-7). “Another distinguishing character of agricultural growth in the 1980s has been its wider dispersal over regions” with the “fact the foodgrains outgrowth picked up in many less developed areas” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-13). Since the mid-1970s in India, there has been a “significant” decline in “inter-state disparities in real wages” caused by labor migration from poorer areas, the “decline in the relative prices of foodgrains,” poverty alleviation programs and the “pick-up in agricultural growth” in poorer areas (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 43). In addition, gender disparities have diminished as female wages have been rising as “traditional semi-feudal relations in agriculture” have been weakened under the impact of the improved agricultural technology (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 43, 51, 55-58, 60-63). The Green Revolution-driven global decline in the relative price of foodgrains has been a major force for poverty reduction, particularly in Asia, for the obvious reason that the poor spend a much higher portion of their income on foodgrains than other income groups. Hanumantha Rao vividly describes the “miserable” working conditions for migrant labor in India, their exploitation by employers and middlemen, and their declining income share in “areas undergoing rapid technological change.” However, “despite the hardships and exploitation, the incomes of migrant labour are higher than they would have been able to earn without migration” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 52 & 54). In the “process of migration, the labour has become more skillful, enterprising, and has considerably improved its staying power on account of rise in its income. This has enhanced its capacity to fight against injustices” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 55).

It is important to note that “among initial conditions conducive to pro-poor growth, literacy plays a notably positive role” (Datt and Ravallion 1999). Datt and Ravallion found that “the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty” (Datt and Ravallion 1996). The higher agricultural yields of the Green Revolution were pro-poor in that they “reduced absolute poverty in rural India, both by raising smallholder productivity and by increasing real agricultural wages.” These benefits were not “confined to those near the poverty line — the poorest also benefited” (Ravallion and Datt 1995). Thanks to the efficiacy of these agricultural technologies, economic growth did not have to be sacrificed in order for there to be benefits for the poor. In fact, “there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro-poor distribution” (Datt and Ravallion 1996). On the debate on whether there has been rising inequality as a result of globalization, Martin Ravallion is often seen as one who supports the view of increasing inequality. However, he also finds that “from the point if view of the poor,” income distribution “has not been deteriorating in the 1990s” (Ravallion 2001, 1807).

Population Growth

One hates to imagine all the famine, disease and death that would have resulted if these spectacular yield increases had not happened, or the destruction of wildlife habitat from desperately hungry people trying to grow food for themselves and their families (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 161-163, 189). “Some estimates of land savings due to all past research efforts and agricultural intensification amount to more than 400 million ha. Mineral fertilizers may have provided 30-50% of these savings and have therefore made a major contribution to the preservation of tropical rainforests and biodiversity” (Norse 2003, see also Pinstrup-Andersen, 2003).

It is generally recognized by demographers that regularized and improved food supply is one of a constellation of development outcomes which lead to low infant death rates which in time lead to lower fertility rates. For about thirty years after World War II, death rates fell faster than birth rates – the population growth rate is the difference between the two, birth rates minus death rates – causing population growth rates reaching about 2.3% per year by the early 1970s. Since the mid-1970s, birth rates have been falling faster than death rates, slowing population growth which will likely lead to a leveling of population at about 9 billion by the mid twenty-first century and possibly even initiate a long term decline. Whatever environmental problems (as well as those of poverty and hunger) we face today, they will be greatly compounded unless modern agronomy is able to continue to facilitate sustainable increases in yields using the technologies that are increasingly being opposed in the name of protecting the environment.

Decrease in Hunger, Increase in Height

The Green Revolution technology in rice involved HYVs (high yielding varieties) of rice with a significantly shorter growing season, allowing the farmer to plant more than one crop per year, thus increasing output both by higher yields and more crops. The seeds generally came as part of a package, along with fertilizer and pesticides and often with access to water. Plants, like all living organisms, need nutrients to grow. Higher yields require more nutrient input no matter what the crop is. In effect, the Green Revolution turned tens or even hundreds of millions of peasant subsistence agriculturalists into mini agribusinesses buying inputs and selling outputs to pay for inputs and to secure a small profit. There were environmental costs from more intensive, sometimes year-round planting and population growth. For example, in an island like Java, with 120 million people in an area the size of Wisconsin, soil erosion and pesticide contamination of the groundwater were and are problems. IPM (Integrated Pest Management) programs using a variety of strategies for pest control, including the use of predator insects such as spiders to help to control crop-eating insects, have helped to reduce pesticide use in many areas, but the task is often difficult and not always successful. Disease resistant varieties of rice have probably been more effective in protecting the crop than IPM, but a multiplicity of strategies for crop protection has merit. An IPM program for cabbage in central Java was teaching farmers to “scout” for bugs, count them and only spray when they reached a certain density instead of once a week. When I asked a farmer not in the program and spraying by the calendar, what he would say if I told him that a farmer across the valley was spraying less than half the number of times that he was and getting the same output, he responded that he wouldn’t believe me. The very success of the Green Revolution package of technologies has made it difficult to make even minor adjustments that benefit the environment. The speed at which “tradition”-bound small farmers adopted the HYVs in paddies literally everywhere it could be grown, surprised even the most optimistic among us. The farmer, having experienced the lower yields and more frequent crop loss of traditional agriculture, was not easily convinced to even slightly modify the technology package that had so dramatically transformed the local food supply and decreased hunger and malnutrition. Those of us who have witnessed this transition in Asia and through time, have little doubt about the overall accuracy of the statistics which show an absolute and proportional decrease in hunger and malnutrition and increase in height that is readily observable throughout most of Asia (for example, see Morgan 2000 for China).

Central to the anti-modern agronomy mythology is the belief that the Green Revolution technologies have led to a vast increase in mono cropping, worsened the nutritional quality of the human diet and fostered a mentality which has been pejoratively called “monocultures of the mind” (Shiva 1993). If Shiva thought about what she was saying and checked the data on health in India, she might have trouble explaining the following data cited by Nanda:

Annual Life expectancy went from 44 years in 1960 to 61.6 years in 1995. Infant mortality rate declined from 165 to 73 per 1000 births from 1960 to 1995. Percentage of underweight children declined from 71 in 1960 to 53 in 1995. Adult literacy went up from 34 percent in 1960 to 52 percent in 1995 (Nanda 2003, 272 citing UNDP 1998).

Rice has had an association with monoculture long before the Green Revolution. It might therefore come as surprise to many that “rice harvested area (hectares under rice multiplied by the number of croppings per year) has declined as a percentage of total crop harvested area in nearly all Asian rice-growing economies since 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33). For example, rice in China went from a 0.24 share of total crop area harvested in 1970 to 0.18 in 2001 while Vietnam went from a 0.75 to a 0.62 share in 2001 in the same period in becoming the second largest rice exporter in the world to Thailand which went from 0.64 share to 0.57 share. “Thus, if some farmers increasingly specialized in rice, others must have diversified into other crops — and done so over a larger harvested area. Despite a near doubling of the total rice harvest, rice is now less dominant in Asian agriculture than it was before the Green Revolution” (Dawe 2003, 33). Stated differently, “overall cropping diversity — the variety of different crops planted — also seems to have increased since the beginning of the Green Revolution … farmers in most Asian countries plant a wider variety of different crops today than was the case in 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33). Contrary to popular misconceptions and consistent with our analysis above, Dawe finds that these increases in production have resulted in a decline in child malnutrition. “While the incidence of child malnutrition still stood at a dismal 31% in 1995, this reflected a reduction of one-third from the 46.5% recorded in 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33, see also Smith and Haddad 2001).

We have a variety of technologies to make all forms of agriculture more environmentally sustainable if we have the right incentives to promote them and can continue the research necessary to increase output without bringing large amounts of new land under cultivation. The task of development economists is to find lower cost affordable ways of adapting these technologies to allow the poorer farmers of the world to both feed their families and preserve their environment.

# There other less expensive ways of using genomics for improved plant breeding. “In 2002, the National Plant Genome Initiative introduced the concepts of `reference species’ and of using the revealed commonality of life to spawn `translational agriculture.’” Namely “focusing mapping resources on a few carefully chosen plant species could yield information and clues that are transferable to many other plant species.” Once again, there is benefit and understanding from the fact that “the genetic sequences common to all plant genomes do not need to be mapped repeatedly. With the concurrent advent of computer networks and coordination, the work of plant genome mapping can be decentralized across many labs and reconstructed in shared databases. Verification and testing across species for shared genetic traits can further advance understanding and subsequently plant improvement” (Gardner and Payne 2003).

Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of Economics, University of Houston and author of Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment, Cato Institute, 2002 and the recently published book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate, Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publisher, 2003 from which much of the material here is taken.

References and Further Reading:

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Meera Nanda’s book Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. Few in the West are aware of the alarming confluence of ideas arising out of the contemporary nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of ‘Vedic science’ and the dominant postmodernist, social constructivist and sociological trends in science studies in the West. Nanda’s book is an intellectual bombshell dropped on this potent combination. No one interested in the ways in which science and culture can interact should ignore this book and the challenging case it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western science ‘studies’. It should serve for years to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when it is allied with fashionable but wrongheaded, and even deeply perverse, manqué ‘epistemologies’, such as those provided in postmodernism, social constructivism and their ilk.

Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what Jeffery Herf calls ‘reactionary modernism’ in his study of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is an outlook that enabled Germans to accept modern scientific technology while at the same time they adopted politically illiberal and reactionary policies and rejected much of the rationality of the enlightenment that informs science. Her thesis is that contemporary India is in the grip of a version of reactionary modernism in which political nationalism is accompanied by technological advance; but the science that informs it has been stripped of its enlightenment context and relocated within the context of nationalistic religion, ‘Vedic Science’. The stripping and relocation fits admirably with doctrines from Western science studies that claim that all knowledge is ‘local’, that scientific belief is culturally caused, that power and knowledge are one, that there is no universal rationality to science and that all scientific belief and its rationality is relative to its socio-political and cultural context.

It is not as if the advocates of ‘Vedic Science’ are avid readers of Foucault’s writings on ‘power/knowledge’, or the sociologists’ advocacy of the Strong Programme for explaining scientific belief, or Latour’s advocacy of might over the possibility of being right in science, and so on for many other such claims in postmodernist and ‘social constructivist’ writings about science. But Nanda tells us that they do cite some Kuhn and Feyerabend, and they do know that in the West there are those who decry modernity and debunk the enlightenment pretensions of defenders of the rationality of science. For such nationalists this is enough to justify their separation of science from broader aspects of enlightenment rationality and its relocation in a different socio-political and religious setting; in so doing they create a distinctive ‘Vedic Science’.

Nanda’s (and Herf’s) analysis challenges the widespread belief that science with its potential for a critical approach to all our beliefs would lead to a more humane and free society liberated from the shackles and superstitions of its past. But there is no necessary connection here; it may do this only sometimes, and other factors can intervene. As both amply illustrate, it is possible within some cultures to accept the technological advances of science while either debunking claims about the superiority of science as a mode of knowing, or reducing the force of such claims by relocating the conception of science within a quite different cultural or religious tradition. Postmodernist doctrines, and much that passes for cultural studies of science, assist in these processes through their own debunking of science and its universal character; science merely becomes another aspect of the effusion of culture, including religion.

Meera Nanda brings to her book a unique combination of background scholarship. She has doctorates in both microbiology and science studies, and a first-hand acquaintance with current Indian politics, its intellectual traditions and its religions. She describes the liberating influence that the study of science had upon her while in India and how it enabled her to reject many of the traditionally held beliefs about religion, the status of women, social and political relationships, ideas about purity and pollution, and the like. But she mentions with dismay her encounter with science studies in the West, dominated as it is by the relativism of postmodernism and the anti-realism and anti-rationality of social constructivism; she became acutely aware of the ways in which it spins its own illusions about itself and the subject it purports to study.

Her initial research that lead to the book had two goals. The first was to show why the prevailing doctrines in science studies, including its feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, did not do justice to science, particularly as a means for enlightenment in non-Western countries. The second was to examine the actual track record of alternative postmodernist approaches to science in non-Western countries, using India as an example. In her view, the old Mertonian norm of ‘organised scepticism’, which bids us to critically examine all beliefs, ought to be institutionalised not only in science but also in the epistemological standpoint of the oppressed.

This project is more fully developed in the book. It contains a strong and brave critique of current Hindu nationalism, its politics, its associated religious doctrines, and its promotion of “Vedic Science”. To this has been added a sustained critique of much that passes for science studies. But in a more positive vein she draws on strands in Indian thought that are closely akin to pragmatism to present an alternative view of science and knowledge. The dalit (untouchable) Ambedkar (1891-1956) developed an account of reason, naturalism, science and humanism that was strongly influenced by Dewey. She advocates Ambedkar’s work as a source for Indian Enlightenment that can pierce through the dark doctrines of Hindu nationalism with its unholy alliance with postmodernist epistemology. He is a prophet facing forward.

In ultimately turning to science journalism she says in retrospect: ‘Without knowing it then, I was speaking the language of the Enlightenment’. But as is well known, these very Enlightenment values have been rejected by postmodernists. So what is ‘Vedic Science’, and what is its connection with the postmodernism that infuses contemporary science studies?

In the West we are familiar with the way in which creationists have co-opted the word ‘science’ to give ‘creation science’ wider credibility. Creationists conduct no experiments, make hardly any observational investigations, do not investigate hypotheses in relation to experiment and observation, and publish their results in no journal that is even vaguely scientific – except their own publications. Their programme of ‘creation science’ has not discovered one novel fact, the discovery of genuine novelty being one of the features of nearly all sciences. Finally, creation science is in conflict with theories of evolution, but fails to show in what way it might be superior either on grounds of evidence, or by offering better explanations, and the like. In these respects it exhibits all the features of a speculative hypothesis that is maintained not by anything that might be vaguely deemed scientific, but by other, extra-scientific interests. In these respects it is certainly a non-science, and there are good grounds for declaring it a pseudo-science.

This is not to say that all speculative doctrines have no scientific value. As Popperians are fond of pointing out, there are doctrines which are advanced on grounds other than those accepted in the sciences, the prime example being Ancient Greek atomism. This was arrived at by philosophical considerations; but it remained a piece of influential metaphysical speculation that had no empirical basis until one was provided towards the end of the 19th century. So even Popperians who are fond of demarcating science from non-science, and from pseudo-science, leave room for a doctrine such as atomism which is non-scientific but not necessarily pseudo-scientific. Of course, one of the things rejected by all postmodernists, and some other approaches in contemporary science studies, is any attempt to draw up such lines of demarcation. But given these broad demarcations, a close comparison can be drawn between ‘Vedic Science’ and ‘creation science’ that sets both at odds with ancient Greek atomism. All three doctrines share the feature of being non-scientific, but atomism left itself open to becoming scientific while the first two doctrines do not, thereby exhibiting all the features of a pseudo-science. Yet both are touted by their advocates as scientific.

In Part I of her book, Nanda gives us an account of what ‘Vedic Science’ is and how it has been adopted by Hindu Nationalists. The sacred Hindu texts, which include the Vedas and the Upanishads, are often regarded as scientific texts in that they allegedly contain all the findings of modern science from physics and biology to mathematics, as well as the methods of science. Such claims are hardly credible since ‘Vedic Science’ needs its legions of decoders and interpreters before any connection can be made to any real science. In this respect its claims are of the same order as those made about the writings of Nostradamus which allegedly contain predictions about all future happenings – if only one has the key to ‘decoding’ or ‘interpreting’ what he says. Though ‘Vedic Science’ might not badly infect current scientific research, the long-term damage it can cause is already well under way as it enters into the Indian education system. Here another parallel can be drawn with ‘creation science’ which also attempts to subvert evolutionary biology in the West.

Importantly for Nanda’s account, the alternative framework in which ‘Vedic Science’ is set makes it different from the other naturalistic and humanist conceptions of science. Crude contrasts are drawn in which it is claimed that ‘Vedic Science’ is superior in being “holistic” and antireductionist while ‘Western science’ is often condemned as ‘positivist’, anti-holistic, strongly reductionist and materialist (or physicalist). ‘Vedic Science’ also locates all of material nature within the framework of divine consciousness, and even endows matter with consciousness and agency. Its advocates even claim that the very essence of Hinduism itself is its scientific thinking. One of the problems here is the tacking-on of an adjective before ‘science’. Science is what it is no matter where it is practiced, in the East or West, or by whom; ‘science’ with a prefix such as ‘Vedic’ or ‘Western’ or the like, ought to arouse suspicion immediately.

This is a heady mixture that even outdoes creation science in its pretensions. It also goes some way towards explaining why many Westerners who are disillusioned with the prevailing conception of science in their culture gravitate towards the more religiously oriented ‘Vedic Science’ in which even the domain of observational experience upon which science is commonly based is expanded to include super-sensory mental experience of ‘alternative levels of reality’ that cannot be encountered in normal experience. More disconcerting is Nanda’s account of how even India’s possession of the atomic bomb, and the science behind it, has been linked to God Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita with its reference to a ‘thousand suns’. On a lighter side she mentions ancient texts that report how warriors of the past could fight for a month on a single meal. Such surprising, venerable reports have led the Indian Government to set up a research programme to investigate these dietary claims for their own troops, thereby hoping to revise even Napoleon’s dictum that an army marches on its stomach. To most Western readers unacquainted with details of current movements in India what Nanda says is both amusing and alarming, like its ‘creation science’ counterpart.

The above is enough to capture the flavour of the ‘Vedic Science’ presented by Nanda. It simply helps itself to the findings of genuine experimental science without being instrumental in producing any of these findings. ‘Vedic Science’ relocates all of science and its advances within a religious, and supernaturalist, framework that turns out to be otiose for those advances. Even if ancient texts are suggestive about, say, what rations warriors might survive on, this, as many philosophers of science would point out, is part of the context of discovery or invention and not part of the context of justification, the area in which scientific testing takes place. The more sinister aspect of ‘Vedic Science’ is its use as a political tool to serve extra-scientific interests, but within a society still intent on technological advance.

Overall ‘Vedic Science’ shares all the pseudo-scientific features of ‘creation science’ and none of the features of, say, ancient atomism that made itself amenable to scientific test. And this brings us to the postmodernist, social constructivist, and other doctrines that inform western science studies, which deny that any distinction can be drawn between science and pseudo-science, and provide ‘Vedic Science’ with an air of legitimacy that it would otherwise lack. How does the link come about? Nanda spells out the connection in Part II of the book, thereby providing a forceful critique of the current state of science studies and the postmodernist epistemological doctrines with which they are often associated. With these doctrines the West makes its own contribution to bolstering ‘Vedic Science’. However not all its Hindu nationalist advocates may have been students of Western postmodernist writers; in some cases Nanda suggests that they have developed some of its central tenets independently. But there is nevertheless an important confluence of ideas with potent results.

Advocates of ‘Vedic Science’ say that both it and ‘Western science’ ultimately express ‘the same truth’, but each in its own culturally relative way. Setting aside whether this is coherent or not, it is accompanied by a relativism characteristic of postmodernism; neither kind of science has the epistemological authority to claim that one is right and the other wrong. Postmodernists and Hindu nationalists will agree that it would be ‘oppressive’ for ‘Western Science’ to pass judgement on any non-western system of belief, including ‘Vedic Science’. Here Nanda locates what she calls ‘epistemic charity’ in making local ‘knowledges’ immune from conflict with rival scientific ‘knowledges’ since at some level they allegedly ‘express the same truth’.

Epistemic ‘charity’ connotes condescension towards other systems of belief and an unwillingness to subject them to any critical scrutiny. But for sociologists of knowledge and postmodernists, the status, and even the very existence, of canons of critical appraisal are up for grabs. These are alleged to have no force beyond the local circumstances in which they are endorsed; so the idea of any universal rationality is to be abandoned. Here one has gone beyond epistemic charity, where vestiges of rationality might be recognised even if not exercised, and into the realm of epistemic nihilism, where there are no universally applicable principles of rationality to be found. The epistemic ‘gift’ is of a poisoned chalice.

Nanda locates a number of sources of epistemic charity or nihilism. One is the Strong Programme of the sociology of scientific knowledge. This, correctly, emphasises the socio-cultural context, or the set of socio-cultural interests, that accompanies belief, whether scientific or non-scientific. But it overshoots its proper target when it claims that the very content of scientific belief is always to be causally explained by socio-cultural contexts, or interests in these. Importantly its ‘Symmetry Tenet’ rules out the possibility of any rational explanation of these beliefs. Thus the following situation becomes possible: for one set of believers in, say, Darwinian evolution, one set of socio-political causes prevail, while for a different set of believers in a rival view, ‘creation science’, a different set of socio-political causes prevail. Who has the correct belief? The Strong Programme is powerless to say. It can only limn the way in which beliefs are allegedly formed; it cannot evaluate the epistemic status of the rival beliefs.

If attempts are made to evaluate beliefs rationally, the Strong Programmers will say that the principles to which one appeals are not universally binding but are only locally accepted as binding. The same situation applies to all cross-cultural belief. In Nanda’s view such epistemic charity on the part of the Strong Programme becomes condescending to non-Western cultures ‘in deny[ing] them the capacity and the need for a reasoned modification of inherited cosmologies in the light of better evidence made available by the methods of modern science’ (p. 127). And this is particularly the case over issues of truth that are downplayed by the Strong Programme. In response it is not enough to quip that any member of a non-Western culture who does look to reasoned modification of belief will have jumped out of their locally accepted traditions of belief and evidence-giving and simply adopted those of another tradition. Nanda develops the case for rejecting the ‘dangerous “gift” of equality of all sciences’. It is a veritable Trojan Horse for those in non-Western societies who are struggling, against their ingrained traditions, beliefs and practices, to obtain even the vestiges of enlightenment, largely won in the West against similar traditions, through the growth of reason and science.

The ‘dangerous gifts’ of epistemic charity are made in other ways in recent science studies, such as the anthropologists’ claim that all science is ethnoscience, Latour’s ‘amodernism’, Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in relation to science, Harding’s and Longino’s feminist epistemology and science, Spivak’s theory of ‘epistemological violence’, the views of multicuturalists, just to mention a few. In some cases she usefully draws parallels between these views and similar views held by Indian nationalists.

Concerning such epistemological ‘gifts’ to Indians, Nanda makes the acute point that the ‘knowledges’ that might appear to be marginalised to Westerners might not be marginal as far as non-Westerners are concerned; they are often deeply embedded in their own pre-secular and pre-scientific societies and serve to reinforce the power relations of the dominant cultural and religious institutions. But her main point still remains that postmodernists and others give support to right-wing nationalists by claiming that science, no matter where it is practiced, and ‘Vedic Science’ are on the same epistemological footing. And thus we are led down the path of what, following Herf, she calls ‘reactionary modernism’. The various strands of argument are admirably set out and make a compelling and disturbing case concerning the pathology of human thought.

But all is not epistemological darkness in India; there are other intellectual traditions to draw upon that come from Buddhism and are most recently encapsulated in the pragmatism of what she refers to as ‘Ambedkar’s Deweyian Buddha’. There is a strand of pragmatism developed by Ambedkar, but played down in the version of pragmatism of Richard Rorty, that wishes to subject the claims of tradition to examination and test using the very methods that are part of scientific practice. This draws on naturalistic modes of thinking in Indian intellectual traditions that are opposed to the enchanted and mystical thinking that finds its way into ‘Vedic Science’. Recently this tradition has been eclipsed by the dominance of Hindu Nationalism, with the ‘gift’ of postmodernism playing a substantial role on the side. Nanda’s book is a long argument in support of those traditions in Indian thought that align themselves with the best of the Enlightenment, and against those who would turn out its light.

The publishers have on the back cover a quotation in support of the book from the sociologist of science, Steve Fuller: ‘This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists’. One can agree about the need for a wake-up call. But why just leftists? Not only leftists can be disturbed by reactionary Hindu nationalism. What this passes over is the fact that far too many self-styled leftists have been responsible for promoting the very postmodernist and social constructivist doctrines that are criticised in Nanda’s book. The wake-up call for leftists and others should be not only about the political consequences of postmodernism, but also the whole ragbag of doctrines that comprise postmodernism itself and its allied doctrines in ‘science studies’.

Nanda’s forceful book is a wake-up call not just about the import of Hindu nationalism with its ‘Vedic Science’ but also a bankrupt system of thought, unfortunately all too prevalent in science studies, that gives credence to it. Nanda argues that the rationality that infuses science can be a liberatory force. This is not to be oblivious to the perils that science has produced for us, though the perils are largely attributable to the political, military and economic context in which science functions rather than the science itself. We all remember the phrase that Eisenhower gave us when he talked of ‘the military-industrial complex’; we forget he also warned us at the same time of ‘the scientific-technological élite’. What we do not need in order to face these challenges is the obfuscating fog of weird epistemologies. The importance of Nanda’s book also lies in its fog-lifting.

Introduction

On 5 January, 2004, the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune was vandalized by some 150 thugs. Priceless manuscripts and artefacts were destroyed. Those responsible declared themselves to be members of the ‘Sambhaji Brigade’, linked to the Maratha Seva Sangh, a regional organization with anti-Brahmin sentiments. They apparently chose this method to protest against allegedly insulting remarks made against their hero, Shivaji, in a recently published book by the American historian James W. Laine.

The link with the Institute was somewhat indirect: Laine had acknowledged the help of several academics at Bhandarkar with the translation of certain manuscripts. The book concerned, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, has been withdrawn by Oxford University Press, and the author has apologized for any offence caused, stressing that it was wholly unintentional. The Bhandarkar Institute is the repository of many manuscripts of great historical significance and an important source of information on the life and times of Shivaji. It was responsible for the preparation of a critical edition of the Mahabharata in 19 volumes, completed in 1966. News of the attack caused widespread shock, and many students and other concerned individuals rushed to the Institute to help with salvaging what they could and clearing up the devastation the vandals had left behind.

Appalling though it was, this attack does not appear to be part of any political plan of national dimensions. It would seem, at least in part, to be an embodiment of regional tensions between the Maratha and Brahmin communities (the scholarly Institute being perceived as a Brahmin entity). But it serves as a reminder of several points relating to history, historiography, and the current Indian situation.

First, it is a reminder of the fundamental role of irreplaceable material evidence in history. This is a situation broadly shared by historical sciences such as geology and astronomy, which cannot resort to experiment, though the nature of evidence in history, given its human provenance, is rather more complex, intractable to general laws, and in some forms particularly vulnerable to multiple interpretations. Hence history’s unique position as a ‘protean discipline’. Nevertheless, evidence remains its bedrock. Some of what was destroyed at Bhandarkar is destroyed forever, access to it now being limited to the frozen interpretations of previous historians, the original no longer available for consultation and re-analysis.

A second point highlighted by this episode is the special significance of history to the concerns of the present, and especially to identity – the sense of heritage. Indian newspaper reports mourn not only the loss of historical records precious in themselves but of important parts of ‘our heritage’. Heritage is a source of pride (and of tourist revenue) to all nations. To those for whom colonial rule is within living memory, elements of heritage, particularly those perceived as part of a freedom struggle against past invaders, have a strong resonance. Shivaji was a Hindu who successfully fought the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, declaring himself king and establishing the powerful Maratha Confederacy. His story has become legendary.

And therein lies another point. The story of the Hindu Maratha hero’s defiance and success against a Muslim king has captured the imagination. It has taken on its own part-mythical life. Perhaps so much so that the actual historical evidence is somewhat troublesome and inconvenient. It can be treated in a cavalier manner because it must be subservient to the myth. The past is dead and can be manipulated or, if necessary, obliterated; the myth must live.

This brings me to my final point concerning Bhandarkar – the extreme, whipped up response against a Western historian. The history of India has for too long been interpreted, written, and thus, as Said pointed out, in some way owned and controlled, by the colonialists. ‘They’, now widened to all modern Westerners, cannot possibly be trusted to understand or interpret ‘our’ history. There is no doubt that the Orientalists of the 19th century framed and periodized Indian history in accordance with certain assumptions concerning the ‘other’, which coloured and constrained their otherwise impressive achievement in building a vast corpus of knowledge about aspects of Indian history and culture. But Indology has moved on since then. The approach of leading Western scholars of Indian history today is far more self-aware and sensitive to such assumptions, while remaining appropriately rigorous and critical in its analysis. Yet in the intensely Hindu nationalist climate currently pervading India and flourishing in sections of the Indian diaspora, even distinguished Indologists such as Wendy Doniger are attacked in a knee-jerk response for daring to critically evaluate Hindu texts. Those Indian historians who question the agenda of Hindutva or ‘Hindu-ness’ fare even worse. Eminent, internationally respected historians such as Romila Thapar have been threatened and vilified. But these courageous individuals refuse to be silenced.

The origins of Hindutva go back to the early part of the 20th century. The term refers to the Hindu chauvinistic nationalist agenda of a number of interconnected organizations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, that range from the paramilitary to the ostensibly cultural (even sometimes appropriating the terms ‘secular’ and ‘humanist’). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forms the broad political front. In addition to being the leading party of the ruling coalition, the BJP is in power in several states, including Gujarat, where they were voted back to power in the climate of fear lingering in the wake of the horrific communal massacres of 2002. The other two major bodies are the cultural arm of the movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the openly militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh Parivar has taken to itself the colour saffron. Once associated with renunciation, it is flaunted now as a symbol of Hindu pride and power.

Within the past 12 years or so, as the hold of Congress has declined, the growth and spread of Hindutva has been remarkable. Aided by a powerful propaganda machine and the wealth pouring in from Indians abroad, especially in the US and UK [1], the ‘saffron brigade’ have sought to replace the secular, pluralist vision of Nehru and other earlier nationalists with their own Hindu chauvinist concept of the nation and its past, and to indoctrinate the young with this conception.

I would suggest that as the Nehruvian dream began to fade, as Congress regimes moved away from the project for independent development and some kind of social justice – notably during the Emergency of course – we get the substitution of those commitments with rhetoric. More and more we are taught to look at the nation as something of a myth, as just a map, a cult or a flag. –Sumit Sarkar [2]

Who Owns the Past?

[The] past needs to make the present unfamiliar to itself. History must acquire the power to surprise the present with its differences. –Pradip Kumar Datta [3]

History is deeply interpretive. The immense richness of any human society, the various facets of any culture, the changes wrought upon it by the operation of socio-economic, political, and religious forces, the impact of interaction with other cultures, forms such a complex tapestry that it is unlikely that we will ever have a full picture of any period in the past, especially the remote past. There is plenty of room for interpretation. But does that then mean that the door is wide open for any interpretation, constrained, as the postmodernists would have it, only by intertextuality? Hardly.

The anchoring role of material evidence becomes particularly important in the case of history because of the way in which present political groups seek to legitimize their agenda by taking control of the past. To argue that this is inevitable, that the past cannot be seen in any objective light, that it is a mere battleground of present ideologies in which the most persistent will win, is not only unwarranted but constitutes a dangerous concession to the extreme right. In a climate of postmodernism, of discourses floating free, Holocaust deniers can thrive with impunity, as Richard Evans has pointed out [4].

History, as conducted by professional historians, is a rigorous and objective field, a social science in which knowledge accumulates over time. Both the evidences and techniques used in the modern discipline justify this statement. Historical evidence, it need hardly be said, continues to grow with time, as more materials come to light. But in addition, the forms of evidence used by the modern historian are far wider ranging than in the past, and frequently involve collaboration with experts from other disciplines. As well as from texts, inscriptions, and artefacts, there is evidence available from archaeology, from linguistics, from indications of climate change and alterations to water courses, and nowadays sometimes from population genetics too. Further, certain elements of supportive evidence may be obtained from the study of myths (used, for example by the late distinguished Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi [5] in the interpretation of aspects of early Indian society), and from anthropological work. Techniques of textual analysis have become more rigorous and faster, with much use of computers, while dating methods too have improved. [6]

This is the nature of the historian’s work today. It is an exercise involving interdisciplinary teams of academics from all over the world. It relies on critical evaluation of evidence, and the tradition of open debate. While interpretations continue to be presented and discussed, they will simply not pass muster if they are not grounded in reason and evidence. History, by the nature of its materials and processes (a non-Markovian system, Peter Atkins once remarked to me) may not be conducive to the vigorous honing by experiment and explanatory structures available to science, but it is nevertheless a progressive and rational discipline.

And what has Hindutva to offer in its place? Little more than assertions and poor scholarship, infused with a lavish helping of mythology. The Sangh’s ‘indigenism’ lacks the fundamental characteristics of any reasoned approach to history:

[Indigenism] attempts to invent a “tradition” and retain it as something essentially different from other cultures and societies, and to build an ideology on such a tradition. But it fails to provide a theory of historical explanation or a method of historical analysis. –Romila Thapar [7]

Ironically for a movement anxious to remove all trace of colonialist perceptions, the vision they espouse is one anchored in the simplistic periodization of the 19th century Orientalists: that of an ancient and glorious Hindu ‘golden age’, followed by a ‘dark’ period of crushingly oppressive Muslim rule, and a modern period of less oppressive British rule. They continue the old British colonial view of India as constituted by two essentially antagonistic religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, a view that, abetted by both the RSS and the Muslim League, led to partition. Of course one of these communities is seen as forever the outsiders.

The real history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history of the subcontinent is more complex. As Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out [8], the relationship of the two has varied not only with ruler, but with the social groups being considered, the particular sects (the Sufis, in particular, became considerably Indianized), and the way in which Islam entered the area. In Kerala, for example, with its strong and ancient trade links with the Mediterranean, the Muslim community grew from Arab traders, and was primarily assimilationist, compared to the undoubted confrontations and military conquest in the north. Yet here, too, cooperation existed, both among the elites, and among the poor of both religions. The situation cannot adequately be described in terms of any simple polarization between two monolithic religions. This is true even during the rule of the notoriously intolerant Aurangzeb, as has been noted in the studies of various Indian historians. K. N. Panikkar has remarked, “Aurangzeb’s chiefs and courtiers were more Hindus than Muslims. And the person who fought against Shivaji was Raja Jaisingh, a Hindu.” [9]

The current sensitivity over this period of Indian history is of course linked to the Sangh’s highly effective campaign to mobilize Hindus under the banner of Ram Janmabhoomi (birthplace of the god Ram). In the words of the President of Maharashtra VHP, Ashok Chowgule, “The Ram Janmabhoomi issue has revolutionised the politics of the country. A fragmented Hindu samaj has been united to an extent unheard of in recent times.” [10] More than a decade after the Sangh incited mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid, built by Babur over, as they claim, a Hindu temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, the pressure to allow the building of a temple on the site continues. So far, the courts have not relented.

The way in which Hindutva has been able to exploit and promote the image of the god Ram is interesting in itself. By effectively focusing on a single god, and transforming him into a warrior god, they have given the polytheistic Hinduism the sleekness and muscle of a monotheistic faith. India becomes the land of Ram.

The historicization of Ram, his presumed epiphany in historical as opposed to mythical time, has been the mainstay of the Hindutva project. This brazen mixing of history and mythology to suit political ends runs throughout Sangh ideology. To the masses, the mythological elements are simply asserted as history. To the intellectuals, this unholy ‘interpenetration’ is presented with a suitably postmodern flourish: “The fact is that there is often more history in myths and more myth in history.” [11]

Hinduism is, of course, far from the monolithic belief system projected by Hindtuva as enduring through time immemorial. With no founder, no single canonical text, and no ecclesiastical structure (though it has priests), its historical development has been distinct in pattern from that of Semitic religions:

The evolution of Hinduism is not a linear progression from a founder through an organizational system, with sects branching off. It is rather the mosaic of distinct cults, deities, sects, and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing or distancing of these to existing ones, the placement drawing not only on belief and ideas but also on the socio-economic reality. –Romila Thapar [12]

This brings us to the other historical period of high sensitivity to Hindutva: the nature of ancient India and the Hindutva assertion of an indigenous ‘Aryan race’. Where does one even begin? The philologist William Jones identified the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, and first proposed that they all derived from a single language, Indo-European. What should have remained a linguistic category was altered to that of a race in the obsessively race-conscious late 19th century. European scholars, including even Max Müller for a time, built up the idea of an ‘Aryan race’ that swept into India as invaders from the north-west, bringing their language with them, and establishing superiority over, and hermetic separation from, the indigenous ‘Dravidian race’ through the caste system.

With the growth of archaeological evidence, and supporting evidence from linguistics, the story that is emerging is not one of invasion but of gradual migration and settlement of peoples speaking an Indo-European language, following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization. The subsequent growth of a caste system is also now regarded as having been a rather more complex process than previously thought.

In contrast to this carefully evaluated and maturing view, constantly sensitive to archaeological finds and the implications of detailed linguistic analysis, the assertion of Hindutva is simple: the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were neither migrants nor invaders, but were indigenous to India. The ancient Harappan civilization is regarded as part of a great Vedic Age, and the dates of the Vedic texts set so far back in time (up to 9000 BCE) as to confirm that India must have been the first centre of human civilization (and even of human origins), with subsequent migration of Aryan peoples into Iran. To stress the Vedic connection, the term ‘Harappan’ is now increasingly replaced with ‘Sarasvati-Sindhu’, a name with a distinctly Vedic flavour. The claim that the Sarasvati, a dried up tributary of the Indus around which many Harappan settlements have been found, was once a mighty river finds no support from the topography and geology of the region.

Needless to say, during this glorious Vedic Age, India was a land of wisdom, peace, and knowledge; a time of the profoundest discoveries in mathematics and science, and boasting a well-knit and harmonious society, with no oppression of women or of lower castes. Irfan Habib comments that

since all later texts are being given exorbitantly earlier dates, and every intellectual and technological achievement pushed to an obscure, sacred past, the later times begin to appear more and more as sheer dark ages. We are being asked to believe that not only did the alleged inventors of writing in the 4th millennium BC forget to write up the Vedic texts, but their descendants too simply forgot writing altogether for a period of 1500 years or so, before the Mauryas came around. We Indians also coolly forgot the great scientific secrets embedded in our texts… [13]

It seems scarcely worth taking the effort to repeat Hindutva’s nonsensical claims, but for the fact that they have been so widely and effectively propagated as Hindu history and culture by the saffron brigade. Astonishing as it may seem, this is the interpretation of the nation’s history that is being perpetrated through the Sangh’s network of sectarian schools and that has even infiltrated in part into the fabric of the country’s national curriculum and textbooks.

The Great RSS Education Project

Modern sectarian Hindu schooling may be said to have begun in 1946, when the RSS leader M. S. Golwalkar set up the Gita Junior Secondary School in Kurukshetra, Haryana. After something of a gap, resulting from the banning of the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination, a Saraswati Shishu Mandir was established in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1952. Since then, RSS schools, run by their education wing, Vidya Bharati, have multiplied and spread into many states. One recent estimate puts the number of RSS-run schools in the country at over 18,000 and further and higher education institutions at over 60. [14] At least several thousand of these are endorsed by state governments in states where the BJP is in power.

The aim of these schools is to ‘evolve an integrated system of education in conformity with the aims of Indian culture and its ideals of life’. [15] For Indian here, read Hindu: the two are used interchangeably in Hindutva-speak. This is apparent from Vidya Bharati’s further stated educational aim to bring up a new generation of Indians ‘fully saturated with the feelings of Hindutva and patriotism’.

What, then, is the educational ethos in these schools, and what do they teach? At first sight, things may not seem so bad. They generally use standard textbooks and cover the standard curriculum. They have to, in order to compete with other schools. No, the Hindutva agenda is spread through aspects of school regimen, through the slant given to the content of the standard curriculum, through the overall ethos and, most explicitly, through a special examined course which forms part of the core curriculum: Sanskriti Gyan (study of culture). An RSS centre and VHP-controlled temple are frequently nearby, and sometimes even directly linked.

The ethos of such schools has been described by Tanika Sarkar:

the walls displayed maps of undivided India as the true shape of the nation, imparting in students a refusal of the historical reality of the Partition and visualising the country as inclusive of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh… [They] are also festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like Shivaji and Rana Pratap, visually invoking legends of Muslim tyranny and Hindu royal-heroic resistance.

In school assemblies, principals address students frequently on themes of Hindu patriotism, Babur and his mosque that allegedly destroyed Ram’s temple, the saga of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and its martyrs. [16]

This is aptly complemented by the chanting of the Sarasvati Vandana (a Sanskrit prayer to Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of learning) and the singing of Vande Mataram, a nationalist song that has become the de facto national anthem in these times. With emphasis placed on the study of Sanskrit (the ‘Hindu language’), and yoga a compulsory part of the curriculum, parents are pleased to send their children to these schools, confident in their ability to inculcate Indian culture and values, and maintain discipline and standards. This may sound familiar: equivalent reasons are given by parents in the West for sending children to religious schools, including creationist academies.

And what of the Sanskriti Gyan textbooks? These special textbooks explicitly set out the Hindutva conception of Indian history described above. ‘Facts’ taught for examination include Aryans as an indigenous people, who subsequently spread to Iran, the position of the destroyed Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Ram, and the claim that Homer adapted the Ramayana to create the Iliad. [17] Ancient India, in short, is the origin of all great things, and the invaders – Muslims, Christians – were responsible for the decline from this utopian Ramarajya. The implications for present-day minority communities are clear:

Muslims and Christians are not simply invaders and conquerors of the past, they are fixed in eternal postures of aggression which, today, translates as insidious and covert gestures of hidden expansionism and conquest, carried on through conversion and terrorism. Histories of communities are not just unchanging and repetitive, they are, moreover, singular. History becomes emblematic, congealed into an array of postures, each summing up a whole community across the ages. The past is a museum of a few signs. –Tanika Sarkar [18]

The RSS is a militaristic, cadre-based organization. It is disciplined, focused, ruthless, and pragmatic. It has systematically politicized education and widened its hold across the country, through regular training camps with campaigners sent out especially to rural areas to organize new cadres. Angana Chatterji describes their approach in Orissa:

The RSS holds month long training sessions across Orissa during summer vacations to attract students and young children. From these sessions, the RSS recruits for the Officers Training Camps (OTC). Held twice a year, the OTC provides schooling in self-defense and leadership. Around 500 people attend each year. On completion, approximately100 join the organisation as campaigners. Graduates take an oath, “I will devote my body, mind, and money (tana, mana, bhana) to the motherland.” For about 10 recruits, this develops into a lifelong, intense and full time commitment. Each December, the RSS organises the Sita Shibir, a 7-10 day winter camp. The families of attendees finance the camps. The growth of the RSS testifies to the success of these camps. [19]

The spreading of their message to tribal areas is a particularly cynical ploy. The RSS argues that it is trying to counter missionary activity. The level of missionary activity in many of these districts scarcely fits with such a position, even had it been justified. This reaching out to the ‘vanvasis’ (forest dwellers – the Hindutva version of history does not allow them to use the usual term ‘adivasis’, or indigenous peoples) is trumpeted as social work in uplifting the poor. In reality, the children are provided with limited education (unlike that in regular RSS schools). The prime purpose is not education but indoctrination. A similar approach is used towards slum dwellers. Some commentators have remarked on the unusual involvement of adivasis in the Gujarat massacres of Muslims in 2002, suggesting that this was directly due to the communal hatred perpetrated by Hindutva-driven organizations.

Thus far, we have only considered private RSS-run schools. Where the BJP is in power, elements of the Hindutva agenda have been adopted into the state education system. Even more alarming have been attempts in the past five years to subvert academic and educational bodies and smuggle Hindutva ideology into the national curriculum itself.

Infiltration of Hindutva Elements into National Education

While the British promoted the Macaulay model for a small minority, for the vast majority, they continued to emphasise traditional models like Toles and Madrasas [religious schools]. In fact, it was our Renaissance leaders like Phule, Rammohan Roy and Vidyasagar who led the battle for abolition of religious and obscurantist education and promotion of English, logic, science, humanities and Western philosophy. Inspired by the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy as found in the French, American and Italian Revolutions, they sought to lay a new foundation for democratic and secular education in India. The classical definition of secularism was not the product of fanciful imagination, but emerged from the historical need to unite a people divided by regional, religious and caste barriers. –Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer [20]

A national system of education which the colonial intellectuals and nationalist leaders tried to evolve was based on a possible synthesis of all that is advanced in the West with all that was abiding in the traditional. In other words the national policy was not lodged in a dichotomy between the indigenous and the western. The impact of such a policy was the internalization of a universal outlook and the location of the indigenous in the wider matrix of human history. The educational policy adumbrated by independent India, even if it faltered on many a count, was informed by an open-ended view… The modern system of education, which they tried to perpetuate, is anathema to the Sangh Parivar, as it is not sufficiently “national” in content. The alternative proposed by the Parivar and now being implemented by the government is an indigenous system, which M.S. Golwalkar had earlier conceived as religious in character, with emphasis on tradition, discipline and military training. Romanticisation of traditional knowledge, celebration of religious beliefs and emphasis on conformism are its chief characteristics. –K. N. Panikkar [21]

Since the late 1990s, national education has become a battleground, drawing in many distinguished historians, scientists, and other academics who have refused to tolerate any move away from a strictly secular education system; who have protested against the mingling of myth alongside history, and pseudoscience alongside science. India has too robust a secular intellectual community to take such measures without a fight. In this, they have been betrayed by postmodernists such as Ashish Nandy [22] and Partha Chatterjee, whose fashionable criticisms of secularism as an elite western conception inflicted on India have helped pave the way for the takeover of academia by the extreme right. “Subalternism,” wrote Aijaz Ahmad, “has had a curious career, starting with invocations of Gramsci and finally coming into its own as an accomplice of the anti-Communist Right.” [23]

The architect of the saffronising of national education has been the BJP Union Human Resource Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. A former professor of physics who sees science within a mystical framework, and a fierce nationalist, he has been associated with the RSS from 1944. Since his arrival at the head of the Ministry in 1998, he has spearheaded the takeover of academic institutions and committees by those sympathetic to Hindutva. He himself is a believer in an extremely ancient indigenous civilization, and justifies any points he makes with what he declares to be scientific evidence: “We have proved by our ocean development scientists that there is enough proof of the existence of human activity in the region of Bay of Cambay in 7500 BC. We have proved it. I am saying let us know whether Indian civilisation is 2,000 years old, 7,000 years old, 10,000 years old. These are the results my scientists have shown, this is the result of carbon dating.” [24] Imagine the excitement in the international archaeological community if the results of ‘his scientists’ were shown to be true! But Joshi’s perception of science as well as history is grossly coloured by his Hindutva beliefs. To quote from one of his speeches:

The question is how can science and spiritually reconcile and contribute to make this planet peaceful. Indian philosophy answered this question centuries ago and it would be my endeavour to place before you how modern science is converging on the philosophy of Gita. [25]

It is not difficult to see how a minister with such a worldview and a supportive government might operate to alter the direction of education at every level across the country. While institutions may be nominally autonomous, their reliance on government funding makes them hostages to political change. The University Grants Commission has dismayed many academics in its new-found insistence on giving equal importance in universities to the study of such ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ as Vedic astrology:

The UGC for its part is promoting certificate courses in Vedic rituals, Vedic astrology and Sanskrit. Its Chairman has said that these courses will serve to promote Hindu culture among NRIs and will improve foreign exchange earnings. This is happening in the context of declining grants to universities for science and humanities courses. In short, bigoted, communal and obscurantist ideas which have nothing to do even with Hindu culture and philosophy are finding their way into education. –Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer [26]

Joshi’s particular concern has been to hound out ‘Marxists’ (a term he seems to apply to any anti-Hindutva historian) and to have their textbooks reviewed by committees appointed by his reshaped institutions. He persistently refers to these scholars as being educated along European lines and therefore unable to grasp Indian realities. The best of Indian historical scholarship has certainly drawn from elements of Marxist theory and in recent decades from the Annales School, applying these broader approaches in the Indian context. The result has been an understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and other aspects of Indian history that has vastly enriched the limited histories of an earlier, colonial period which focused primarily on a narrow reading of the Brahminical texts and on the history of the dynasties (a change in the understanding of history that has occurred everywhere). Ironically, it is the Hindutva movement that has followed colonial tradition by emphasizing Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmin elite, and the great Sanskrit texts such as the Vedas, while ignoring other aspects of Indian history and culture. But the relevant underlying point must be this: both science and history are seeking objective knowledge and understanding. As such, they are fundamentally international efforts. Practitioners, whatever their country of origin, must be open to ideas and approaches from other parts of the world. They must then apply these approaches as appropriate to their particular topic of study. There is no special Indian mindset that sees what others well equipped in the necessary analytical techniques and background cannot see. For the saffron brigade, any inconvenient facts concerning Indian history are the product of Western colonial ‘constructs’. Indian scholars engaged in an objective evaluation of the past thus become labelled ‘traitors’. As in the case of secularism, what began as legitimate postcolonial questioning has been extended beyond all reasonable bounds, to the very nature of objective enquiry itself, a point that has been eloquently argued by Meera Nanda. [27]

Soon after Joshi’s arrival at the Ministry, Sangh sympathisers were quickly appointed to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. An almost immediate casualty was the ‘Towards Freedom’ project sponsored by the unreconstituted ICHR – a compilation of archival documents from the final period of the freedom struggle, 1937-1947. The General Editor of the volumes was a distinguished historian of international standing, the late Sarvepalli Gopal. The volumes for 1940 and 1946, edited by historians K. N. Panikkar and Sumit Sarkar respectively, had been approved by the General Editor before his death, and even sent to the publishers, Oxford University Press. But they were declared to be ‘temporarily withheld from publication’ in 2002, and a committee set up to review the supposedly controversial volumes. The move was regarded as unacceptable by the volumes’ editors, who have yet to be told what the problems are, but Sarkar has remarked on the sensitivity of this period for the RSS:

Part of the logic of the volumes, which Prof. Gopal has expounded very well in his general introduction, is that we should bring out the diversities. And the significance of the anti-colonial movement lies not only in the struggle against the British, but in the progressive broadening of the movement – how, in other words, democratic, secular and some kind of federal and social justice aspirations enter the canvas – the background, in short, to the Constitution. [28]

This was a broadening of the independence movement, Sarkar says, in which the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha (a precursor of the BJP) were conspicuous by their absence. The project remains stalled at present.

What, then, of school education? A first attempt to bring elements of the RSS agenda into national education in 1998 was successfully halted under strong protest from a number of State Education Ministers. Joshi’s next move was to appoint J. S. Rajput, his former student and a Hindutva sympathizer, as chairman of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). He did not tarry long in getting to grips with the task of altering the ethos of national education in the country. A new National Curriculum Framework for School Education was drawn up in 2000 to replace the existing 1988 Framework. Secular academics studied its wording with a growing sense of outrage.

Littered among the generalities and lofty pedagogical aspirations that characterize such documents are some disturbing elements. It has been remarked that these portions seem disconnected, as though added later. Whatever their provenance, the overall result is that despite professing recognition of diversity and a commitment to the cultivation of a ‘scientific temper’, the flavour of Hindutva bursts through. Nationalism takes precedence over reason and objectivity; national duty over human rights. In a framework document which establishes the guiding principles for teaching in the state sector (and, in effect, in much of the private sector), this is serious cause for concern.

The second paragraph of the preamble to the document makes explicit that it is framed within the context of belief in a glorious, very ancient Indian (Hindu) tradition and heritage:

India had an advanced system of education and the world’s first universities which presented a consummate example of education based on philosophy and religion and at the same time stressed the study of mathematics, history, astronomy, maritime and even the laws of economics and public administration. The Chandogya Upanishad (Chapter VII, Section 1) mentions eighteen different subjects of study including areas such as natural disaster management, mineralogy, linguistics, science of elements, and science of defence. [29]

Certainly this is not to deny that there were vibrant centres of education in early India, in the form of Jain and Buddhist centres (most famously Nalanda in the north-east) as well as numerous centres of Brahminical learning, ghatikas and later mathas. But the points to note are the selective promotion of positive aspects of ancient India, intended to evoke the sense of a ‘golden age’, and the exaggerated impression given of the knowledge of the ancient Indians. Chauvinism and indigenism are woven throughout the document.

There are many sections worth quoting from the Curriculum Framework, but I shall confine myself to just two or three particular examples. Discussion of history itself is limited in the document, very general, and subsumed under ‘social sciences’. But references to ancient traditions and achievements abound. Under ‘Integrating India’s Indigenous Knowledge and India’s Contribution to Mankind’, we have the following:

Today, even more than ever before, there is a world-wide recognition of India’s indigenous knowledge systems. Ayurveda is being increasingly recognised as a holistic system of health and Indian psychology as a more complete discipline than the western. In this context it may be relevant to point out that there are domains of knowledge which could be called ‘parallel’, ‘indigenous’, ‘traditional’ or ‘civilisational’ knowledge systems. These belong to societies in the developing world that have nurtured and defined the systems of knowledge of their own, relating to such diverse domains as geology, ecology, agriculture, health and the like.
…Paradoxical as it may sound, while our children know about Newton, they do not know about Aryabhatta, they do know about computers but do not know about the advent of the concept of zero or the decimal system. Mention may also have to be made, for instance, of Yoga and Yogic practices as well as the Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) like the Ayurvedic and Unani systems which are now being recognised and practised all over the world. The country’s curriculum shall have to correct such imbalances.
…Equally importantly we need an indepth analysis of the parallelism of insights between the indigenous knowledge systems, on the one hand, and certain areas of modern science and thought concerned with the basics of life, on the other. Indigenousness, obviously, is not opposed to being receptive to new ideas from different peoples, cultures and cultural contexts.

The whole treatment of science in the document shows an awkward effort to combine ancient, unscientific practices with those arising from modern science in a bid to promote the indigenous while retaining the semblance of a modern outlook:

School curriculum has therefore, to help to generate and promote among the learners: …scientific temper characterised by the spirit of enquiry, problem- solving, courage to question and objectivity leading to elimination of obscurantism, superstition and fatalism, while at the same time, sustaining and emphasising the indigenous knowledge ingrained in the Indian tradition.

Spirituality and ‘value education’ form another significant feature. A number of academics have strongly criticized the approach to value education which, while paying lip service to the possibility that religion may not be the only source of values, proceeds to give religions an important role throughout the taught curriculum (the document is careful to use religions in the plural). For Indian state education, formerly secular in tone, this is a serious retrograde step. It leaves the door open for presenting scientific subjects within a mystical framework. It will also potentially lead to the compromising of factual accounts, for fear of upsetting religious sensibilities (the impact it has already had on textbooks is shown below). Overall, this injection of spirituality will only serve to weaken intellectual rigour and independence of mind.

Sanskrit, as would be expected, is given great importance at secondary level, and should apparently be treated as a living language ‘which is still relevant to the general life needs of the people of India, and which has caught international attention because of the global interest in subjects like yoga, vedic mathematics, astronomy and ayurveda’. And finally, what of mathematics, a field in which there have been many eminent Indians? The section on mathematics identifies study of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and the wider applications of mathematics (there is a heavy weighting given throughout to technology – another Hindutva feature [30]), but ends once again with the admixture of pseudoscience:

The history of mathematics with special reference to India and the nature of mathematical thinking should find an important place. The students may be encouraged to enhance their computational skill by the use of Vedic Mathematics.

Meetings, protests, and articles expressed the anger of secular academics and educationalists at this hijacking of educational policy, though NCERT denied any political pressure or the existence of a hidden agenda. The matter was widely reported and discussed by the Indian media. The Hindu newspaper and its associated magazine Frontline have been particularly notable in their consistent, enlightened reporting of threats to secularism. A 3-day National Convention Against the Communalization of Education in India was organized by SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust) in August 2001 to discuss the Framework document and related educational issues. Drawing more than 500 delegates from across the country, including a number of state education ministers and their representatives, and addressed by leading academics from various disciplines, the Convention was a powerful statement of dissent. At its conclusion, a number of state education ministers endorsed a formal statement against the Centre’s education policy. [31]

At the same time, over a hundred leading scientists and mathematicians led by S. G. Dani, Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, signed a statement in protest against the efforts to include ‘Vedic mathematics’ in the school curriculum. Entitled ‘Neither Vedic Nor Mathematics’, it points out that the idea of ‘Vedic mathematics’ comes from a book by a swami (religious teacher) published posthumously in 1965 and containing ‘a set of tricks in elementary arithmetic and algebra to be applied in performing computations with numbers and polynomials’, written in the form of cryptic Sanskrit aphorisms (true ancient Indian mathematics, they note, was anything but cryptic). There is no connection with the Vedas, and virtually no mathematical usefulness in these aphorisms. It is worth quoting sections of the statement in full:

In an era when the content of mathematics teaching has to be carefully designed to keep pace with the general explosion of knowledge and the needs of other modern professions that use mathematical techniques, the imposition of “Vedic mathematics” will be nothing short of calamitous.
Nowhere in the world does any school system teach “Vedic mathematics” or any form of ancient mathematics for that matter as an adjunct to modern mathematical teaching. The bulk of such teaching belongs properly to the teaching of history and in particular the teaching of the history of the sciences.
We are concerned that the essential thrust behind the campaign to introduce the so-called `Vedic mathematics’ has more to do with promoting a particular brand of religious majoritarianism and associated obscurantist ideas rather than any serious and meaningful development of mathematics teaching in India. We note that similar concerns have been expressed about other aspects too of the National Curricular Framework for School Education. We re-iterate our firm conviction that all teaching and pedagogy, not just the teaching of mathematics, must be founded on rational, scientific and secular principles.[32]

These efforts make inspiring reading, which is why I have mentioned them in some detail here. But the political climate has not changed, and efforts to declare the Framework legally invalid, through filing a public interest litigation case over communal bias and lack of consultation with the Central Advisory Board of Education, has failed in the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, several history textbooks published by NCERT have been altered (‘corrected’) without consulting their authors and schools told that they should not even discuss the deleted elements. This too has caused consternation among progressive academics, being a move that effectively censors aspects of history, and presents a selective view of the facts.

The elements removed are relatively small, but they are significant. References to the eating of beef by Brahmins in ancient India occurring in textbooks by Romila Thapar and Ram Sharan Sharma have been removed. (The RSS, following Brahminical tradition, gives high status to the cow, describing it in their educational literature as ‘the mother of us all and the abode of gods’.) Another deleted passage from Sharma’s book dealt directly with the historicising of Rama and Krishna:

Archaeological evidence should be considered far more important than long family trees given in the Puranas. The Puranic tradition could be used to date Rama of Ayodhya around 2000 BC but diggings and extensive explorations in Ayodhya do not show any settlement around that date. Similarly, although Krishna plays an important part in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculptural pieces found in Madhura between 200 BC and AD 900 do not attest his presence. Because of such difficulties, the idea of an epic age based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have to be discarded, although in the past it formed a chapter in most survey books on ancient India. Of course several stages in social evolution in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata can be detected. This is so because the epics do not belong to a single phase of social evolution: they have undergone several editions, as has been shown earlier in the present chapter. [33]

Further deletions include a paragraph pointing out that the antiquity claimed for the tirthankaras of Jainism does not appear to fit archaeological evidence of settlement in the middle Gangetic plain, and passages discussing Brahmin antipathy towards the Buddhist king Ashoka, and the use of the caste system to oppress and control peasants and servants through inculcating fear of breaking the divine law.

Deletions in Satish Chandra’s book on Medieval India relate to Sikh history, and in particular the reasons for the killing, under Aurangzeb, of Guru Tegh Bahadur, whom Sikhs regard as a martyr. Various reasons given for his killing are mentioned, including the Persian version, in which the execution was to end a plunder spree across Punjab, the Sikh tradition that it was the result of intrigue by members of the family opposed to his succession as Guru, and a third version in which the Guru had angered Aurangzeb by converting some Muslims to Sikhism. Of these, only the third escaped deletion.

A final deletion, from the book on Modern India by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev, removes a paragraph describing the Jats as being involved in plundering raids and court intrigues in Delhi in the 18th century.

The reason given for the deletions, at least in the case of the material concerning Sikh, Jain, and Jat history, was that they upset the feelings of the communities concerned. (The RSS, it should be noted, has sought to draw in Sikhs and Jains under its Hindu nationalist banner, the better to create a monolithic chauvinistic force ranged in opposition to the Muslim minority.) Curiously, the feelings of Muslims are never mentioned. When religions make truth claims that fall in the realm of science or of history, they can and should be contested. Once begin to compromise on this point, and there is no need to spell out the consequences for subjects grounded in empirical knowledge.

The deletion of these passages was intended as a gagging measure for the NCERT books in circulation until new textbooks could be drawn up that were based on the new Framework. The first new textbooks were released in the autumn of 2002, when the Supreme Court stay on their publication was lifted following the failure of the court case against the Framework. Almost immediately, reports spread of elements of bias in the new texts. Soon after their publication, a meeting of Opposition party leaders was called by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)), at which the leaders rejected both the Curriculum Framework and the new texts, and declared that they would not be adopted in states in which their parties were in power. They would not tolerate a change in educational policy driven by the Centre without state consultation and demanded that the Central Advisory Board for Education be reconvened.

The strong stance of Opposition parties leant vital political support to the consistently firm position that has been taken on this issue by the professional body of Indian historians, the Indian History Congress (IHC). The IHC is a very prestigious body. Founded in 1935, and with over 9,000 members, making it the largest professional forum of its kind in South Asia, its primary aim, as defined by its constitution, is the ‘promotion and encouragement of the scientific study of Indian history’.

The IHC set up a committee to review the new official history texts. Its report was published as History in the New NCERT Textbooks: Report and An Index of Errors in 2003. Among the errors noted by the authors, Professors Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal and Aditya Mukherjee, are the assertion that the Indus Valley Civilization was established as early as 4,600 BC. It is also placed under the section on Vedic Civilization. The text on Medieval India portrays the Mughal rulers as exceptionally cruel and violent, without either putting their actions into the context of common practice of other rulers of the period within India, or mentioning positive aspects such as Akbar’s enlightened policies on the slave trade and on the practice of sati. They found the textbook on modern India and the freedom struggle particularly riddled with misleading emphases and omissions. Again, partition is blamed on Muslim separatists without any mention of Hindu communalist activities. The whole independence struggle is described in narrow terms, without emphasizing its underpinning principles of democracy and secularism, or the central role of Nehru, and the early Hindutva leaders are presented as great patriots. The fact that Gandhi was assassinated by Nadhuram Godse, closely associated with the RSS and a friend and admirer of the Hindu Mahasabha leader V. D. Savarkar (whose portrait was unveiled in the Indian parliament last year) is conveniently forgotten. As the report stressed, the problem is not so much factual error, though key errors exist. It is more the overall impression and slant put on Indian history that is of concern.

Despite the efforts of NCERT and Joshi to present this whole issue as ’hystrionics’ by leftist historians, the controversy has refused to die down and in any case, the firm stance of the IHC, representing a wide spectrum of professional historians, gives the lie to such an interpretation. Moreover, in spite of continuing government moves to manipulate research and education bodies (the chairman of the ICHR was recently dismissed for no stated reason), the IHC raises hope and confidence for the continuance of sound historical study in India.

The 64th session of the IHC was held in Mysore, Karnataka, on 28-30 December 2003. With over 1200 delegates, and the presentation of more than 600 papers, it was one of the biggest sessions ever conducted by the body. The official report declares that it was ‘an assertion of academic vigour and rational approach to Indian history’ [34]. The address of the General President, Professor S. Settar, illustrated well the nature of modern historical research. Entitled ‘Footprints of Artisans in History’, it used evidence from epigraphic sources, linguistics, and palaeography to reconstruct the life of artisans and their role in intercultural exchange at the regional level. This is a far cry from history as merely wanton extrapolation from selected Sanskrit texts of a Brahmin religious elite. The session included a special panel discussion on ‘History in School Education’, attended by a number of schoolteachers as well as academics. The IHC report notes that in secret ballot elections for the 20 Executive Committee members for the next year, the RSS put forward 12 candidates, all of whom were ‘soundly defeated’. This news brings a glimmer of hope to an otherwise darkening scene.

Conclusion

It is in this context of whipped up communal feelings and the encroaching hold on the public of narrow, chauvinistic perceptions of history that we must see the wider implications of the raid on the Bhandarkar Institute. The whole curriculum and textbook controversy is not a battle between ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ historians. It is a battle in defence of reason and objectivity, the very basis of all scientific enquiry. It is a battle whose consequences spill out far beyond libraries and classrooms. The ultimate cost of Hindutva’s success is measured in lives. Nearly 2000 Muslims, including children and babies, were hacked and burned to death in Gujarat in the riots of 2002. This is what happens when Golwalkar’s ‘children of the soil’ go on the rampage. And it originates in a mindset moulded in the saffron-infused classroom.

Latha Menon is a freelance writer and editor.

Footnotes

1 See for example http://www.stopfundinghate.org/

2 Interview in Frontline, Vol 17, Issue 5, March 4-17, 2000.

3 Hindutva and its Mhystory, Rewriting History Seminar, 2001.

4 In Defence of History. Granta, 1997.

5 See for example, D. D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture. Sangam, 1984.

6 A sense of the varieties of evidence used in the piecing together of the history of the subcontinent can be obtained from the Introduction to the newly revised edition of Romila Thapar’s Early India, Penguin, 2002.

7 Interview with Parvathi Menon in Frontline, 1998.

8 Asghar Ali Engineer, Hindu-Muslim Relations Before and After 1947, in Anatomy of a Confrontation, S. Gopal (ed.), Penguin India, 1990.

9 From interview with Indian portal Rediff, 1999. http://www.rediff.com/news/1999/mar/19panik1.htm

10 History and Politics of Ram Janmabhoomi, Hindu Vivek Kendra. http://www.hvk.org/ram/a3.html

11 K. R. Malkani, quoted in Pradip Kumar Datta, Hindutva and its Mhystory, Rewriting History Seminar, 200.

12 Imagined Religious Communities?, Interpreting Early India, Oxford University Press, 1992.

13 The Rewriting of History by the Sangh Parivar. http://www.www.secularindia.net/article6.html

14 Angana Chatterji, Learning in Saffron: RSS Schools in Orissa, Asian Age, Nov 11, 2003. Available at various places on the net, see e.g. http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/anganaNov2003.html

15 Vidya Bharati official site: http://www.vidyabharati.org/aim.asp

16 Historical Pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar, Rewriting History Seminar, February 2003.

17 A range of such examples are provided by Akhbar magazine under ‘In the Name of History: Examples from Hindutva-Inspired School Textbooks in India’. http://www.ercwilcom.net/indowindow/sad/article.php?child=30&article=31

18 Tanika Sarkar, op. cit.

19 Angana Chatterji, op. cit.

20 Letter from Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, President, All India Save Education Committee, to the Prime Minister, 24 November 2000, in response to proposed changes to the curriculum. Text available in full on http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

21 Whither Indian History? Speech delivered at National Convention Against Communalisation of Education in India, New Delhi, August 2001. Text available at http://www.knpanikkar.org/lectures/Whither%20Indian%20Education.html

22 The role of Nandy in easing the takeover of academia by RSS ideologues has been highlighted by many. See for example the comment of social anthropologist Andre Beteille quoted in an article by Neena Vyas in The Hindu, 29 April, 2001: ‘To a large extent, the “ground work had already been prepared by intemperate criticism of modern social theory” by men such as Dr. Ashish Nandy who sought to emphasise indigenous methodologies, rubbishing modern social theory as “western”, Prof. Beteille pointed out. From that emphasis on the indigenous and rubbishing of modern theory, (and thereby identifying all modern theory and thought as of western origin) the next step of eulogising all that was understood or articulated in “ancient India” was an easy step.’

23 Right-Wing Politics and the Cultures of Cruelty, Ved Gupta Memorial Lecture 1998.

24 Rediff interview, 3 November, 2003. http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/nov/03inter.htm

25 Speech at Bharatiya Vichar Kendra function. The full text of the speech is available on Joshi’s official website, which is at any rate worth a look: http://www.drmmjoshi.com/

26Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, Op. Cit.

27 Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press, 2003.

28 Sumit Sarkar, Op. Cit.

29 http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

30 For a discussion of Hindutva’s devotion to technology, see Meera Nanda, op. cit.

31 The full text of the statement is available online at the CPI(M)’s People’s Democracy site: http://pd.cpim.org/2001/aug12/aug122k1_sahmat.htm

32 The full statement is available at http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/NoVedic.html

33 All the deleted passages can be found on NCERT’s website, http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

34 http://members.tripod.com/historycongress3/mysore.htm