Mythified! Debunking facts for fiction

SANDEEP SINHA

“The idea of parthenogenesis had been accepted in this house in order to keep out certain other, unpleasantly physical notion,” wrote Salman Rushdie in his novel “Shame” to describe a household in which the protagonist has three mothers, all of whom share the same symptoms, including those of pregnancy. In this context, the observation by a leading academic at the Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar that the Kauravas could well have been test-tube babies is understandable.

And why only the Kauravas? The story of the birth of Karna, son of Kunti and the Sungod, is equally mystifying. In fact, the pride in our scientific achievements extends to describing the Pushpak Vimana of Ravana as a marvel in aeronautics and the arrows that Ram and Ravana hurled at each other as the earliest specimens of missiles.

The pride in the scientific achievements of ancient India is not thoroughly misplaced. The country developed the technology to make steel, later known as “Wootz”, used to make the finest scimitars. The decimal system and the use of zero, all are credited to the ancient Indians and the outside world only learnt it from them.

To Aryabhatta goes the credit for calculating the area of a triangle which led to the birth of trigonometry. The works of Aryabhatta and Varahamihira in astronomy were well known and discovered solar and lunar eclipse and believed that it was the earth that rotated around the sun. In medical science, the names of Charaka, Sushruta and Dhanwantary are well known. Ayurveda and yoga are a testimony to the enduring qualities of excellence achieved in the field of body science during this period.

But the recent statements have stretched things a bit too far for those who swear by the cause and effect theory. It is not that rational thinking should preach atheism or make us agnostics. In fact, one of the leading lights of the saffron side, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, was a professor of physics, who taught the subject for many years at Allahabad University. To his credit, no such statement has been attributed to him. In West Bengal, the communists are known to celebrate Durga Puja with gusto. For them, as they discovered, it has less to do with religion and more to do with “mass movement”.

Science, like all intellectual and cultural products, is about evolution. Just as Charles Darwin told us how humans had descended from primates, the bipedalism, the increased cranial capacity, and the well developed arch of the foot, being pointers in this direction, so has culture, of which science is a part, evolved. The way our lives have been transformed by a simple instrument like phone with its huge array of functions, shows how technology and science have evolved. We take pride in our achievements which make the gadgets of yore look primitive. 

Technology backed by science is a cultural product that keeps evolving. The benchmark is usefulness, which in turn leads to the popularity of the subject, evident in the emphasis we put on setting up institutions and training faculty that can take our growth engine forward. India lagged behind because it missed the first industrial revolution because of colonial rule. A determined country now has surged ahead in information technology and other scientific areas. 

Isaac Asimov, the famous science fiction writer, said: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka (I have found it), but ‘That’s funny’. The statements of the worthies at the Science Congress need to be seen in this light.