Books
A NEW MORAL ECONOMY FOR INDIA’S FORESTS? Discourse on Community and Participation edited by Roger Jeffery and Nandini Sundar. Sage, New Delhi, 1999.
JOINT Forest Management, or JFM, is perhaps the most commonly used term in Indian forestry today, at least within the context of international aid to the forestry sector. Its popularity derives largely from the underlying expectation that ‘local communities’ should be more involved in managing forests, thus far managed through the use of strong-arm tactics by the forest department across the country. This move to involve communities in forest management is expected to lead to better conservation practice, rooted in the assumption that greater local involvement will somehow lead to a greater sense of ownership within the community and, therefore, to better stewardship of the resource. Simultaneously, the move to JFM is also expected to empower these communities more gene-rally, thereby inducing some level of social transformation to the ultimate benefit of the communities.
While the need for greater local involvement in conservation can hardly be questioned, the means by which this can be achieved such that there is real participation by the entire diversity of local stakeholders across class, caste and gender divides, has eluded practitioners in the forestry sector. In other words the push for the adoption of a radical step in Indian forestry (JFM has been adopted by 18 states) has taken place with little or no understanding of how such a step is to be operationalised. The book under review provides a critical analysis of some of the assumptions that underlie community involvement in conservation, focusing in particular on the problematic notions of ‘community’ and ‘participation’. In exploring the problems with the way in which both community and participation are imagined and constructed within development and environment discourse, Sundar and Jeffery, in their introduction, suggest that a new moral economy of Indian forests is being created, one that in effect serves to further curtail customary and legal rights to natural resources, particularly for the least powerful members of village society.
This exploration of community and participation surfaces repeatedly in the 10 additional contributions to the book. Sumit Guha uses pre-colonial records to demonstrate a great deal of flux in communities in present day Maharashtra, and the absence of homogenous, closely bounded and egalitarian communities. By doing so he is confronting a basic assumption that informs the repeated calls for greater community involvement in resource management.
In his study of landlords, forest cover and forest policy in Midnapore district of West Bengal, K. Sivaramakrishnan demonstrates that private forest lands under the Midnapore zamindars were actively managed during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. This was done in an attempt to increase forest cover, countering the colonial assumption of a steady decline in forest cover in lands not managed by the forest department. He also suggests that the effectiveness of forest management was at least partially due to the heavy-handed enforcement of restrictions by the van-sardars of the zamindars, countering, once again, the notion of egalitarian communities working to protect the environment.
In a largely theoretical piece, Arun Agrawal suggests that the latest valorization of community within the environmental/developmental discourse of the day is merely the latest in a series of such revivalist trends in scholarship, with its earliest practitioners being active in the late 19th century. In light of this movement of community in and out of fashion, Agrawal urges caution in embracing community as a panacea for our current conservation problems. Agrawal also takes a closer look at the assumptions that underlie standard arguments that urge greater community involvement in conservation. The notion of community as shared understanding is seen as reflecting a defined collection of individuals with common concerns, wherein any differences in interests are papered over as a result of frequent face-to-face interactions. Such a model hides the real political frictions – in the form of alienation, hierarchies and domination – that exist within any community. Recognizing and confronting this politics is a prerequisite to more effective involvement of communities in conservation.
Amita Baviskar then explores the logic and practice of eco-development within the Great Himalaya National Park in Himachal Pradesh, site of an experiment aimed at reducing villager dependence on grazing and other resources within the national park. The logic is that by undertaking varied developmental works and by providing alternative employment opportunities, villagers could be weaned away from using the park, in the process serving both local interests and the interest of conservation. Baviskar demonstrates the ways in which villagers have used the rhetoric of community to extract the maximum out of the forest department – in the form of funds for the building of roads and other developmental activities – while simultaneously resisting attempts by park authorities to curtail their access to park resources.
Savyasaachi demonstrates a disjuncture between forester and tribal perception of a forested landscape in Orissa, and argues that radically differing readings of the landscape are likely to undermine any attempt at afforestation by the forest department. With such differing views on what a landscape should look like, any attempt at involving the community in managing the forest is doomed at the start, particularly since most projects that attempt to involve communities tend to leave these communities out of the decision-making pro-cess with regard to the specifics of forest management.
In their paper, ‘How many committees do I belong to?’ Vasavada, Mishra and Bates provide a delicious example of bureaucratese taken to its logical conclusion, pointing to the proliferation of communities within villages as a result of the growing rhetoric on increased local involvement in development and environmental issues. Such involvement, invariably, is expected to unfold through a committee, one that represents the varied interests in the village. In one instance, the authors record 12 different committees supposedly devoted to developmental and other works. Committee work may be an unaffordable drain on the villagers time. In other situations, villagers may have no knowledge of the fact that they are on a committee, or the nature of their powers. Since these committees tend to comprise of village elite for the most part, both villagers and state officials have merely found new ways of channeling developmental resources in ways most suited to themselves.
Saxena and Sarin provide a critical evaluation of the JFM experience in Uttara Kannada, focusing on three key areas: (i) the need to expand the current JFM focus beyond ‘degraded’ forests, and to include forests that are in relatively good condition (in Uttara Kannada degraded forests comprise less than 1% of the forests managed by the forest department, and hence, while insignificant in the overall scheme of things, these are the forests receiving the greatest amount of attention from the department); (ii) the question of the composition and functioning of village forest committees, particularly with relation to equity and gender, but also more broadly with regard to far greater involvement of VFCs in actual management of forests on a day-to-day basis; and (iii) the need for institutional reform within the Karnataka Forest Department to ensure a better fit between its rhetoric of JFM and its own actions towards meeting stated goals.
Marriete Correa brings the feminist research perspective to JFM in Uttara Kannada and demonstrates numerous problems with the programme, indicating that most attempts to include women have been largely cosmetic, aimed at fulfilling project requirements, rather than actively ensuring real participation in decision-making. Correa also talks of the need for researchers to be wary of potential pitfalls in conducting research among women, in particular to be wary of ‘fake’ responses – i.e. responses that women may provide a researcher based on a desire to provide the latter with what he/she wants to hear, rather than the reality the woman is subject to.
Catherine Locke takes an even closer look at the gender issue, suggesting that the inclusion of women in policy documents and in practice is largely a response to donor pressures. In turn, donor focus on the gender issue has often been reactionary rather than proactive, and more often than not merely paying lip ser-vice to what has become a politically correct and self-evident truth. The standard assumption is that involving women will in and of itself be beneficial to the process, thereby reducing women to an all encompassing, singular category. She argues that there is a need to treat women’s participation in public spheres as an activity critically mediated by intra-household and inter-community politics, with all manner of power plays shaping who participates and in what fashion.
Bhaskar Vira then moves focus from the community to the bureaucracy and its interface with the community. He argues that, for the most part, researchers tend to work with a model of a monolithic state, one with little horizontal or vertical variation in its functioning. Vira challenges this assumption and calls for greater ethnographic research of the forest bureaucracy. He notes that field staff in particular, operate under a wide variety of compulsions, many mediated by their relations with the community they are interacting with, and that as a result there may be wide divergence between stated policy and actual implementation. There has been little by way of a research agenda directed at understanding the bureaucracy-community interface, despite its obvious importance in shaping the implementation of new policies.
The papers are of a uniformly high quality, offering empirical and theoretical insights into the problems that have surfaced in attempts to involve communities in conservation. For the most part the book holds together well. My only grouse is the fact that of the five papers that deal with JFM, a key focus of the book, three are substantially, or entirely, rooted in the Karnataka JFM experience, ignoring in the pro-cess the experiences in 17 other states that have adopted JFM over the past decade.
Vasant K. Saberwal
MODERN FORESTS: State Making and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India by K. Sivaramakrishnan. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.
IN times when scholarship in general and writing in particular seems to be heading towards increasing specialization and narrow foci, Modern Forests comes as a pleasant addition to a tradition of path-breaking works that combine disciplines and transcend artificial boundaries to look at the real world. Indeed, the book is astonishing as much for its academic analysis as for the breadth of the canvas. Straddling almost two hundred years of colonial history, the book looks critically at received doctrines of state and society, colonial knowledge and scientific forestry, unpacking these and providing a historical context to the evolution of such ideas and their practice. It is equally amazing that it manages to do so purely through the study of forest management in Bengal between the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries.
The introduction (almost) celebrates the diversity in the outcomes of the colonial project of centralization and state control over forests, and suggests that ‘by examining these variations closely, the book… shows how the manner in which culture, nature and power are spatially constituted and expressed, influences the processes of statemaking.’ Overall, the book explores three main themes. First, it examines construction of the colonial state through a dialectical interaction of central direction and local autonomy in ‘woodland Bengal’. Second, through this process, it demonstrates the variations in governance and the emergence of ‘exceptionally administered areas’ as they evolved in Bengal. Finally, it sketches the evolution of ‘scientific forestry’ in its different guises, as it unfolded in a scarcely understood and fiercely contested landscape of ‘woodland Bengal’.
The author repudiates the notion of a unified state represented in its rule-enforcing bureaucratic character and argues for a more lenient view of the power of the state in determining and enforcing the forms and legitimations of government and governmentality. Starting from the notion that ‘partitioning of landscapes and social spheres came to characterize large aspects of modernist state formation’ which was ‘central to the stabilization of colonial rule,’ the book defines statemaking as the production of the state-society distinction and offers a theory for their respective constitution as complex colonial entities through mediation by a ‘historically transformed political society.’ Traversing through the historical and contemporary treatment of the subject of state and society across disciplines, the book argues that political society, constituted in colonial Bengal of ‘headmanship, police and judicial roles of landlords, and labour contractors,’ mediates between state and civil society as well as propels the process of statemaking by providing the terrain for the emergence of polarities such as public and private, state and society, civilized and backward, and so forth.
Describing ‘woodland Bengal’ as the Bengal beyond the river valleys and the Gangetic delta, ‘geographically best described as a forest-savannah transition zone,’ the book takes a fresh look at the evolution of regimes of governance in ‘Jungle mahals’, the upland areas of the erstwhile Midnapore district. The author argues that instead of a unitary view of the impact and outcomes of regimes of governance as necessarily imported and standardized, it is more useful to examine the ‘development of forms of managerial consciousness and practices in their political, cultural and material settings.’
Documenting the process in Jungle mahals, the author points out that ‘early administration of woodland Bengal emerged as a series of exceptions and anomalies within the overarching standardizations undertaken in the land settlement process.’ The author unpacks the watershed of the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and shows that the emergence of the Jungle mahals as an exceptionally administered district and the legitimization of the exception with the constitution of the South West Frontier Agency in 1833, had as much to do with the local historical legacy of resistance to state penetration in its revenue collecting avatar, lack of colonial understanding about the region and the tussle over the locus of governance between central dictat and locally generated knowledge as with the centralizing process represented by the Permanent Settlement.
The book takes the argument further to demonstrate the evolution of the concept of ‘tribal places’ as a combination of primitive people and illegible landscapes that offered little evidence of a stable polity, in stark contrast to ‘the large agrarian villages of the adjoining plains which represented a legible landscape of rice fields, orchards, ponds, streams and people comprehensible as Hindu or Muslim.’ In the process, the author also constructs the concept of ‘zones of anomaly’ described as ‘areas where the application of the Permanent Settlement was thwarted’ wherein the standard vision of ‘rule through zamindars presiding over stable peasant communities’ was not practicable.
In generating insights from the interaction of the civilizing arm of the colonial project with itinerant and undefinable communities, the first part of the book shows how the ‘zones of anomaly… became a special place defined by the unique combination of tribal people and (peculiar) forest landscape.’ The account of the evolution of a ‘zone of anomaly’ illustrates the limits of colonial knowledge in defining the boundaries between state and society, public and private, as well as culture and science.
In the second part of the book, the author looks at how regional variations appeared within Bengal in the process of statemaking through the mechanisms of territorialization and access restriction regimes. It examines colonial forestry in three guises: ‘First, as a set of material technologies imposed on trees, grasses and wild animals; second, as a legal regime aimed at appropriation and monopoly in the extraction of natural rents; and third as a system of rational knowledge.’
In a fascinating account of the ‘contested history of sal’ the author demonstrates that received technologies (as for example, exclusion of fire for sal regeneration) seldom worked and had to be abandoned or reversed; centralized territorialization of forest into neat categories of degrees of exclusion was extremely difficult to implement and was often relaxed, modified or forsaken when contested by different sections of the heterogeneous society and the fragmented state alike; and finally, forestry as a system of professional know-ledge never managed to attain the kind of legitimacy and authority that foresters wished or pretended to wield. The author explains: ‘…this was because woodland Bengal – its people, flora and fauna – clearly emerged as an agent able to confound foresters and resist their ambitious schemes.’
This account challenges conventional wisdom on the issue of India’s colonial encounter. Rejecting the notion that scientific forestry was a ‘received version of European models that was subordinated to economic imperatives,’ the book argues that the practice of forestry as it evolved in woodland Bengal was critically influenced by the legacy of the colonial encounter in Bengal with ‘zones of anomaly’ and resulted in regional variations that are impossible to explain by a doctrine of universal and successful territorialization. The book, in fact, demonstrates that categories such as reserved forests or protected forests were re-interpreted in a local context in woodland Bengal and resulted in a ‘limited conservancy’ tempered by the local context.
In spite of the fantastic length and breadth of the issues covered by the book, or perhaps because of it, a few loose ends remain untied. In a riveting discussion on the nature of protest in the Jungle mahals, the author successfully unpacks social categories such as ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ into zamindars, paiks, chuars and so on and locates the fulcrum of such protest in the arena of statemaking with its locus in the negotiated terrain of political society. However, while the narrative of the process of statemaking is well illustrated, the issue of the role of protest in constructing civil society in conversation with the state remains unexplained. Similarly, the book, in several of its arguments, transcends the hitherto prevalent nature-culture divide but somehow fails to clinch a theoretical perspective on the leap from nature-culture dualism to the state-society dualism.
On balance, however, Modern Forests is a captivating story of the emergence of regimes of governance in Bengal over 200 years of colonial rule. The story has important ramifications for the study of statemaking in India, in particular because Bengal provided the experimental laboratories as well as the experiential knowledge that culminated in the science and technologies that came to be constituted as ‘colonial knowledge’ and regimes of governance that have been depicted as the ‘colonial state’. By unpacking these categories in the historical context of the region these concepts evolved in, the book raises questions about the future writings on the environmental history of India and points towards a regional rather than a national focus.
Ashwini Chhatre
Water: Unreliable Supply in Delhi by Marie- Helene Zerah. Manohar and Centre De Sciences Humaines, Delhi, 2000.
Private (domestic or foreign) investment flow decisions in infrastructure are based upon an estimation of likely returns which are the outcome of economically rational tariffs. Thus, with generous tariff and counter guarantees in the power sector there has been a measure of success in attracting investment. However, in the water sector financially unviable tariffs have deterred privatization and investment flows.
This is the context in which Marie-Helene’s doctoral thesis has been carried out. Supported by various French institutions, the thesis focuses mainly on the economic consequences of the unreliability of water supply in the urban sector and the resultant willingness to pay higher tariffs in return for reliability. The case study is based upon actual survey of 700 households in Delhi.
The book establishes the connection between an inefficient distribution system, lack of resources, poor management, tariff and subsidy constraints, financial difficulties, myopic strategies and regulatory framework as the prime cause of unreliability of water supply and the resultant behavioural human response. It is a fine presentation of the economy of unreliable water supply and its impact upon water consumption and related costs. Statistical models have been used for demand estimation and determining cost of access to water.
The author shows that the concept of lack of reliability in water supply is the economic result of technical factors. Lack of reliability is a characteristic of the water supply system itself and shows up as doubtful quality, intermittent supply, seasonal disruptions and unreliability of supply, insufficient and irregular pressure. These give rise to consequential compensatory strategies such as storage, pumping, recycling, rescheduling activities, fetching water, and so on along with the associated costs.
The examination of the concept of willingness to pay invalidates the assumption that the households refuse to pay for water. One of the major findings of the book is the estimation of the cost of insufficient and unreliable water supply incurred on the compensatory strategies. The information processed from primary surveys provides revealing insights such as the fact that households spend up to 5.5 times the amount they annually pay to the municipality for generating reliability and additionality in water supply. This comes to an annual sum of Rs 2000 per household.
The domestic water tariff is only 20% of the cost of supply, one of the lowest tariffs amongst major Indian cities, showing the immense subsidies involved. One of the major problems of water pricing and management is the low recovery rate. In 1994-95, the total arrears reached Rs 290 million, while the billed consumption was approximately Rs 622 million. Arrears translate into fairly low recovery rate of 66%. In urban areas the recovery varies between 70% and 88%, but is much lower in rural areas of Delhi.
The insights gained from Delhi are relevant to other cities as well. In the case of Delhi, the study of geographic locations to explain inequalities have also been examined. This certainly suggests that a better rationalization of the distribution system could be useful in reducing these inequalities.
Reliability and higher costs are compatible. On the basis of willingness to pay the author concludes that the public would be willing to pay higher tariff for reliable water supply as it would more than neutralize the cost implications of compensatory strategies.
This is a significant policy input. While politicians have made vague noises about increasing the price of water to at least meet the costs, in reality, this is a sensitive political issue which is normally avoided by them.
The book has not focused upon the hurdles in effecting the logical outcome of its conclusion. Thus, there is an immense need to overhaul the municipal water supply organizations for any rise in the tariff to bring positive results. The organizational overhaul should result in improved maintenance and operation of the infrastructure as well as in higher recovery rates. The government will have to initially put in certain seed money to effect infrastructural improvements. Thereafter, tariff and supply improvements can be carried out simultaneously and incrementally. The political limitation of effecting tariff hikes will have to be overcome through public education and making it into a non- political issue.
A welcome development which could follow would be the focus upon efficiency as well as conservation in resource use. Higher pricing of water may also result in a self-regulation of demand. But would this be possible if there is no augmentation of the resource itself?
To conclude, Marie-Helene highlights the concept of unreliability as an economic rather than a technological concept. This poses the implied assumption that water is an economic rather than social good.
Manu Bhatnagar
Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham edited by S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.
THE historiography of science that emerged in the West in the aftermath of the world wars, namely the new humanism movement, was situated within the framework of the critical studies of science and society. It was founded on the rejection of Eurocentric science and based on the unity of sciences and for the first time looked into the linkages between science and cultures. The most significant work during this period was Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, which not only challenged Eurocentrism but also made an encyclopedic revision of the perspectives of the history of science, both in the West and the non-West. He posed what is now known as the Needham paradox, that is, why did modern science and technology emerge in the West and not in China, a first attempt by an European to delve into the history of science of a non-western nation. As Henry Holorenshaw writes, it was for Needham a quasi-religious vocation, of rendering justice, sympathy and understanding ‘to a great people whose contributions to human development have been grotesquely underrated.’
In another significant stage in the evolution of the historiography of science, the new humanism school was questioned. Post modernity saw a crisis in development and skepticism in science together with the emergence of studies in the sociological deconstruction of science. Concepts in the study of history and civilization had changed simultaneously. The West was already re-examining the Needham paradox and viewing it through a Kuhnian lens, thereby raising several doubts about the Sinologist’s monumental work. In India, however, the historiographers and philosophers of science had not met at a common forum to review the questions raised by Needham. It was therefore timely that the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS), Delhi, the Delhi Science Forum and the Maison de Sciences de l’Homme, Paris organised a conference, ‘Science the Refreshing River’, as an exercise reflecting on Joseph Needham’s work. The volume under review is the outcome of this conference.
The book is structured around two themes, one an internalist critique of Needham’s basic premise on science, the other a preoccupation with the transmission of knowledge across cultures. The internalist critique, held in common by most of the authors, especially Gregory Blue, Aant Elzinga and Steve Fuller, is of the position that the essential purpose of Needham’s work was a defense of the agenda of modernity and that his work is organised according to a positivist ordering of the sciences. Needham uses modern science categories to analyze and classify Chinese thinking about nature, thereby distorting ‘the way Chinese thinkers in the past have actually understood and valued their world’ (Blue). As Fuller writes, ‘The general tenor of his life work was to highlight the contingent character of the West’s scientific ascendancy.’ Elzinga points out that such a critique is possible with ‘the introduction of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm or disciplinary matrix, which encompasses not only cognitive and epistemic but also social dimensions in the growth processes of science.’
Needham ultimately believed in the unity of mankind and the essential unity of the cosmological, the organic and social evolution, in which human progress would find its place (Holorenshaw). This convinced him of the universalism of science and the place of modern science as the global normative order, almost an ecumenical order like the Kingdom of God, in which all civilizations will find their salvation.
Having established the paradigmatic deconstruction of Needham’s science, the volume continues to explore the tenuous interrelationship between science and civilization and cross-cultural transmissions of knowledge. The historiographers of science thus step into dialogue with the historian. Needham had explored the transmissions and diffusions of know-ledge between the East and the West in the sense of exchanges and borrowings and as evidence for laying the foundation of a global science which could be equitably benefited by both the Christian and non-Christian worlds. Subsequently, deconstructionism in history has led cross-cultural studies through the layered domains of multiculturalism, pluralism and acts of translations which transform that which is transmitted into something new or altered.
As Romila Thapar writes in her introductory essay to the book, ‘Civilizations are not seen now as static or geographically bounded;’ nor are they monoliths but patterns of living which are in the process of being constantly reordered and redefined. Inter-civilizational relationships therefore have acquired dimensions theoretically unimaginable for Needham and his contemporaries. Contemporary historiographies of such transmission of scientific knowledge is explored in the papers by Karine Chemla and Pascal Crozet while Catherine Jami and Raina and Habib examine the relevance of Needham in the evolution of historiographies of science in China and India.
Apart from being the first definitive work on Needham from India and an indispensable volume for the historiographers of science, Situating the History of Science is unique in that it carries forward Joseph Needham’s preoccupation with science and civilization. By redefining the historiography of science and cross-cultural history, the book is a neo-Needhamian exercise in exploring the relationship between science and civilization and manages to establish a grand discourse in the history of science. This, of course, has necessitated the emphasis on the epistemic framework rather than the epistemic content of Needhamian science but then that would require another volume.
Sinologist, historian, embryologist and a self-proclaimed honorary Taoist, a devout Christian and a committed Marxist, Joseph Needham remains the last of the polymaths. This book is a homage to him.
Sarbani Sarkar
Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India by Gyan Prakash. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000.
FOR Gyan Prakash, a member of the Subaltern Studies collective, the transition from Bonded Histories to Another Reason is quite a break from his earlier work. The book under review tries to bring out the close nexus between science, colonialism and the modern nation. It raises some already well-researched points, such as science being simultaneously an instrument of empire as well as a symbol of liberty, progress and universal reason. The question of the hybridization of scientific knowledge in non-European contexts had been explored in detail over the years by several scholars, both in India and abroad, some of whom were working out the sociology of scientific knowledge through their focus on specific disciplines in the 1980s, and by Zaheer Baber in the 1990s. The book engages far more seriously with the questions of culture and impending modernity than with science per se.
The author covers almost 200 years of Indian history, beginning from the early days of the British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He takes us into colonial museums and exhibitions where Indian arts, crafts, animals, plants and even people were labeled and categorised. In this context, he questions whether it is possible to deny the simultaneity of the formation of western scientific disciplines and modern imperialism. No one can deny the birth of field sciences as they were called and the expansion of empire. Such disciplines like ethnology, botany, medicine, geology and meteorology were largely dependent on varied samples and colonialism certainly provided that opportunity. The matter was discussed extensively by S.N. Sen and a number of other historians of science in debates on the Basalla model, but this entire discussion goes unmentioned.
Another Reason is an interesting contribution to the corpus of socio-cultural history of India, but says little about the history of science. On the one hand science is seen as the imagination of people who had nothing to do with the discipline; on the other we come across practicing scientists like P.C. Ray being discussed in the same vein as Dayanand Saraswati who tried to root the ancient sciences in the Vedas. Whereas P.C. Ray bent over backwards to investigate into our scientific past to counter the Orientalist notion that Indians were merely interested in the transcendental world, Dayanand Saraswati, being a social reformer, did not merely look for science in the Vedas but had a polemical agenda to counter rivals within Hinduism as well as Islam and Christian missionary campaigns.
Prakash blurs the distinction between the two when he says that ‘practicing scientists and Hindu religious reformers read ancient texts and interpreted traditions to identify an original "Hindu Science" upon which an Indian universality could stand…’ He, however, fails to see what is being read and interpreted and to what purpose. Later, he quotes P.C. Ray about the pride and satisfaction he felt when ‘old, worm-eaten Chemical Manuscripts’ began to pour in from every quarter of India during the 12 years of his research in the history of Hindu Chemistry (p.113). The Hindu religious reformer was not interested in a scientific manuscript from the ancient past. One sample is cited by the author himself which says ‘that the ancient Aryans knew the power of steam… and the Aryans and their descendants possessed telegraph instruments that did not require telegraph poles and wires…. The Aryans fought battles in air chariots.’
The Arya Samaj felt a deep sense of loss at the invented memory of the Aryans’ past scientific attainments. They were committed to establish Vedic India as the originator of all sciences, arts and religions through the fabricated imaginings of the past. This exclusivism allowed no plurality of vision. However, P.C. Ray’s commitment to the compositeness of Indian culture is reflected in his work on Hindu Chemistry as well as his other writings. Most of the time he is more insightful in his observations of the past than his contemporary professional historians.
Gyan Prakash has also emphasised that India was painted Hindu by Ray and others, ignoring the contribution of Islam in medieval times. A closer reading of Ray and his contemporary Benoy Sarkar’s review of Ain-i-Akbari, would provide a very different picture. Sarkar called Abul Fazl ‘one of the modern founders of comparative methodology in world-culture who deserves his rightful place in the history of science and philosophy and is by all means a great precursor of the Hindu Rammohan Roy.’ Prakash concludes that ‘the revaluation of the past, therefore, led to the projection of Hindu science as India’s national tradition.’
On the contrary, one should see this as a concession to the rising nationalism and anti-colonialism of the period. Even a pan-Islamist like Jamaluddin Afghani, addressing the Muslims of Calcutta in 1882, called them the descendants of those Indians who were the teachers of Greeks in literary ideas, limpid poetry and lofty thoughts. This cultural nationalism was inclusivist and sensitive to India’s multicultural and multireligious past. P.C. Ray and others were part of a larger programme of cultural legitimation of modern science while Arya Samaj and such reformist organisations were seeking legitimation for themselves as well as for their invented knowledge of the past, using modern science.
In chapter three, Gyan Prakash gets to the question of the indigenization of science’s authority which was possible only if ‘science was asked to open itself to and also to contain the pressures of indigenous cultures, to dwell in the religious dispositions and literary writings of the "natives".’ L. Wilkinson, a colonial official, organised a school in 1839 where Hindu and Muslim boys were taught mathematics and astronomy. The old astronomical beliefs were questioned in the debates and students were shown the way to move from geocentrism to heliocentrism of Copernicus, Newton and Galileo. The author chooses Bhugolsar as the canonical text to illustrate his point arguing that Bhugolsar was written by Omkar Bhatt in response to this debate. There are two points to be raised in this context. First, Omkar Bhatt was very much part of Wilkinson’s project and Bhugolsar was written at Wilkinson’s initiative and not in response to the debate he initiated. Second, Bhugolsar was not authored by Omkar Bhatt. He was a mere translator of an original Marathi text.
Despite the few points raised above, the book is an insightful and valuable contribution to historical research.
S. Irfan Habib
Toward a Global Science: Mining Civili-zational Knowledge by Susantha Goonatilake. Vistaar Publications, Delhi, 1999.
THERE has been a recent revival of interest in fields such as the social studies of science in the phenomenon of the ‘rise of the East’. These studies have contested received conceptions of science, history and the theory of science. While the project itself is about half a century old, it appears to have acquired some academic legitimacy in the West, albeit packaged as a ‘postcolonial’ something.
Goonatilake’s earlier book, Aborted Discovery, prefigures some of the concerns that are rearticulated from a contemporary vantage point in the present work. The author of Toward a Global Science employs a geological metaphor connoting colonial expropriation and directs it towards a different project. The intent is to set the record straight for the sciences and techno-logy of the South Asian region by mining contemporary scholarship that is quite at variance with the dominant master narrative on how the West grew rich and, of course, powerful.
As Goonatilake writes: ‘Science and technology of the last couple of centuries has expressed European culture, of Europe’s congealed history… Asian tastes and desires as they developed through history and congealed as cultural products will deeply influence the science and technology to come.’ The book’s central thesis is that the world’s centre of gravity is shifting to Asia. The point is in itself not new and has been highlighted by sociologists of science and economic historians for quite sometime. Furthermore, historians of East Asian science having broken with traditional historiography, long anticipated this change and pursued their investigations of science of the East Asian region in terms of positive characterisations, and understanding modernity in East Asia with or without science. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for the South Asian region for a multitude of reasons. In part, this has arisen from the continued fidelity of historians of science to the epistemic image of positivist science in reconstructing the sciences of India.
Goonatilake’s recent book attempts a novel characterization, but continues to abide by a neo-positivist notion of science. It thus limits the dialogue between modern science and the sciences of the South Asian region. Other than the epistemic obstacles that have prevented the realization of the emergence of a revised historiography, is the failure of scholars to account for the current diversity of the South Asian region, since almost every reconstruction commits the error of antiquarianism and is afflicted by the romanticism of the Orientalists. Goonatilake insists that his enter- prise has little to do with antiquarianism for he is situated within the teleology of progress, and is sceptical of the fruitfulness of dubious parallelisms that are currently fashionable. Consequently, he assumes a normative account of science that differentiates between empirical and pragmatic components of traditional knowledge and those that are patently spurious and unusable. In that sense Goonatilake’s dialogue with the past of science is a Popperian one.
This neo-positivist epistemology differentiates between multiculturalism in the sciences and the humanities. Taking cognisance of the so-called crisis in the project of modernization and western science, Goonatilake suggests the relevance of the philosophy of Nagarjuna, Bhartrhari and Aryadeva to the post-modern enterprise, which in its present form he sees riddled with much trivia. But one pauses to wonder whether a genuine scientific multiculturalism cannot be constructed out of neo-positivist epistemology, and that the author has been facile with the normative account of current science.
It is difficult to underplay the impression that this reconstruction is technocratic, though it is itself propelled by the impulse of an earlier generation of scientists from the periphery to relate their contemporary scientific efforts to their scientific traditions through some principle of quasi-continuity. This was as true of western scientists who turned to the image of ancient Greece and advanced the institutionalisation of what Harding calls philosophical Eurocentrism. But in the contemporary practice of science, the Needhamian idea that history matters hardly holds any water. History matters for Goonatilake, but he needs to address how his idea of mining civilisational wisdom differs from that of rapacious multinationals bio-prospecting the Third Worlds’ traditional resources for new medicinal remedies to treat ailments plaguing contemporary civilisation.
The larger point that Goonatilake makes is that the study of science in South Asia raises broader issues concerning the social context of science. The social studies of science have done much to prise open notions of objectivity, modernization and progress. This should prompt scholars working on South Asia to examine their historiographies without lapsing into jingoism and parochialism current on the sub-continent. The author reviews some of the recent developments in the social studies of the sciences and the repainting of the big picture of science that it has initiated. This eclectic review is framed within a neo-positivist evolutionary perspective of the sciences, maintains a distance from the more radical claims of the sociology of knowledge, while recognizing the possibility that it opens a window for non-western sciences.
Goonatilake sees traditional sciences enriching modern science in two ways: (i) by directly splicing in material that has demonstrable validity – the hardware approach; (ii) by introducing metaphors that dislocate standard ways of thinking, nudging the imagination into giving rise to new concepts.
The theory of transmission and the modality of transmission that is implicit in this reconstruction would appear a trifle problematic for the professional reader for its lack of symmetry. Goonatilake takes upon himself the task of obtaining Needhamian justice for the South Asian region conceived as a civilisational entity. It would have been interesting to sit through a careful demonstration of the Buddhist influence on Hume, and the transmission of these Humean ideas mediated by Enlightenment thought on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
However, this reconstruction does not engage with the radical historiography of the Arab sciences produced by Sabra, Saliba, King, Kennedy and Rashed. Unfortunately, it shares the standard Eurocentric historiography of Arabic science. Surely, there was a great deal of Arab navigational knowledge that was taken up by the European voyagers of the modern period. But this knowledge was not merely the pro- duct of Asian ideas. Goonatilake’s radical thesis is to highlight then the influence of South Asian ideas on the history of contemporary science and technology and not just modern science, and on this count it differs from the Needhamian project.
This is evident in the latter part of the book that discusses some of the sciences practiced in the region and what they have to offer the contemporary sciences. While the thesis is radical, the argument as presented is not. This is because he occasionally platforms this salvaging operation on historical material that is not very reliable and some of it certainly questionable. Second, he falls into the very trap that he wishes to rid the history of science of, picking up only those ideas that echo in the contemporary practice of the sciences, and hence nourish the already existing paradigm of the sciences by producing a couple of side branches without revolutionising them.
Eclecticism can be both a weakness and a strength. The work comes up with a number of pointers that dispute the standard tale of the history of sciences, where certain key episodes in the history of scientific knowledge are played up by establishing the contingent character of the rise of science in the West. It is, however, oblivious about the newer historiographies of Arab or East Asian and Far Eastern sciences that have highlighted the contingent character of western science. The problem could also be resolved if only he would abandon a core element in his historiography of transmission that abides by the fundamental idea of the monogenesis of scientific ideas.
I shall not delve deeply into the various dimensions of mining South Asian civilisational knowledge. The chapter on South Asian mathematics is rewarding. This I think has to do with two factors, one metatheoretical and the other relating to logistics. In metatheoretical terms the historiography of mathematics is difficult to accommodate within a Kuhnian historiography. Further, mathematicians have always had a working relationship with the mathematics of the past, unlike in the other scientific disciplines. Consequently, the dialogue with the past of mathematics has not been terribly curtailed, either by the historiography of progress or with presentism. Goonatilake’s salvaging operation is less problematic than is the case with the other disciplines.
Second, in most of the departments of the history of sciences in India examined so far, the history of mathematics and astronomy has by far been the most widely and meticulously studied. Consequently, the material that Goonatilake draws upon is not as problematic as that encountered in some of the other disciplines.
The ambiguity encountered in Goonatilake’s work arises from the uncritical use of his sources – actually secondary source material. The ambiguity arises from a paradox, that of constructing a global history of science from bricks and mortar that have a particularistic vision of history. Maybe this could be accomplished as a project in subversive reading, but that is not the author’s intention.
One problem with the history of sciences in India is that it has long restricted itself to challenging the Eurocentric history of science through priority disputes rather than challenging the theory of science on which it is premised. Historians of a liberal turn of mind have done much to interrogate the Eurocentric history of science. There has been as much or possibly more research material produced by scientists whose motives have been ultra-nationalistic. Some of these nationalistic claims seep through Goonatilake’s secular and liberal vision unchecked. But the book itself stands out as a significant contribution towards the emergence of a global history of science.
Dhruv Raina
ECOSOCIALISM OR ECOCAPITALISM? A Critical Analysis of Humanity’s Fundamental Choices by Saral Sarkar. Orient Longman, Delhi, 1999.
IT takes a particularly brave man to risk a title, or rather sub-title, like the one under review. But then, Saral Sarkar is hardly a risk averter. One time teacher of German at the Max Mueller Bhavan in Hyderabad, Saral moved to Germany in the early ’80s, where he became active with the Green Movement. A few years later, under the auspices of the Peace and Global Transformation programme of the United Nations University, Sarkar produced the two volume Green Alternative Politics in West Germany, arguably one of the best accounts of both the philosophical presuppositions and the travails of a politics seeking to combine socialist and ecological concerns. It is a sad commentary on the intellectual acumen of our publishing industry that the work, despite its many obvious lessons for India (and the Third World generally), failed to find a recognised publisher. The book, at least in India, went unsung.
It is thus fitting that Orient Longman thought it worthwhile to publish a South Asia edition of this book, originally brought out by Zed. And while this is no easy tract to plough through, both given its sweep and complex argument, it is a crucial read, particularly for those advocating an anti-growth/development path as the only rational option before humanity.
At the risk of over-simplification, let me present the two central concerns marking Sarkar’s text. The first relates to the ostensible collapse of the socialist project, a concern which has gained currency post the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and a steady incorporation of capitalistic market principles in all economies, including those which claim to be socialist. The second relates to the Limits to Growth thesis, widely discussed since the Club of Rome publication of the same title in 1972. Since Sarkar is both ‘red’ and ‘green’, his interest lies in tracing the efficacy of a radical ecology project. He, in fact, argues that the ‘creation of a tolerably good human society and an ecological economy are no longer matters of dreaming; they have become necessities for survival.’
Many today recognise a basic contradiction between ecology and industrial society, whether capitalist or socialist. They trace this to a hegemonic anthropocentrism, a view glorifying man’s unique position in nature, and to a theoretical foregrounding of the rapid development of productive forces (an escape from material constraints) as a pre-condition to a social welfare or socialist state. They also focus on the real danger of the extermination of the human species or of the whole biosphere. Sarkar, in distinction, seeks to argue that ‘while there is an ineluctable and unresolvable contradiction between capitalism and industrial economy on the one hand and a truly ecological economy on the other, there is no contradiction between socialism and a truly ecological economy if the former can be conceived of as a non-industrial society’ (emphasis added). Socialism is favoured mainly because of the values it represents: equality, cooperation, solidarity. ‘Freedom and democracy are compatible with these values, although they did not exist in the "socialist" regimes we have experienced upto now.’
Based on the above, his thesis regarding the collapse of the ‘socialist’ states highlights both the political and moral failures, as also, and more importantly, the inability to transcend economism. It is in the latter, the vision of an industrial society, that the erstwhile socialist states most aped capitalist logic and values. And if in ecological terms they were far more damaging, it is both because the system had no way of recognising and thereby accounting for the costs, as also a ‘faith’ that developments in science and technology would help overcome the constraints posed by nature.
Taking off from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Gaia’s automatic control system has helped her survive many ecological catastrophes, Sarkar distances himself from both the deep ecologists and animal rights activists who question anthropocentrism. As such, he does not accept the notion of equality between species. Second, as an anthropocentrist, he argues for internationalism, i.e. the basic policy has to be the same for the North and South. Finally, he favours a ‘limits to growth’ paradigm which recognises both nature’s ability to absorb man-made environmental disruptions as also the earth’s carrying capacity. As such, he seeks to advance a case that sustainable development or ecological modernisation is possible only within socialist relations of production.
Of course, for all ecologists, there is still the challenge posed by Garret Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, that given the short-term, personal interest of maximising the objective function, the rational acts of free individuals will necessarily result in the destruction of the commons. Sarkar’s argument that this proposition relates only to ‘an open-access, a free- for-all regime without any authority anywhere’ is only partially correct. Even under a commonly accepted regime that imposes restrictions, the political challenge of controlling the watchdogs remains.
More interesting than the philosophical discussion is Sarkar’s examination of the various proposals for sustainable development. His discussion of the natural resource base of the economy is particularly useful in countering those who are enthusiastic about shifting to renewable resources, say solar energy. He points out that as serious as the current costs of solar energy is the fact that under known technology, the life of solar plants is limited and that far more energy is involved in setting them up than we receive from them. One can make similar arguments about biomass or even hydel energy. As for wind energy, the regrettable fact is that the technology is workable only under highly specified conditions and that too for appropriately endowed regions. In short, many of these ‘green’ technologies are either too costly (explicit or implicit), or not universally applicable.
Where readers may find Sarkar politically incorrect is his advocacy of population control. While agreeing that specific population policies may be accepted or rejected, he argues that the problem cannot be wished away, that an unfettered growth would only escalate conflict over resources. Equally, that sustainability is incompatible with continuous growth.
Is it then the case that survival demands the rejection of development? For this, Sarkar has an ingenious solution, one that goes against the grain of traditional Marxists. What Sarkar favours is a low-level, steady-state economy, where the moral imperatives become as important as the material. Nevertheless, he does not advocate a return to the past (primitive communism) or even valorize traditional non-western cultures as being in harmony with nature. Nor is he a great believer in cultural pluralism and distinctiveness as ‘goods’ within their own right. His case, and not very clear, is one that a planned, self-limiting economy under appropriate political conditions offers the best chances of long term survival.
More than presenting solutions, or even a framework for evolving solutions, Sarkar’s book is better at helping unravel the presuppositions behind our favoured propositions. So if we suggest the development of non-conventional energy as a way out of the fossil-fuel crisis, we will be clearer about all the ramifications of the proposed change. As such, his writing seems very much in the tradition of Ivan Illich who refused to suggest alternatives, but nevertheless helped us examine the efficacy of our proposals.
A final point. If Sarkar’s book appears negative or at times even defeatist, it is because (like many of his ilk) he refuses to engage with the politics of transformation. Just who is supposed to advocate and fight for the desired changes, more so since the demands are for less rather than more? Without grappling with this, Sarkar’s ecosocialism will remain an utopia. Or a nightmare.
Harsh Sethi
