11-04-2006, 10:27 AM
Fortunately, India also happens to be a country where the intellectual tradition - if for a moment we forget the colonial overtones of such a statement - is truly bicultural. It has had six hundred years of exposure to the west and at least two hundred years of experience in incorporating and internalizing not merely the west but specifically western systems of knowledge. It need not necessarily exercise the option that it has of defensively rejecting modern science in toto and falling back upon the purity of its traditional systems of knowledge. It can, instead, choose the option of creatively assessing the modern system of knowledge, and then integrating important segments of it within the frame of its traditional visions of knowledge. In other words, the Indic civilization today, because it straddles two cultures, has the capacity to reverse the usual one-way procedure of enriching modern science by integrating within it significant elements from all other sciences - premodern, non-modern and postmodern - as a further proof of the universality and syncretism of modern science. Instead of using an edited version of modern science for Indian purposes, India can use an edited version of its traditional sciences for contemporary purposes.
This argument can be pushed in another direction. Contemporary India, by virtue of its bicultural experience, manages to epitomize the global problem of knowledge and power in our times. There is a continuity between the Indian experience of an increasingly violent modern science, encroaching upon other traditions of knowledge and social life, and the western experience with modern science as the dominant cultural principle resisting the emergence of new cultures of knowledge. There is a continuity between the experiences of the two civilizations even at the level of élite and middle-class responses to the situation.
The modern Indian élites and middle classes have a fear of the present, explained away, with the help of some forms of history, as only a fear of the past. The western élites and middle classes have a fear of the future, explained away, with the help of some forms of futurology, as only the fear of a future un-restrained by or disjunctive with the present. Evidently, the élites of both worlds have in common the ambition of containing the future by controlling the present politics of knowledge. The former fear the process of democratization of India which is marginalizing them; the latter fear the possibility of future democratization of the world which will marginalize them.
And, as if to spite those who pin their hopes in matters such as this on generational changes, on the expectation that the youth will liberate them from the certitudes of the past, in India the emerging middle-class élites seem to nurture the same hope of substituting science for politics, because politics for them is irrational and messy, and science is rational, neat and controllable. Meanwhile in the west a project takes shape which seeks to derive all politics from science for roughly the same set of reasons.
This argument can be pushed in another direction. Contemporary India, by virtue of its bicultural experience, manages to epitomize the global problem of knowledge and power in our times. There is a continuity between the Indian experience of an increasingly violent modern science, encroaching upon other traditions of knowledge and social life, and the western experience with modern science as the dominant cultural principle resisting the emergence of new cultures of knowledge. There is a continuity between the experiences of the two civilizations even at the level of élite and middle-class responses to the situation.
The modern Indian élites and middle classes have a fear of the present, explained away, with the help of some forms of history, as only a fear of the past. The western élites and middle classes have a fear of the future, explained away, with the help of some forms of futurology, as only the fear of a future un-restrained by or disjunctive with the present. Evidently, the élites of both worlds have in common the ambition of containing the future by controlling the present politics of knowledge. The former fear the process of democratization of India which is marginalizing them; the latter fear the possibility of future democratization of the world which will marginalize them.
And, as if to spite those who pin their hopes in matters such as this on generational changes, on the expectation that the youth will liberate them from the certitudes of the past, in India the emerging middle-class élites seem to nurture the same hope of substituting science for politics, because politics for them is irrational and messy, and science is rational, neat and controllable. Meanwhile in the west a project takes shape which seeks to derive all politics from science for roughly the same set of reasons.