Book review: Renny Thomas. 2022. Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment

Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment is an important contribution to the sociology/anthropology of religion and science, and science and technology studies in particular. The ethnographic study re-examines the apparently settled opposition between faith and reason of European Enlightenment. The existing ‘conflict’ or ‘complementary’ binary framework is inadequate, says Thomas, to examine the complexity of science and religion as practised in India, where scientists can simultaneously be professionally competent and religious believers (p. 1). He attempts to unravel this paradox by conducting a yearlong laboratory study at the ‘Institute’ at Bangalore to reveal, through the five chapters, how the key tropes of scientific temper, rationality, disenchantment, belief, atheism, and caste identity play out in the articulation of science and religion.

As a sociologist, Thomas grapples with the methodological difficulty of ‘studying up’ and complements his ethnography with biographical (memoirs), and archival accounts (reflections, speeches) of scientists. This strategy is a welcome move, given the necessarily historical (colonial account) and survey (quantitative technique) bias that over-determines the study of science and scientists in India. He rightly suggests the need to focus on the everyday life of scientists and juxtapose personal writings with field data.

Thomas issues a caveat that his study is not an ‘“Indian” case study of science, but a case study of “Science” in an Indian context’ (p. 14) and by putting Science in its place, he explores ‘how scientists live their “religious” and “non-religious” life beyond a disenchanted world of rationality and scientific modernity’ (p. 3).

Chapter 1 explores how Western science played a civilising mission in the Nehruvian era, where modernisation was characterised by the inculcation and diffusion of scientific temper. Scientific modernity and rationality constituted the benchmark of progress and emancipation that would remove superstition and religious beliefs of tradition. The social contract between science and politics was sealed in 1976 through the 42^nd Constitutional Amendment that made the civic role of inculcating scientific temper into a legal mandate of fundamental duty. Scientists emerged as the new power elite with legitimate claims to the monopoly of knowledge. The naïve optimism of the triumph of reason over faith and superstition underlined the vision of a modern rational society premised on scientific temper.

In chapter 2, Thomas demonstrates the limitation of scientific methodological atheism in the Indian context where faith and reason are not mutually exclusive categories. Unlike the disenchanted Western scientists, religion and science are equally important activities for Indian scientists. For the latter, religion refers to faith, cultural upbringing, beliefs, and emotion, which play a very important role in family and personal life. Science and Religion thus constitute two separate modes of existence that need not connect. Scientists believe in God but do not feel the need to prove its existence. However, the scientists distinguished their beliefs from cultural nationalists whose political aim were to oversee the scientisation of Hindu tradition by claiming that ancient Hindu wisdom was amenable to scientific interpretation.

In claiming coexistence of their religious ethos and professional credibility, the ‘scientist-believers’ (p. 84) normalise the majoritarian religious ethos of Hinduism as the cultural norm that informs chapter 3. Thomas reveals how the ‘strategic adjustment’ of interchangeably using the terms religion, culture and tradition for Hinduism ironically shores up the majoritarian religion as the culturally unmarked category in contrast to other religious faith (p. 73). Through a discussion of the ritual celebration of Ayudha Puja, Thomas demonstrates how the culturing of technology takes place at the ‘Institute’. Even in their religious ethos, the scientific elite considers their practices as superior to the folk rituals of the laity.

Chapter 4 examines the ‘believer without beliefs’ or the ‘complete’, ‘staunch’, ‘hardcore’ atheists (p. 121). Thomas reiterates how despite their non-belief in God, these scientists nevertheless identified themselves with the majoritarian cultural norms of Hinduism. They also justified their atheism by referring to the materialist and atheist tradition of ancient Hindu thought. Unlike Western monotheistic religion that enables a disenchanted, atheistic worldview where Godlessness prevails, the Indian non-believer scientists do not oppose the majoritarian religious practices perceiving it to be a part of culture and tradition.

In chapter 5, Thomas contends that ‘what connects religious and atheist scientists is their shared caste identity’ (p. 135). Both ‘believer’ and ‘non-believer’ scientists alike come from Brahmanical and upper caste backgrounds. The chapter unsettles the objective, meritorious and neutral image of science by examining how Brahmanical caste capital gets institutionalised as the hegemonic norm or paradigm.

Thomas shows how cultivating taste in classical musical and vegetarian dietary preferences are an integral part of Brahmanical and upper caste socialisation. Thus, musical taste and food preferences preserve caste culture that excludes the dietary preferences of non-Brahmin communities at the ‘Institute’, which makes a Dalit scientist refers to it as the ‘Iyer Iyengar Institute’, thereby indexing the hegemony of a particular caste group (p. 142).

In my opinion, Thomas breaks fresh ground in the sociology of science by re-examining the critique of the European faith–reason dichotomy made by J.P.S Uberoi (1978) in his classic Science and Culture. The study complements Uberoi’s work from an Indian context. More importantly, it furthers research on the much-neglected role of caste in Indian science, which has recently merited attention as in the work of Abha Sur’s (2011) Dispersed Radiance: Caste Gender and Modern Science in India. By introducing the symmetrical principle of studying both ‘believer’ and ‘non-believer’ scientists, Thomas avoids the sterile epistemic binary trap, thereby revealing the complicated life-world of Indian scientists where the ‘usage of “cultural”… is never independent of its religious and caste affiliations’ (p. 126). The author is reflexive in suggesting the limitations of his study and contends that future research on science and religion should explore scientific practices in small universities and rural or non-elite settings. It should also endeavour to study priests in their respective institutional roles. Science and Religion in India will be of topical relevance to scientists, social scientists, and anyone interested in the vexed question of faith and reason in general.