What does science in India feel like?

As a science journalist whose medium of choice is text (“text is king”), the very first sense of what I am going to write about in a science article is often an emotion in my head. A feeling. Sure, science’s identity is most pronounced in its own mathematics — research budgets, publishing indices, the many, many measurements, the calculations, and so on. It bears a certain finitude, a measure of certainty: even when the answer is beyond its grasp, it has a method, its thresholds, their attendant confidence limits and error rates. However, that is not where the stories really are. (I also would not go so far as to say the stories are always only in its people.)

Science, from the point of view of a journalist, is also a mood, so to speak, that society carries about what it believes science is for. And this is not some nebulous, evasive thing. The Welsh thinker Raymond Williams called it “a structure of feeling”. Unlike ideologies, which are written into party programmes and defended if necessary with violence, the structure of feeling denotes what a particular span of time and in a particular place feels like to live inside, especially before someone has managed to figure out how to put it into words. The structure of feeling lives in the tone, in the adjectives that accrue around a subject in newspaper articles and political speeches. It is the Thing before the doctrine, not yet framed but not entirely amorphous either, particular to the quality of the lived social experience.

I recently finished reading Politics and Letters, a collection of interviews of Williams by New Left Review. While its ideas promise to be food for thought for many weeks to come, what Williams says about the structure of feeling in its pages also suggested a way of thinking about the history of science in independent India. Specifically, I think Indian society has inhabited at least three distinct structures of feeling in relation to science since independence — and they are not as continuous as one might expect given the continuity of the underlying institutions themselves.

Perhaps the two words most people remember from The Discovery of India are “scientific temper”. It is a weighty term, a pedagogical demand for Indians to adopt a certain rationalist cast of mind and for a long time they did — something of a distinct and since then characteristic civic-religious bent. When its author Jawaharlal Nehru called dams and steel plants the “temples of modern India”, he practically consecrated the character of science, perhaps a little desperately, in order to prove a newly decolonised nation could ‘out-modern’ its former rulers using engineers and technologists. Thus the first decades of free India were marked by technological gigantism, rather expansionism: the large dams and power plants were soon joined by the atomic energy programme, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research laboratories, the various IITs (and their emphasis on merit), and the space programme.

The corresponding structure of feeling was chiefly paternalistic, of course in the way nation-building usually is, but it also had a dark side that became apparent only decades later. We know today that solemnity must not dignify science because then science also becomes shielded from scrutiny, and in India that arguably paved the way for the rise and the rule of the license raj.

Then came economic liberalisation. It did not change the picture completely as the part of science encompassing ISRO and DRDO still remained solemn; that said, the rest became more pragmatic, more mobile, more indifferent to civilisation rhetoric, and more oriented towards individual aspirations than a collective national ascent, so to speak. It was the time of the IT boom and the NRI success story. The engineers who left for Sunnyvale, California, were a testimony to the quality of India’s technical training rather than brain drain.

The structure of feeling in this time might frankly have been obscene vis-à-vis the ‘Nehruvian mood’ — a predominantly instrumentalist opinion of science, of science as a ticket to individual mobility, often not much more valuable than its ability to be converted to a ‘foreign posting’. Basic research likewise became unglamorous for being bereft of this specific value, and in the next two decades or so, the institutions changed accordingly as funding ratios and researchers’ salaries relative to industry dropped.

Then, finally, began the moment that remains ongoing, the post-2014 period after Prime Minister Narendra Modi became, well, prime minister. And this epoch does not have a single structure. In fact it is a morass — and perhaps fortunately so: no feeling, including those accompanying chest-thumping, is any closer to crystallising into a widespread culture than the others. Of course, that also complicates the question of how science journalism can best approach its subject matter in India.

One, there is the triumphalism, perhaps most pronounced vis-à-vis ISRO and its famously “shoestring” budgets and the exquisite pleasure of doing more with less. It is a misguided pleasure, of course, not least because it is — among other things — an artefact of the civilisational anxiety from the first period, the one immediately following independence, but in the garb of nationalist pride rather than the assertion of civilisational greatness. In fact, the mood is not really concerned with cost efficiency, and with boasting rather than solemnity.

Then there is the whiff of techno-nationalism surrounding more recent state projects like the National Quantum Mission and the AI mission. The BJP government insists this is nothing more but also nothing less than winning an all-important race where falling behind could amount to the loss of independence and the onset of a new-fangled colonialism imposed by the west. Hanging on to these coattails is the (not infrequently misplaced) entrepreneurial optimism borrowed wholesale from the startup ecosystem and grafted on to science: the deep-tech startups couched in the vocabulary of venture capital, valuations and — amusingly — becoming unicorns.

Finally, rounding off the morass is the pseudoscientific nationalism, carried by claims of ancient Indian supremacy over contemporary study and discoveries, garnished with a black-comedic fixation on the Sanskrit language. It is really a parody of “scientific temper”, having managed to borrow the prestige of science, such as it is, to devise a civilisational argument that has nothing to do with method or evidence. It even manages to compete for the same territory that Nehru’s generation tried to claim for rationalism itself!

As well, it also illustrates the power of Williams’s concept of the structure of feeling itself, in particular exemplifying the pitfalls of overlooking it. The structure helps explain how India has lurched from national embarrassment in one decade to national genius, in a manner of speaking, in the next in a way that no numbers could have been expected to capture. And if science journalism limited itself to reporting on papers and budgets, it will miss the zeitgeist that gives those facts their meaning. Axiomatically, I think, one of the primary tasks of science journalism is to discern the structure before, or beyond, the budgetary allocations and the policy documents, and the slogans and the speeches, where the country’s relationship with science exists but is still struggling to describe itself.

And I wish that that is the feeling I recognise first, before I ever write a word.