500 shiv visvanathan, on ancestors and epigones

11/ 28/ 12 500 Shiv Visvanat han, O n ancest or s and epigones

1/ 27www. india- sem inar . com / 2001/ 500/ 500 shiv visvanat han. ht m

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On ancestors and epigones

S HIV V IS V A NA THA N

THE importance of environment as a policy issue can be traced back

to the colonial era. One can cite the various protest movementsagainst colonial forestry in the Garhwal region or the tribal revolts

chronicled by the historians of the subaltern school.1 The classic

example would probably be the problem of flood control. As early as

1900, the British engineer, Francis Spring, suggested that ‘the

appointment of a river commission for the organized study of the

great alluvial rivers would be... an act worthy of the state.’2

The problems of flood control inspired the astrophysicist, Meghnad

Saha, to speculate on the problems of river valley planning in India.

He established the journal Science and Culture to popularise the

need for statist planning to confront such environmental issues.3 The

work of the science and culture pressure group contributed to the

establishment of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) which was

modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). However,

environmentalism as statist ideology is a more recent phenomenon.

It was a result of the necessity of responding to the Naxalite and

Chipko movements, out of a desire to suppress one and co-opt the

other. Environmentalism as a reason of state is concurrent with the

Emergency era. A concern for the environment provided a liberaldressing for the oppressiveness of the regime. It helped portray its

humanistic concern for the victims of development. Such an ensemble

of tactics must be differentiated from the holism of an ecological

worldview. The grammar of the latter is radically different. It reflects

the affinity of a society for nature, an intrinsic sense of the sacred

regarding plants and animals, and an attitude to technology impelled

by a sense of communitas.

As examples, one could think of various tribal worldviews or the

culture of the Bishnois. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj would represent

another embodiment of such a worldview. For an environmentalist,

on the other hand, a concern with nature or for other cultures is an

afterthought of his commitment to the project called development. Itreflects the essential hubris of the state-science nexus and the belief

that a little more technology and science can mop up the

http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/500.htm



depredations of technocratic development.

The current view of environmentalism as a statist strategy is

embodied in a series of tactics associated with some archetypal

figures. My irrepressible colleagues have fine-honed it to a list of four.

First the late prime minister, Indira Gandhi, internationally known for

her concern for wildlife but indifferent to the genocidal possibilities of

dams displacing people.

To add to this, we have the hyphenated strategies associated with

two remarkably competent officials, Jagmohan and Jayakar.

Jagmohan’s concern with town planning, with the city as a built-upenvironment, reflected the vision of Haussmannism as power,

concealed under environmentalism as concern. The other part of thispicture is a preoccupation with traditional heritage as a form of

conspicuous consumption. It is embodied in the spectacle of PupulJayakar’s India Festivals. Interlacing all these into a populist

manifesto was the work of Sanjay Gandhi, the fascist in the guise of aboy scout, with his concern for hiking, green belts and familyplanning.

But, beyond this set of personal styles, as an ideology,

environmentalism in India embodies the following assumptionsregarding nature, other cultures, technology and the city as the built-

up environment.

1. It views nature primarily as a resource or commodity, justifying thepreservation of nature for reasons of trade, tourism or leisure. It fails

to comprehend the disjunction between the depredation of nature inthe production system with the need to conserve nature for the

purposes of leisure or consumption.

2. It attempts to humanize the violence of technological obsolescencethrough the museumization and preservation of endangered species,objects and people as spectacles or exhibits.

3. It disguises the power and violence of the state through notions of

welfare, particularly through metaphors of health and hygiene,legitimating repression by offering to cleanse the environment. As a

result, refractory communities like the poor, or even minorities, arecleared under town planning or family planning welfare programmes.



4. It fails to challenge the fact that the Indian state is an anti-ecological phenomenon displacing cultures and communities through

dams, or destroying people through repressive forest bills introducedas an expression of its environmentalist concern. Environmentalism is

a technocracy’s attempt to depoliticise the implications of ecologicallyinspired groups such as the Chipko, Appiko or even the Kerala

Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP).

5. It is illiterate about the possibilities of science itself being a mode ofviolence as expressed for instance in the idea of vivisection (the

infliction of pain justified in the pursuit of scientific knowledge orTriage (the withholding of relief to certain communities justified on

rational grounds).4 It fails to see the violence of the Bhopal disaster,

nuclear energy or the green revolution as banally intrinsic to the

dominant paradigms of science and technology.5

6. It abandons a civilizational view of nature and technology for the

glorification of the nation-state and legitimizes managerial models asthe styles of technological and political coping, sanctifying the expert

technocrat as a special kind of man.

One could challenge such an ideology through a political critique of

the state or through an evaluation of the technocratic conception ofknowledge. But what I would like to do is to confront it on its own

grounds as an imagination. I would like to suggest that it is a second-rate imagination and its mediocrity can be underlined by confronting it

with its own genealogy within the national movement. Ideas, like

families, need genealogies particularly to point out that they may havefallen into the wrong hands. The epigons must confront the ancestors

particularly when the latter are more relevant.

I shall confront the current models of environmentalism with some ofthe collective wisdom of the debates on science and technology that

were prevalent before the current model of statist development drove

them underground or caricatured them through bowdlerization. I wantto concentrate in particular on the critique of the Swadeshi movement

of 1905. Swadeshism itself was the original embodiment of the

garbled mix of nationalism and technocracy that we now call the

import substitution model of industrialization.

The year 1905 was a landmark in the history of India. The partition



of Bengal triggered the Swadeshi movement which demanded a

greater degree of autonomy and initiated moves to indigenise

industry. While its concerns were basically politico-economic, it wasaccompanied by an efflorescence of cultural debates. The movement

produced in its aftermath a spate of self-criticism revolving around the

civilizational question of science and state, focusing particularly on the

question of university education and industrial development.6

Two aspects of the debate make it particularly relevant. It saw

western science and civilization not merely as a fact out there,

coercive and colonial, but as an inherent possibility within its own self.

Secondly, it held that any solution should be relevant not only for theIndian village or neighbourhood but also to the whole world as a

possibility. The neighbourhood had to reflect the concerns of the

wider cosmos. The basic groups involved were the Gandhians, the

Theosophists, the Swadeshi advocates, the Traditionalists, theNeovitalists and the Intermediate technologists. I shall restrict myself

to a discussion of the last three groups.7

The solutions that all these groups offered were fascinating and

provocative. They held that India could not reduce its identity to ascientific civilization. They saw science as problematic and sought to

embed it within an ecology of other knowledges. Ecology, of course,

is a modernist term. The equivalent exercise would contain the idea of

a critical tradition or the use of tradition as a critique of modernity.The critical encounter between modern science and the civilizational

traditions in India has not been fully played out. But even the first few

acts offer a fascinating spectrum of possibilities.

The attempt was not to deny science, but to confront it with life

giving myths or inject it with what the philosopher, Arne Naess, calls

‘postulates of impotency’. The violence and hegemony of science,

they suggested, could only be controlled by working towards a

pluralist ecology of knowledges. They sought to confront science withthe wisdom of the other that it had subdued as pre-scientific, non-or

pseudo-scientific. When modern science confronted the primitive, it

reduced him to a lower order of mentality. When traditionalists triedto introduce into science the order of the symbol, pleading for an

iconography of technology, this was dismissed as a millenarian

vestige. I shall now outline some of the solutions offered, beginning

with the work of the traditionalists as represented by the writings ofAnanda Coomaraswamy.



The traditionalists challenged the swadeshi conceptions of science

and technology to prevent the repetition of a tragedy. They realized

that the West had lost the great traditions of medieval technology.

But, in India, tradition was still alive and craft technologies were still

living orders of doing and being. These technologies were gene poolsof an alternative imagination which had to be sustained and eventually

made available to the West. The problem lay in the fact that the

nationalism of the Swadeshi movement was a mechanical one,seeking merely to substitute in industry, Indian personnel and

ownership for the western colonial order.

Ananda Coomaraswamy asked: ‘What has Swadeshi done for Indianart? Almost nothing. Efforts are made to establish all sorts of factories

for making soap, matches, cotton, nibs, biscuits and what not, while

men who can still weave, still build, still work in gold and silver,

copper and wood and stone, are starving because their work is out

of fashion.’8

The traditionalist critique of western bourgeois science and

technology centred around the museum. The museum represented an

attitude to nature and culture which had to be challenged. To theWest, the museum as a collective representation, represented its

humanistic concern for other cultures. Yet, to Coomaraswamy, the

immiseration of cultures through science was represented in the

paradox called the museum. As an institution, the museum embodieda classification of dead cultures, collected and classified by the very

scientific-industrial mind that had forced them into obsolescence. ‘We

preserve folksongs at the same time our way of life destroys the

singer.’9

The museum and the reservation – both as part and zoo – were

complements of the violence of science in the laboratory. The first

sought to preserve the artifacts of dead cultures, the other protected

and embalmed cultures and species which were dying. Yet, bothwere participants in the wider order of science which forced these

modes of technology and living into obsolescence. While humanistic,

they reflected the detached curiosity of science to what it had done to

the other outside it. For Coomaraswamy, it was almost as if scientificcuriosity and formaldehyde went together. He thus condemned the

museum as ethnocidal and necrophilic, smacking of anthropology and

archaeology as the sciences of dead and dying orders and not of artas part of the living ecology of traditions. Museum treasures, he

reminded us, were originally everyday productions of men, live men



in living cultures. Coomaraswamy quoted a Sinhalese journalist as

asking, ‘If God appeared on earth and enquired for the Aztecs,

Incas, Red Indians, Australian aborigines and other slowly

disappearing races, would civilized man take him to the museum?’10

Coomaraswamy’s critique of modern science focused on three other

aspects. Firstly, the notion of art itself. He rejected the post-

Renaissance distinction between crafts and fine arts and appealed to

the platonic notion of art as the principles of manufacture – thescience, both the physical and metaphysical, of making things for

man’s good use. Such a concept included under its rubric not merelypainting and music, but agriculture, cookery, and fishing. ‘Art is

simply the right way of making things whether symphonies or

aeroplanes.’11 Second, such a view challenged the very notion of art

and thus even of science as something done by a special kind of man.

Within such a traditional view, every man was both an artist and a

scientist, that is the artist was not a special kind of man but that every

man with a vocation was a special kind of artist in the pursuit of

arranging something or other according to his constitution and

training. Finally, modern science he argued, led to the immiseration of

cultures, the destruction of people’s art, appropriating their science

and rendering them prole tarian. According to Coomaraswamy, a

craftsman sans his science was a proletarian. Coomaraswamy’scritique can be understood with reference to two small essays, one

on synthetic dyes and the other on the gramophone.12

His short note on Aniline dyes was an immediate response to P.C.

Ray’s eulogy of synthetic chemistry. In a review of the International

Congress of Applied Chemistry, the scientist had argued that the

success of synthetic chemistry was the result of the dedication ofgenerations of chemists, of labours which ‘revolutionized and

completely destroyed a staple trade of France, Holland, Italy, and

Turkey.’13 Coomaraswamy was provoked by the fact that Ray had

failed to question the desirability or consequences of such a

distinctively scientific process. Coomaraswamy held that such a flawwas endemic to the structure of science, which justified itself as

knowledge pursued for its own sake.

As a result of this, abstract science lacked the normative principles

for differentiating between growth and obsolescence. One



incorporated the notion of tradition, genealogical depth and memory

while the latter sprang from the emptiness of clock time.

Coomaraswamy felt that only tradition and the cosmologies of a

traditional society could provide the ecological system of controls, the

embeddedness required for directing the technological process. The

traditional orders lacked the dualism of the symbolic and the

instrumental which modern technique introduces. They embodiednotions of responsibility which the professionalism of modern science

seemed unaware of. Coomaraswamy cited the case of an Indian

woman who refused to buy a washing machine because then ‘what

would become of my washerman’s livelihood?’14

The craft idiocy of modern science was reflected in the use ofsynthetic dyes, an act which forced a whole way of life ‘to die or sink

into oblivion, without an attempt to study it and learn from it.’15

Science became the basis for a proletarianized world where the

craftsman is no longer a master scientist. Coomaraswamy saw

proletarianization by science as a process of deculturation throughappropriation and standardization. The introduction of synthetic dyes

had destroyed these craft traditions, and the art of dyeing, rather than

being a celebration of variegated techniques differing from family to

family and district to district, became a standardized set of

scientifically ordained procedures to be applied mechanically from

packets distributed by visiting German salesmen. The craft models of

tradition became, to Coomaraswamy, ways that must be kept alive to

remind science of orders of responsibility from which science itselfstemmed. The craft traditions offer us a model of internal control, of

renunciation, as an alternative to the externalist model of international

control which is so central today.

Coomaraswamy saw science as accelerating the process towards

the vulgar, unaesthetic man, a populist phenomenon which could not

be restored by the palliatives of night school and ‘Home University’

pocket books. He added that, on the other hand, the craft traditions

also embodied notions of ritualized reciprocity which eluded thesecular structure of technological innovation. In his essay on the

gramophone, he sought to articulate some of these normative

principles.

The gramophone in a mechanical world was no longer an innocent

form of entertainment. In fact, ‘every time you accept a gramophone

in the place of a man, you degrade the musician, take from him his

living and injure the group soul of your people.’16 Within the craft

tradition each instrument had its own individuality, each moment of

song was communion with a particular audience. But the mechanical



production of the gramophone, where each part was made by a

different man and fitted together by another man, destroyed such aprocess. The industrialization of music destroyed it both as a folk and

esoteric art and rendered music vulgar and populist.

For Coomaraswamy, property, unlike in modern individualism, had

to be part of communitas. Intellectual property was the common

heritage of people and like natural resources had to be part of the

commons. Any innovation which sought to destroy the continuity of

such an heritage had to be renounced. Thus, what was rendered

obsolescent by the gramophone was not just an artifact but acommunity of singers. Coomaraswamy was not against science per

se. In fact, he believed that the only use for the gramophone was for

purposes of scientific research. He felt however that science as a

mode of perceiving had to be localized and encompassed within a

wider metaphysics of the good, the true and the beautiful.

Modern intellectual science was merely a truncated cosmography and

truncated cosmographies were woefully inadequate to provide theembeddedness, the holism that ecology demanded. One could hardly

think of notions like the gift or sacrifice or play within such a

framework. Coomaraswamy believed that one had to wage a

relentless guerilla warfare against scientific civilisation. It was here that

the swadeshism of Indian nationalism failed by succumbing to

materialistic offerings of science, whether as the gramophone or the

Aniline dye. ‘Five hundred years ago, it would not have matteredwho destroyed Rheims; in this age of intellect it matters because

contractors do not build like craftsmen. Indeed, is there any article of

everyday use, from clothing of paper, from food to furniture that is as

well made as it was a hundred years ago, except the engines of

destruction.’17

If the traditionalists saw in resurgent India the possibilities of

maintaining the continuity of tradition, the intermediate

technologists discerned in the situation the possibilities of an

altogether different experiment. They did not deny the rationality of

traditional systems of technology. What they confronted was the

problem of the viability of such systems against the onslaught of

modernity, capitalism and imperialism. They were aware that themodern factory system was exploitative and degrading and saw the

possibilities of helping India evolve industry in a different and more

humane direction.



I shall examine two efforts in this context: the work of Allan Octavian

Hume on agriculture and Fredrick Nicholson on fishing and

agriculture. One must emphasize that the career lines of these

exercises were similar. All these scientists were confronted with, even

surprised by the rationality of traditional technology. The problem,

however, lay in the fact that traditional technology as a text was being

subverted by the new context. It was becoming unviable. The

challenge lay in the possibilities of retaining the ecological viability ofthese technologies by introducing efficiencies which were consonant

with their technique or by grafting them to alternative energy sources,

like solar or wind-power, to avoid the diseconomies of modern

technology.

The intermediate technology movement anticipated and articulated

what is today known as the ethnoscience perspective. It holds thattraditional notions of technology rather than being mere superstition

were rational systems and, secondly, that the farmer and the artisan,

like the scientist, was a man of knowledge. What is noteworthy is the

reluctant admiration of this network of individuals for the rationality of

traditional techniques.

The outstanding work in this genre is Allan Octavian Hume’s

Agricultural Reform in India. Although it slightly predates theSwadeshi movement, it is relevant to the issues discussed. Referring

to the peasant, Hume remarked, ‘so far as the rule of thumb goes, the

experience of 3000 years has not been wholly wasted. They know to

a day when it is best (if only meteorological conditions permit) to sow

each staple and each variety of staple that is grown in each

neighbourhood. As for weeds, their wheat fields would in this respect

shame ninety-nine hundredths of those in Europe. They are greatadepts at storing grain and will turn it out of rough earthenware pits

after 20 years absolutely uninjured.’18

What troubled Hume was the fact that such knowledge was

empirical, concrete, embedded in a local matrix of nature and

tradition. Further, such knowledge was not purely secular but

coloured by religious tradition. Hume listed a number of agriculturalproverbs which governed the cycle of ploughing, sowing and reaping.

Yet, unlike the modern agricultural scientist, Hume realized the

importance of beginning with an analysis of such proverbs because ‘it

is impossible to introduce any improved system of agriculture without

realizing the extent to which the present practice of such an art is

governed by superstition.’19



What puzzled Hume throughout was the fact that science was thought

to be abstract and agricultural policy general; but here was a system

of local sciences, embodied in proverbs, with its own vocabulary

which incorporated empirical truths. Hume emphasized the

importance of adapting science to local ecologies, especially in

modifying machine technology to meet the needs of local agricultural

systems.

Unlike traditionalism, the idea of intermediate technology consisted

of an eclectic set of experiments. What was characteristic was the

attempt to combine science as universal knowledge with local

knowledges since these, even if ‘para-scientific’, had produced

rational viable systems in symbiosis with other aspects of the culture.

One must emphasize however that ethno-science and intermediate

technology were relative rather than pluralistic orders. They only

sought to humanize the movement from the traditional agriculturalview to the scientific-industrial perspective. But the logic of their

work led them to a realization that tribal or traditional agronomy as a

system might embody a more ecological worldview than scientific

agriculture.

The intermediate technologists saw swadeshism as a failure of the

technological imagination. They felt that intermediate technologycould provide that missing grammar, a blend of both technological

competence and meaning. The role of the intermediate technologist

lay in his ability to improve existing methods of technology without

disrupting the culture or the ecology of the system and also in helping

to facilitate a gradual movement towards industrialization. As

evidence of the first, one can cite Nicholson’s work on agriculture

and of the second, his efforts towards improving fisheries in India.

Nicholson, in his study of agriculture, showed that economics had to

be ecological, that any system of intermediate technology must use

what is generally under-utilized or ignored as waste. For technologists

like Nicholson, the garden was the model, mediating between

agriculture and industry. In his Note on Agriculture in Japan he

remarked, ‘All land is treated like gardens, agriculture in Japan is

horticulture.’20

It was Japanese intensiveness in the utilization of land and waste that

impressed the British technologist. ‘With characteristic ingenuity,

villagers contrive to attract mules, (the plan does not succeed with

horses) to particular spots on the roads by odorising such spots with

donkey droppings and urine; no passing donkey or mule fails to

respond to the suggestion.’21 In fact, so intensive was the use that



even city corporations obtained income by ‘leasing out the collection

of dejecta to farmers and scavengers.’22 It was precisely such

economy that Nicholson advocated for Madras which was poisoning

itself with natural wastes festering on village sites.

Nicholson faulted both colonialism and swadeshism for ignoring such

everyday technologies. Nicholson articulated his vision of

intermediate technology in a remarkable passage on fishing. One

should notice in particular his attempt to locate various forms oftechnology into niches. ‘There is a vague popular idea that

development means ‘steam trawlers’; that there is an illimitable sea

harvest outside needing only to be gathered in by a modern plant and

by starting steam trawlers. My own idea of Madras needs and

methods is, on the contrary, that we do not need or want steam, save

for particular cases; that to jump from the catamaran to the steamer is

impossible and unwise if possible, and that our true method is toproceed by the ordinary and historical process of slow development;

revolutionary methods, here as elsewhere are a mistake. We want to

develop, gradatim et parti passu, the fisherfolk, the fishing industryand the fishing trade by methods which will not necessarily reducefishing folk to hired labour under capitalists, European or

otherwise.’23

Within intermediate technology, thus, science becomes a tool to

prevent the proletarianization of labour. Nicholson claimed that it wasthe sailing boat and the curing yard rather than the steam trawler and

the refrigerating car which should be the focus of attention. Herealized, however, that the days of steam trawling would come, butfelt that the old and the new must be ecologically niched and that the

superior and more powerful boats should supplement and not oustthe catamaran and the canoe. The role of the state lay in being a

humane referee between these differing styles of technology.

In general, some notion of evolutionism informed the debates on the

Swadeshi movement. But the specific critiques of swadeshism weremore informed by the maverick ideas of Patrick Geddes, biologist

turned polymath sociologist, town planner and educationist, who sawin his neo-vitalist biology, the possibilities of the recovery not only oftradition but the unities that the dualisms of western science had



unnecessarily kept apart. The Geddesian critique of the swadeshi-

colonial idea of science operated at two levels: firstly, in terms of thespecificities of university reform and, secondly, in showing how India

could contribute to the recovery of a more biologistic view of theworld.

Geddes saw the colony as a tropical world, magnifying thepathologies of the West. He claimed that there was something unrealabout the extraordinary diffusion of English as the medium of

education in India. He realized the disaster of a system which was‘trying to educate princes into public school boys, pundits into

honours graduates, babus into cheap clerks, peasants into

proletarians.’24

Yet, Geddes cautioned that swadeshism in its very moment ofprotest, was compounding the tragedy through its interpretation of the

situation. Geddes believed that the strife was not between East andWest and added that developments in science had created the

conditions for the recovery of a second West – the other West ofvitalist ecology beyond the reductionist, machine-driven colonialism

of the first West. For Geddes, the restructuring of the Indianuniversity had to develop through a dialogue with this other West.The Indian university of the future had to understand its genealogy as

a knowledge system.

Geddes argued that the career of the university as an organism

reflected an often violent dialogue with the competing notions of

knowledge and pedagogy resident in its environment. Its success layin its ability to provide a working synthesis. The medieval university

itself arose out of an attempt to reconcile the doctrines of theChristian church with the recovery of Aristotle. Paralleling this wasthe dialogue of the medical systems, where physicians of many faiths

were comparing not only their drugs but their doctrines. Thismedieval university then became the Renaissance university by

imbibing ‘the new learning from the fugitive Greeks, the newastronomy from the persecuted heretics and the results of the new art

of printing from wandering scholars and craftsmen.’25 TheRenaissance university eventually grew into the contemporary

German system. For Geddes thus, no university was completewithout its dissenting academics. The relation between the two

provided for both stability and mutation.



Geddes remarked that India, in rebuilding its universities, faced a

similar challenge. Rather than mechanically importing the westernuniversity, one had to innovate by counterposing the western

university to the civilizational possibilities inherent in indigenoussystems of medicine, agriculture, law or architecture. The tragedy lay

in the fact that India had failed to respond to the challenge andproduced not a post Germanic university expounding new notions of

biology, law and medicine but second hand pre-Germanic universitiesin Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. These universities were unable torespond creatively to the possibilities of their environment and were

reduced to being examination machines. What was true for theuniversity was true for the scientist.

Geddes once observed that he was not against Indians travellingabroad for science, but he warned against the insidious power ofwestern thought. ‘Let the Indian student come to us by all means...

but I think merely to be a more or less faithful or weak reproductionof ourselves, be it in sports or games, as minor functionary or

convert, not even if he were to surpass our ideal. Prince Ranjitsingh ismost welcome; he has done us no end of good; he has raised the

popular esteem and respect for India in the man in the street morethan a new Buddha would have done. We admire the Saxon Ivanhoefor overthrowing Norman champions at their own tournaments. Yet

Ivanhoe, masquerading in a culture foreign alike to his deepesttraditions and his highest aspirations was... but the first snob, the first

misleading example to his own culture.’26

Today, Indian science has produced many of these lesser

Ranjitsinghjis. One can cite the names of Bhabha, Sokhey, Saha orthe Krishnans and the Swaminathans as examples. Yet they werecarriers of the western genepool of knowledge in whom the

alternative possibilities of an Indian worldview became recessive.Geddes cited as counter example to the Ranjit-singhjis of science, the

name of Jagadis Chandra Bose.

Bose tried to forge the grammar of an alternative science.27 His was

an attempt to inject into science the alternative assumptions of hisown culture. Particularly in his classic Responses in The Living and

Non-Living, Bose sought to inject into science, the Indian concept ofvitalistic monism to demonstrate that plans and even metals were

irritable. One could cite the praises of Shaw, Hardy, Einstein orRomain Rolland, but it is the facetious response of an Englishnewspaper that captures the life giving power that his work gave to a

mechanistic vivisectional science.



‘Can metals feel? Last night at the Royal Institution, ProfessorJagadis Chandra Bose proved they can in the same way as animate

things. He struck a piece of copper, pinched a piece of zinc, gave itpoison, administered an antidote, threw light upon an artificial retina.

In each case, the electrical emotion registered by the galvanometerwas painful to witness. There is an opening for a society for the

prevention of cruelty to plants.’28

One wonders what would have happened to modern science if it

had been more systematically impregnated with the vitalistic monism

of Bose’s biology. It might have altered its destructive attitude tonature. One must confront at this stage the full implications ofGeddes’ neo-vitalism. For Geddes, biology was not merely a mode

of thought but a way of living. For him, the machine was anti-nature.The hegemony of the machine had, however, permeated several

major sectors of western thought – physical science, politicaleconomy, pedagogy and town planning. Geddes argued that the

mechanical worldview was grounded on an outdated science, in aphysics before the discovery and internalization of the second law ofthermo-dynamics. He added that from such a reductionist physics

was also derived the arrogance of an economics based on ‘theincreasing dissipation of energies and material resources, an activity

termed development in the enthusiastic verbiage of this pseudo-

science.’29

Mechanistic thought had also infected notions of power, as forexample in the Haussmanic city, with its celebration of linear planning,

employing grids of roads cutting across vital communities. Themechanical world was a reductionist one replacing unity with

uniformity, emphasizing equalization instead of difference.Mechanistic science lacked the vocabulary to understand the

organicity of tradition. Geddes saw in his neo-vitalist biology thepossibilities of a dialogue that western science had repressed.Mechanistic physics, through its reductionism, had denied mystery

and magic; biology, by rejecting reductionism had emphasized thepossibilities of emergent worlds. A biological worldview eventually

merged into a cosmic one, where the ideas of science, magic andreligion interacted once more.

For Geddes, thus, there were two Wests, the paleotechnic West of

the mechanical-colonial era and the neo-technic, vitalist, ecological



West. Swadeshism, he implied, was ignorant of the neotechnicsciences and in its very moment of protest, was internalizing the

categories of the mechanical mind. It is in this context that Geddesrepeatedly emphasized that the new university for India would be

primarily an agricultural one based on the notions of biology. Hepleaded for a revival of a rural view of science. ‘The economics of

the leaf colony and the economics of metals are coming into conflict;the first will again have the largest significance as in the rural world of

the old.’30

It is interesting to note that both Geddes and Tagore, in their schemes

for a new international university, argued in a similar manner. Thebiologist as scientist resonated with the poet in his conception of theuniversity, in vision, if not in all detail. One should add that Geddes,

Tagore and Jagadis Chandra Bose taught together at a summerschool in Darjeeling. All three were interested in the relations

between different forms of knowledge systems and virtually sought toinstitutionalize an ecology of knowledge systems.

Tagore believed that the modern university as a collectiverepresentation embodied the essential world-view of westerncivilization. Thus a student from another land had no difficulty in

obtaining a grasp of the western mind because it was capturedsynoptically in the university. Tagore felt that the East had no

equivalent institution. He sought to build such a centre at Santiniketan.Tagore was not content with a swadeshism that settled for a

voyeuristic view of the western university. He argued that before thedialogue between East and West could begin, there had to be anintellectual centre which embodied the spirit of knowledge in the East,

reflecting each of its great civilizations. Only with the existence ofsuch an institution could the interaction of East and West be one of

equality, of dialogic reciprocity, exploring difference.

Tagore argued that each university was an embodiment of an

archetypal set. The western university, as the microcosm of the

civitas, reflected the mind of the city. In India, however, civilizationwas associated with the forest ‘taking on its distinctive character fromits origin and environment.’ Its intellect sought spiritual harmony with

nature, while the mind of the city sought its subjugation, extending itsboundary walls around its acquisitions. The sage in the forest

hermitage was not interested in acquiring and dominating, but inrealizing and enlarging his consciousness by growing with and into his

surroundings. Even when the primeval forest gave way to the farmand the city, ‘the heart of India looked back with adoration upon thegreat ideal of strenuous self-realization and the simple dignity of the



forest hermitage.’31

The West on the contrary took pride in subduing nature. As a result,the American wilderness, unlike the Indian forest, lacked an animistic

power. For the West, nature belonged to the category of theinanimate. Western thought posited a disjunction between nature and

human nature but the Indian mind freely acknowledged its kinshipwith nature, positing an unbroken relationship with all.

Thus, while a city science sought to subdue nature, in India ‘a whole

people who were once meat eaters gave up taking animal food to

cultivate the sentiment of universal sympathy for life, an event unique

in history.’32 Tagore predicted that the dialogue between the twouniversities would be between a city science and a forest science,between a mode of being that sought harmony with nature and a way

of doing that sought possession of it.

Tagore did not deny the power of western science or the dynamism

of the western university. He felt however that the dialogue ofknowledges could only begin when differences were understood and

recognized. It was in a similar spirit that Geddes sought a return to anagricultural view of science, to a biology that would replace thehegemony of the machine as reified metaphor. Geddes’ letter to

Sister Nivedita about his idea of the proposed Indian Institute ofScience at Bangalore could have been written by Tagore. One

arrived at vitalism through the poetics of a leaf, through understandingthe implications of the forest as meaning, the other through the

synoptic eye that sought communion with the life-giving tendencies ofscience. It is in such a context that Geddes’ vision of the Indainuniversity should be seen.

‘You seek wealth through poverty, through simplicity. We seek themastery of man and beast; you know the spirit that is in them. In

science, it is we who have dissected the body, we who haveclassified and named the plants, but it is amidst the strange symbolism

of your temples that has first and most fully been shadowed forth thesecret of growth and the revival of all things living – for us theoutward forms of life and death, for you, the inner mysteries. We can

tell you of evolution in concrete detail, as of horse from clumsytapiroid, flower from humble weed; but you caught the first breath of

Brahma; the anti-thesis of anabolism and katabolism with itsphysiological details and their outcomes.

‘Our world is the modern specialists skill, but yours has been thecosmic sense. With the renewal of your own poetry, your own



philosophy, renew your ancient science, infuse and deepen our

keener yet less profound western thought.’33

The Geddesian plans for the post-Germanic university were never

concretized. The swadeshi nationalists defeated his hopes of

designing the new University of Banaras. The Central University ofIndore remained an unrealized vision. The dialogue between Geddes

and Tagore did not continue for long. Soon after he moved toPalestine to work on the plans for the University of Israel. But the

ecologistic vision of the world remains as relevant today, particularlyin his vision of the city.

As a biologist, Geddes was fascinated by mediating categories and

he used them creatively. The biologists concern was not for progresswhich is a linear notion, but with growth, a process which mediates

between life and death. His notion of region and regional planningmediated between the abstractions of universalist planning and the

parochialism of the locally concrete and also between town andcountry. The mediating term was the garden. The gardener was thepeasant in the city, and Geddes wanted city planning to incorporate a

‘peasant’ view of science.

Unfortunately, the city regarded as part of a mechanical industrial

order conceptualizing the city as a machine legitimated the throwing

away of old and worn out parts becoming a mandate forobsolescence. The violence lay in the fact that the city was an

organism. Thinking mechanistically, one performed lobotomies whilehiding behind the innocence of a Lego set. To counter this Geddesadvocated two methods: (i) the diagnostic survey; and (ii)

conservative surgery.

The practitioners of the diagnostic survey like the general practitioner

knew their city as a person. They did not begin with palaces and thegreat civic buildings and only later ‘penetrate the older parts of the

city and then, too often, only to sweep it past before them.’ Theybegan by understanding the inner labyrinth of the city. Like all organicforms ‘this may at first seem confused to our modern eyes, that have

for so long been trained to a mechanical order,’ but ‘gradually ahigher form of order can be discerned – the order of life in

development.’34 Life to a gardener is capable of repair, rebirth andrevival. Like the gardener, one pruned only certain selected parts, the



dilapidated sections, but only to encourage life processes. This whole

act of conservative surgery should be achieved through cooperationand persuasion.

Three notions become fundamental to the post HaussmanicGeddesian city: a notion of order that goes beyond the grid iron andunderstands irregularity, a notion of space that links domestic space,

the village square and temple shrine to cosmic space and the idea of acity that internalizes the biological wisdom of the rural world.

Geddes held that the degradation of the city was due to the‘deterioration of a peasant people deprived of their old contacts with

other earth.’35 He felt that renewal could only come throughinnovations by the people themselves across the three spaces

mentioned above. His observations are still fascinating. ‘Everywherein the slums we see women toiling and sweeping, each struggling to

maintain her little hovel above the distressingly low level of municipal

paving.’36 ‘The plague,’ said Geddes, ‘is product of the uncleanly

victory of the rat over the housewife. This of course is not her faultbut of our masculine inefficiency as businessmen, city rulers and state

controllers.’37

Thus, the first task of the planner was to liberate domestic space,

make the innumerable little adjustments which help the housewifemaintain a healthy environment. ‘Few realize,’ Geddes added, ‘thehygiene of tuberculosis consists above all of getting everyday a

verandah fit to sleep and a chabutra to sit on.’38 The economic lifeefficient wisdom of the housewife needed the garden as a

complement. It is not only the place for the tulsi plant but the shadegiving fruit tree, preferably the banana, rather than that present icon of

industrialism, the eucalyptus.

Geddes argued that this garden had to be different from that of thesuburbias of western planning. These garden cities were urban

suburbs which had neither agricultural productivity nor provided realcontact with nature. Rather than being an antiseptic collectin of

ornamental trees or an assembly line of flowers, gardens, Geddesargued, had to be efficient means of waste disposal. ‘It is the disaster

of India that her great religious systems were formulated before therealization of the significance of manure; while it is the strength ofChina and of ancient Rome that their religious systems fully and

frankly appreciated and even idealized the manurial process.’39



But more than being a source of food and a pollutin absorbent, the

garden provided a different notion of time, work and rhythm

embodied in the peasant view of science. In his Gardener’s View ofScience, Geddes remarked, ‘The ancient correlation of astronomywith climate and vegetation and through these with animal life, with

human occupation, is thus for us as fundamental as for primitivescience... Within the zodiac, the sun, the moon, the world of life and

labour all become unified as of old within a single education, a single

initiation in which cosmic unity and human ideal unite.’40 It is thisintegrated view of the world that the garden preserved in the city. Ifthe gardener was the peasant in the city, the zodiac was his compass

– a compact cosmos of life giving rhythms integrating folk, work andplace.

I have described above some of the conceptions of nature andtechnology elaborated by the critics of the Swadeshi movement. The

question one must ask is, how are they relevant to the contemporaryIndian nation-state proud of possessing the third largest cadre ofscientific personnel and the fourth largest army in the world? Firstly,

the idea of ecology is relevant for the conception of the nation-stateitself. Such ecologically sensitive concepts like survival, plurality and

the commons are more open-ended than ideas like security,development and social contract with which contemporary political

systems operate.

More importantly, while environmentalism is more of a

behaviouristic response to nature, ecology seeks more meaningfulmediations between nature and culture. In this context, it seeks to

challenge the hegemony of the one nation-state – one science view ofthe world. It realizes that the relation of the nation-state to the various

ethnic groups is analogous to the relation of western science totraditional and folk knowledges. It is also aware that the survival of

tribal and peasant groups might lie in conserving their ethnosciences.

Both the nation-state and modern western science as victoriousregimes speak the language of domination and defeat. Within such a

framework, defeated knowledges are either museumized ordisappear altogether. An ecological approach seeks to go beyond

this zero-sum imagination and speak instead of the language of

inequalities, the language of difference.41 The language of inequalities

allows mainly for erasure through defeat or equalization throughuniformity. The language of difference leads to complementarity and

reciprocity based on the recognition that various forms of knowledge



contain different truths. It recognizes the unique rather than theuniversalizing, contending that truths like germ plasm cannot be stored

in genebanks and museums but must be lived out.

Let us consider how scientific environmentalism or the nation-statehandles difference. The problematic ‘object’ is generally a recalcitrant

peasant or a tribal following his own truth. The following possibilitiesexist:

I. Genocide – the total erasure of a people and their knowledges.

II. Assimilation – the loss of identity and absorption into themainstream.

III. Museumization – preservation in parks, reserves and museumsof defeated cultures, a embalming that does not allow for growth or

mutation.

IV. Dualism, Apartheid – the existence of a defeated culture as alesser unit separate but unequal.

V. Systems, Cybernetics, Federations – a non-playful notion of thewhole emphasizing unity and stability rather than metamorphosis. The

whole seeks to discipline the parts, the emphasis being eventually oncommunication and control rather than meaning and truth.

VI. Pluralism – a dialogic relation between different truths in search

of a whole or unity, allowing for emergence, mutation and mystery.The search is not only for similarities but for understanding of

differences, even allowing for incommensurability.

The first five possibilities are virtually sequences in the

developmental process of which environmentalism is an integral part.

Those recalcitrant cultures which were not destroyed are displacedinto reservations or parks, or are incorporated into the process of

development through structures like the school. But the sense ofpluralism, of different systems interacting with and penetrating eachother, is missing. The issue can be understood by examining how the

problem of medical systems was confronted in India.42 The dominant

western medical system was regarded as more true and efficient thanthe traditional Ayurvedic, Siddha, Unani or folk practices. The latterwere lesser knowledges.

The possibility of Ayurveda confronting allopathy and comparingdifferent notions of health, diagnosis or disease is alien to such a

worldview. Like the cottage industry, the traditional medical systems



exist as separate but unequal forms to be inched, museumized oreven mined. As an instance of the latter, one can cite the case of

Rauwolfia Serpentina long used by Ayurvedic practitioners to treattension. The drug Reserpine was extracted and inducted into the

western medical pharmacopia while the Ayurvedic philosophy itselfwas ignored. The plant, once common in many forests, has been sorapaciously hunted that it is regarded an endangered species today.

The old warning of the Ayurvedic practitioners that the future ofAyurveda and the forests was inextricably linked did not enter the

systems view of the environmentalist.

Consider another example. India possesses the greatest diversity of

crops and farming systems. The diversity of gene-plasm is sustained

because of a multiplicity of agricultural styles. This diversity of natureconstitutes part of the repertoire of any culture. One can make astrong case that gene-diversity, ethnoscience and ethnicity are

inextricably linked. With the coming of the green revolution-monoculture, this diversity of gene-plasm is being eroded.

Let us examine how the environmentalist confronts the problem. Theyseek to store germ-plasm in gene-banks or parks and reserves

sustained in artificial conditions. Within such a framework, it is thelaboratory and the scientist that become responsible for the seed andnot the farmer. Improved upon, standardized and patented, the seed

becomes the property of a multinational, to be sold back to thefarmer at immense profit. Thus, even concerned environmentalism

becomes inadvertently an act of deculturation. The ecologist, CaryFowler, in a recent conversation, remarked that in Nicaragua seeds

are regarded as a part of the national heritage like music, and thefarmers are encouraged to be trustees their. Fowler added that‘gene-banks were like museums, where seeds go to die.’43 The real

alternative, he said, lay in allowing the farmer to be the scientistworking to sustain this gene pool as a continuing part of agricultural

practice.

Thus, what ecology seeks to sustain is the language of plurality as the

language of survival, not the logic of monocultural efficiency which isthe restricted grammar of the one-nation one-science nexus. Trueplurality would demand not just a critique of shifting cultivation by

scientific agriculture, but understanding what the wisdom of theformer, in mediating between the forest and the garden, has to offerto scientific agriculture.



The civilizational vision of ecology elaborated above emphasized the

dangers of reductionist models of science for politics, particularly inexaggerating the violence of the dominant regime. I would like toconfront as the final example the ideas of Geddes and Jagmohan. Ibelieve this exercise to be particularly relevant because Jagmohan hasoften been criticized for atrocities associated with slum clearance. But

what has been missed out in these assaults is the fact that thisbureaucrat, who was an outstanding planner, was actually followingthe logic of a certain knowledge system.

Jagmoham was a self-confessed adherent of the mechanistic model of

planning inherent in the works of Haussmann and Corbusier. In arevealing poem in his Island of Truth, he confessed,

‘I know

I am no genius

no Haussman reborn

no Lutyens with a chance

or Corbusier with Nehru’s arms.’44

This dedicated bureaucrat saw in the Emergency, the moment for

the realization of his environmentalist dreams. For Jagmohan andother technocrats, the poor in the slums were brakes on progress.

Legally they were squatters, ‘medically’ they were carriers of virusand disease necessitating the strong hand of the state to purge,cleanse and renovate them. The demolitions in Delhi were an attemptto erase the slums and visually cleanse Delhi. Jagmohan stated thatslum clearance was a technological act transcending politics. He

claimed: ‘What had been bulldozed is not the slums but their politics,not the jhuggi jhonpries but physical and mental disease theyreared. Bulldozers are instruments of development not of

demolition.’45

Jagmohan’s vision of green belts and gardens itself reflected anindustrialist notion of environmentalism. Here nature is geometricallyrendered into hedges, flowers pruned into clocks. The park was acreation of an industrial worldview which regiments nature intoorderly rows so that the worker could consume it in his moment of

leisure. It was the epitome of alienation. One wishes Jagmohan hadinternalized the ideas of Geddes. It would have sensitized him topossibilities which he was blind to, made him more culturally self-confident, less prone to parade the recommendations of Margaret



Thatcher and her ilk.46

Geddes observed that ‘the policy of sweeping clearances should be

recognized (as) one of the most disastrous and pernicious blunders inthe chequered history of sanitation.’ He felt it was politically coerciveand biologically illiterate. Underlying it was the idea of Haussmannic

notion of order. It was based on a notion of health that viewed all dirtas pathological. It extended the idea of plague to poverty, slums,congestion as sources of the social plague, the revolution. Bothplague and revolution threatened the existing order and had to bewiped out. The method was that of the grid iron, which did not

tolerate irregularity. As a result ‘new thoroughfares are hacked

through old world village life.’47

Geddes observed that the obeisance paid to the straight line and thedrawing board lead to ‘standardized semi-slums which are but the

slums of tomorrow.’48 What was transferred through the grid ironwas ‘the isolationism and individualism of the western city.’ There is awisdom to the above lines which is relevant today. The

Haussmannism of the Emergency bureaucrats disrupted communitiesand transferred them to the peripheries of the city. In these new areasthe old sense of community was destroyed. People became part ofan industrial lumpen and it was this mass that sections of the rulingparty used to ravage the city during the genocidal violence of

November 1984.

The pluralistic possibilities of the post-swadeshi visions eventuallygave way under the onslaught of the Bolshevik revolution and itspositivist variants. Such alternative worldviews were made to appearromantic, arcadian, reactionary, or even revivalist and lost their

power as life-giving myths. The great impact of the Russian revolutionwas to deaden the importance of local knowledges and highlight theimportance of the two great mega-machines of modernity, the nation-state and Big Science, both encompassed within the dreariness of

statist development. As a cognitive map, this can be best understoodin terms of a shorthand from R&D monographs – the innovationchain, which incoporates the various processes relating to technologytransfer.

The innovation chain is more than just a managerial schema. It

embodies the technological civics of knowledge and power in



modern society. As a cognitive map, it reflects the importance ofscience and technology in the construction of the collective self of

modern society. As a process, it involves a rite of passage fromtradition to modernity, from underdevelopment to development, froma pre-industrial to a post-industrial regime. The flow of science andtechnology is from centre to periphery, metropolis to satellite. Evenpollution seems to follow this trajectory. Environmetalism is a part of

such a managerial schema, providing the ‘softness’ of the humanrelations approach to the hard Taylorism of many transfer oftechnology models.

As a statist ideology, environmentalism is anchored on two axiomswhich are essential to the perpetuation of science as a hegemonic

form of knowledge. One can dub them irreverently as the doctrine ofthe immaculate conception of science and the doctrine of the fall.

The first assumes that science as a method is neutral and as a modeof truth can be the basis of the planetization of the world. It also

believes that science is good or potentially so and that the availablecorpus of scientific knowledge if well used can solve the basicproblems of inequality and starvation. The second axiom, the doctrineof the fall, bemoans the fact that science and technology havebecome increasingly consumerist, intensively polluting and excessively

militarized.

The furthest one can go within the dynamics of this managerial

framework is to argue that science has somehow been embedded inthe wrong politics. The politics of dualism also comes immediatelyinto play contending that while science is autonomous and universal,technology is local and adaptable. The problem thus becomes

essentially one of management rather than of metaphysics; questionsof epistemology and cosmology are no longer the primary focus.Such managerial views fail to see the link between the greenrevolution and Bhopal, between a choice for pesticides and the gas

leak. They fail to realise that a consumerist search for energy mightlead to nuclear annihilation. They substitute the real diversity offorests with industrial plantations of eucalyptus.

It is for these reasons that an ecological worldview must opposeenvironmentalism. Any ecological critique must seek to deconstruct

the present hegemony of the one-nation, one science view of theworld. It must seek to confront the normal science of the nation-statewith the wisdom of its ethnicities and the hegemonic logic of modernscience with the life giving power of local the knowledges-ethnosciences, which have guaranteed the survival of tribal and



peasant communities for generations.

* Reproduced from ‘The Politics of Ecology’, Seminar 330, February 1987.

Footnotes:

1. See Ramachandra Guha, Scientific Forestry and Social Change inUttarkhand, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XX, Special Number,November 1985, p.1939-1952 and Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vols.1-4 (Delhi: Oxford University Press).

2. Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science (New Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1985), p.100.

3. Ibid, see Chapter III.

4. See Shiv Visvanathan, From the Annals of the Laboratory State, LokayanBulletin, Vol.3, Nos.4 & 5, October 1985, p.23-47.

5. Shiv Visvanathan, Bhopal, the imagination of a disaster, Alternatives,Vol.XI, Number 1, January 1986, p.147-165.

6. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Delhi: Peoples PublishingHouse, 1977).

7. For a discussion of the Gandhians and the Theosophists, see Ashis Nandyand Shiv Visvanathan, Modern Medicine and its Non-modern Critics,Mimeographed paper presented at UNU/WIDER Conference on Developmentand Technological Transformations in Traditional Societies: AlternativeApproaches, August 1986.

8. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Essays in National Idealism (New Delhi:Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981) pp. 74-75.

9. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy (London: DennesDobson, 1947), p. 8.

10. Ibid, p. 22.

11. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (NewYork: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 98.

12. A. Coomaraswamy, ‘The International Congress of Applied Chemistry andAniline Dyes,’ Modern Review, Vol.VI, No.3, September 1909, p. 275-278 andCoomaraswamy, 1981, p. 201-206.

13. Coomaraswamy 1909, p. 275.




17. A. Coomaraswamy, ‘Love and Art,’ Modern Review 14(11), May 1915, pp.574-84, 576.

18. Allan Octavian Hume, Agricultural Reform in India (Madras: ChristianLiterature Society, 1899), p. 5.



19. Ibid, p. 58.

20. F.A. Nicholson, Note on Agriculture in Japan (Madras: GovernmentPress, 1907), p. 29.

21. Ibid, p. 45.

22. Ibid, p. 45.

23. F.A. Nicholson, Madras Fisheries Bureau: Papers from 1899 (Madras:Government Press, 1915), p. 83-84.

24. Patrick Geddes, On Universities in Europe and India, Five Letters to anIndian Friend (Madras: National Press, 1904), p.19.

25. Ibid, p. 3.

26. Ibid, p. 95.

27. See Ashis Nandy, Alternatives Sciences (New Delhi: Allied Publishers,1980).

28. Quoted in S.P. Basu (ed), Letters of Sister Nivedita (Calcutta: NavbharatPublishers, 1982), p. 778.

29. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, Life: Outlines of General Biology(London, Williams and Norgate, 1931), p. 1185.

30. Quoted in Amelia Defries, The Interpreter Geddes: The Man and HisGospel (London: Routledge, 1927), p. 175.

31. Rabindranath Tagore, Modern Review, Vol.XIV, July 1913, p. 1 (Mimeo).

32. Ibid, p. 2.

33. Geddes, 1904, p. 17.

34. Jayqueline Tyrwhitt (ed), Patrick Geddes in India (London: LundHumphries, 1947), p. 27.

35. Ibid, p. 88.

36. Ibid, p. 52.

37. Ibid, p. 70.

38. Ibid, p. 70.

39. Ibid, p. 91.

40. Quoted in Annie Beasant, Theosophy in Relation to Human Life (Benares:Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905), p. 113.

41. I am indebted to Jit Uberoi for this distinction.

42. See Nandy and Visvanathan, UNU/WIDER, 1986.

43. Interview at CSDS, 1985.

44. Jagmohan, Island of Truth (New Delhi, Vikas, 1978), p. 10.

45. Ibid, p. 71.

46. Ibid, p. 16.

47. Tyrwhitt, 1947, ibid, 52.



48. Ibid, p. 57.

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