The moral legitimation of modern science: Bhadralok reflections on theories of evolution

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 9-42

  Raina, Dhruv ^a   Irfan Habib, S ^a  

^a INDIAN NATIONAL SCIENCE ACADEMY   (India)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646704626     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631296026001003     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946), 620-27.
2. This period may also be considered appropriate from another point of view. By the 1890s, the physicist J.C. Bose had already made important contributions to radiophysics; C.V. Raman commenced his work on acoustics; and P.C. Ray had taken the first steps towards founding a school of research in chemistry. In 1914, the first Indian Science Congress was held.
3. Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, 'The Unfolding of an Engagement: The Dawn on Science, Technical Education and Industrialization: India, 1896-1912', Studies in History (New Delhi), n.s., Vol. 9, No. 1 (January/June 1993), 87-117.
4. Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, 'Institutional Proliferations Embodying Bhadralok Perceptions of Science, Technology and Cultural Nationalism (19051912)', Indian Economic and Social History Review (New Delhi), Vol. 32, No. 1 (January-March 1995), 95-117. The NCE members constituted the intellectual avant-garde of the nationalist movement in Bengal. Their programme of moral legitimation had to be undertaken by those committed to modernity, but at the same time it had to overcome the resistance of some of the more traditional responses within that nationalist movement.
5. George J. Stein writes that: 'All manner of liberal thinkers have appropriated Darwin to find, at last, a scientific foundation for the liberal belief in progress, democratic egalitarian socialism, and an altruistic ethic of human solidarity':
6. see Stein, 'Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism', American Scientist, Vol. 76, No. 1 (January/February 1988), 50-58, at 52. We will not discuss the uses of thermodynamics in this paper.
7. Geraldine H. Forbes, Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1975);
8. Haridas Mukherjee, Satish Chandra Mukherjee: A Father of the Bengali Revolution (18651948) (Calcutta: Chuckervertty Chatterjee & Co., 1948);
9. Jogesh C. Bagal, Pramatha Nath Bose (Calcutta: P.N. Bose Centenary Committee, 1955).
10. For more detailed accounts of the educational institutes established by the NCE, see Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Education for Industrialization: An Analysis of Forty Years of Jadavpur College of Engineering and Technology (1905-45) (Calcutta: Chuckervertty Chatterjee & Co., 1946);
11. NCE Golden Jubilee commemoration volume, The National Council of Education, Bengal: A History and Homage (Calcutta: NCE, 1956).
12. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1975);
13. Barun De, 'The Colonial Context in the Bengal Renaissance', in C.H. Phillips and M.D. Wainwright (eds), Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization c. 1830-1850 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1975), 119-25;
14. David Kopf, 'The Brahmo Samaj Intelligentsia and the Bengali Renaissance: A Study of Revitalization and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Bengal', in R.I. Crane (ed.), Transition in South Asia (Durham, UK: Durham University Press, 1970), 7-48.
15. For a list of papers on science and technology appearing in The Dawn, see Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 3, 115-17.
16. Sarkar, op. cit. note 8, 150, points out that the term 'intellectual proletariat' was first used in the Bengal District Administration Report, 1913-14 (Calcutta, 1915). Besides professionals, the intellectual proletariat included the large number of students who had graduated from Calcutta University with liberal arts degrees. There was a gross mismatch between the numbers of students graduating and the number of positions available to them in the government (the State was at this time the major employer).
17. See Sarkar, op. cit. note 8. While ideas of national education were already crystallizing in the nineteenth century, the partition of Bengal was regarded as 'a deliberate outrage upon national sentiment and a measure calculated to scatter the gathering force of nationalism . . . The spirit of national self-respect was aroused and the unparalleled outburst of public indignation became canalized in the Swadeshi movement for boycott of everything including education': National Council of Education, op. cit. note 7,2. See also Clive Dewey, 'The Government of India's "New Industrial Policy", 1900-1925: Formation and Failure', in K.N. Chaudhuri and Dewey (eds), Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 215-57;
18. and Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1969).
19. Sarkar, op. cit. note 8, 33.
20. Dewey, op. cit. note 11.
21. See Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 4. The IACS programme was initiated by Mahendra Lai Sircar, a medical practitioner (and much later a votary of homeopathy). He founded a journal, The Calcutta Journal of Medicine, in defence of homeopathy. Among the first Indians to urge the establishment of a scientific research system, he was instrumental in the founding of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, which was to serve as a source of inspiration for the NCE.
22. See R.K. Dasgupta, 'National Education', in Concept of National Education in India (Calcutta: NCE, 1970), 13-14;
23. Haran Chakladar, "The National Council of Education, Bengal: Its Formation, Course of Studies and Message', in National Council of Education, op. cit. note 7, 57-73, at 57; also Sarkar, op. cit. note 7.
24. The Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, in a speech delivered in Bengali and reproduced in The Dawn, threw light on this relationship: 'I was telling you about your society. I wish to raise another point here. Satish babu is the mainstay of this effort to establish a swadeshi school. The effort has been influenced by him. So it can be said that The Dawn Society is equally associated with the foundation of the swadeshi school. It can also be said that those who led the debate in meetings and conferences can now do something concrete. Now it is up to you to further its success': quoted in Chakladar, op. cit. note 15,66. We thank our colleague Pradosh Nath for helping us with the translation from Bengali.
25. Sarkar, op. cit. note 8, 101.
26. The absence of jingoism is evident in Satish Mukherjee's critical cosmopolitanism: 'My idea is not to deprecate high English education as truly mischievous, but to prove that it might be better to fulfil its functions, if it could be leavened with a higher informing spirit; if its lessons could be learnt in the critical spirit and in the comparative method': quoted in Dasgupta, op. cit. note 15, 15.
27. For a short discussion on Rabi Ghosh, see S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, 'Copernicus, Columbus, Colonialism and the Role of Science in NineteenthCentury India', Social Scientist (New Delhi), Vol. 17, Nos 3-4 (March 1989), SI66.
28. Sarkar, op. cit. note 7, 75-76.
29. Sudipto Kaviraj, 'Imaginary History", Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) Occasional Papers on History and Society Issues, Second Series, No. 7 (New Delhi: NMML, September 1988).
30. Mukherjee, op. cit. note 6; see also Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 3, 90.
31. In Kaviraj's own words, amidst the noisy discourses of the nineteenth century 'there is above all a new sound ... of history. This claim of newness is literally true. In the nineteenth century history breaks out everywhere, a most remarkable thing for a culture which had traditionally treated history, or a truly historical consciousness, as entirely dispensable and unimportant': op. cit. note 21, 1.
32. Kopf, op. cit. note 8; Barbara Metcalf, 'Hakim Ajmal Khan: Rais of Delhi and Muslim Leader', in Robert E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi through the Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 299-315;
33. Dhruv Raina, 'On Mathematics and Colonialism: Another Version in the Empire Strikes Back Series', Bulletin of Science (New Delhi), Vol. 6, No. 2 (October-December 1991), 22-26.
34. Kopf, op. cit. note 8, 20.
35. See Prafulla C. Ray, Essays and Discourses (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 1918),
36. and Pramath N. Böse, A History of Hindu Civilization during British Rule in Four Volumes, Vol. Ill (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co., 1896).
37. Bose, op. cit. note 26, v.
38. Habib & Raina, op. cit. note 19, 60-62.
39. Bose was appointed Deputy Director of the Geological Survey of India in 1880. His discovery of iron ore mines near Jamshedpur resulted in the establishment of the Tata Iron and Steel Company. While Bose wrote extensively on Indian culture and civilization, he also prepared the first draft on technical education in Bengal. Later he took over as the first principal of the Bengal Technical Institute, founded by the SPTE.
40. Bose, op. cit. note 26, xiv.
41. Ray was the founder of the school of research in organic chemistry in India. In addition to establishing the Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Company, he is also the author of The History of Hindu Chemistry: From Earliest Time to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century AD (Calcutta: Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Company, 1902). For further details, see Santimay Chatterjee and Amitbha Sen (eds), Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray: Some Aspects of his Life and Work (Calcutta: Indian Science News Association, 1986).
42. Brajendra N. Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1985);
43. B.K. Sarkar, The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, reprint 1985), first published as Vol. 32 in the Sacred Books of the Hindus series (Allahabad, 1937);
44. Sarkar, Hindu Achievements in Exact Sciences (New York, 1918); Ray, op. cit. note 31.
45. Bose, op. cit. note 26, xvi.
46. Ibid., xvii.
47. Ibid., xviii.
48. Krishna Kumar, 'Colonial Citizen as an Educational Ideal', Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, 28 January 1989), 45-51, at 45.
49. Ibid., 46.
50. P.N. Böse, a NCE member, recognized that the 'practical orientation' of the British was largely responsible for their national prosperity. But this prosperity was not merely a consequence of this orientation: it was achieved through a process 'directly antagonistic to the ethical process, by a disregard ... for the well being of the rights of others': Bose, op. cit. note 26, xxxiv.
51. Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1988), 68; this book reprints a series of papers published between December 1918 and January 1921 in Arya (the journal on philosophy and culture founded by Aurobindo in 1914, and published in Pondicherry).
52. Ibid., 68.
53. Ibid. This was a characteristic nineteenth-century perception of Indian civilization, and shades of Weber are visible here.
54. Forbes, op. cit. note 6.
55. Between 1905 and 1912, the NCE split into two. This rift was caused by differences over the place of science and technology in national education, and led to the foundation of two separate institutes -the Bengal National College (BNC), and the Bengal Technical Institute (BTI). The BNC's executive body contained one physicist, and the rest were from the human sciences; the BTI consisted of doctors, chemists, engineers and physicists, who would not accept a moral education as part of the curriculum, although they were in sympathy with the critique of colonialism. This division has been discussed in Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 4. In 1913, the two institutes were again amalgamated under the NCE, after six years of what they called the 'Kultur Kampf. The main actors split as follows: Bengal National College 1. Satish Mukherjee 2. Sri Aurobindo 3. Rabindranath Tagore 4. Benoy Sarkar 5. Radha Kumud Mukherjee 6. Dhammananda Kosambi 7. Ramendra Trivedi 8. Haran Chakladar Bengal Technical Institute 1. Tarak Nath Palit 2. Nilratan Sarkar 3. Rajendranath Mukherjee 4. P.M. Bose 5. P.C. Ray 6. J.C. Bose 7. P.J. Bruhl 8. Jatin Das Gupta 9. Gopal Sen It is significant to note the precarious identity of the philosopher and historian of science, Brajendra N. Seal, who vacillated between the two institutes. B.K. Sarkar's perception itself changed after his visit to Germany and the USA in 1918, and he confessed two decades later that his perception in the 1910s was not quite correct.
56. Bose, op. cit. note 26, v.
57. Ibid.
58. Baneshvar Das, The Social and Economic Ideas of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (Calcutta: Chuckervertty Chatterjee & Co., 1940), 486-88.
59. See John C. Greene, Science, Ideology and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1981), 60-74.
60. Eric J. Hobsbaum, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (London: Cardinal Press, 1988), 15.
61. Stephen Jay Gould refers to the process of equating evolution (social and biological) with progress as the 'great conflation': see his Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 43.
62. Bose, op. cit. note 26, iv-v.
63. Hobsbawm, op. cit. note 48, 13.
64. Bose, op. cit. note 26, vi-vii.
65. Ibid., viii.
66. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Pelican Books, 1980), 42.
67. Kumar, op. cit. note 36, 49.
68. Ibid. Swami Vivekananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna, the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission. Vivekananda headed a movement for the spiritual rejuvenation of Hinduism, evoking the spiritual unity of India. Speaking at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he claimed not to represent a sect or a creed, but India's spirituality wherein all religions are united.
69. Two characteristic features of Spencer's thought were a belief in 'the laissezfaire in social and political matters', and a commitment to the development hypothesis: see Greene, op. cit. note 47, 71. However, Greene further points out that later in life Spencer was less inclined to identify change and progress: ibid., 83.
70. Passmore, op. cit. note 54, 41.
71. Satish Mukherjee, 'Modem Science versus Devas or Higher Intelligence', The Dawn (July 1899), 136-39, at 137.
72. Forbes, op. cit. note 6, 23. Rabindranath Tagore's fine-tuned poetic sensibilities picked up the ambivalent nature of the Bengal positivists, for he remarked that those 'who raised the banner of Auguste Comte and J.S. Mill . . . sought refuge later in hoary traditional values. To this sentiment he later gave poetic voice: Once did you bring the stream of life Breaking all barriers in our fields And yet today you are the men Who in our land swim against the tide. (quoted in Susobhan Sarkar, Bengal Renaissance and Other Essays [New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1981], 153).
73. Mahendra L. Sircar, 'The Right Pursuit of the Physical Sciences considered from the Point of View of Individual as well as Indian National Regeneration', The Dawn (October 1902), 79-84, at 80.
74. Ibid., 81.
75. Aurobindo, op. cit. note 39, 80.
76. Ibid., 81.
77. M.L. Sircar, 'Educational Value of the Physical Sciences from a Moral Point of View -I', The Dawn (September 1901), 55-63, at 55.
78. Ibid., 56.
79. Ibid. ,58.
80. Ibid.
81. In a comparative context, our discussion bears a few parallels with England of 1840-80, where what Andrew Morris refers to as the 'cult of scientism' was to produce a flood of scientifico-moral essays: 'Science would light the way for philosophy, moral hygiene and even domestic harmony; none of life's mysteries would withstand its crusade'. This was the period when science could serve as a 'source of moral truth': see Morris, 'Oscar Wilde and the Eclipse of Darwinism: Aestheticism, Degeneration and Moral Reaction in Late-Victorian Ideology', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (October 1993), 51340, at 514.
82. Sircar, op. cit. note 65, 60.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 56.
85. Ibid., 57.
86. Sir J.C. Bose, 'On the Similarity of the Effect of Electrical Stimulus on Inorganic and Living Substances' (Congress of Science, Paris, 1900), in Bose, Collected Physical Papers, Bose Institute Transactions (London: Longman Green & Co., 1927), 253-58.
87. See also Ashis Nandy, 'Defiance and Conformity in Science: The Identity of Jagadis Chandra Bose', Science Studies (London), Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1972), 31-85.
88. Anonymous, 'Is Matter Alive? Some of the Latest Researches of Dr J.C. Bose', The Dawn (November 1902), 105-12, at 105.
89. Satish Mukherjee, 'The Theory of Evolution: Old and New', The Dawn (August 1897), 191.
90. A recent work on Indian philosophy has the following to say about 'Samkhya'. The word itself comes from 'Sankhya', meaning 'number, and that in turn comes from 'sam' (meaning 'exact') and 'khya' (meaning 'to know'). Hence Samkyha refers to exact knowledge. P.T. Raju writes: 'As the most exact concept is number, the word has come to mean in literary language, number. Since exact knowledge includes discrimination, Samkhya, the name of this school, means that which gives exact knowledge of reality': Raju, Structural Depths of Indian Thought (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1985), 304.
91. Mukherjee, op. cit. note 76, 191.
92. Seal, op. cit. note 32, 2.
93. Ibid., 1.
94. M.L. Sircar, 'Educational Value of the Physical Sciences from a Moral Point of View -II', The Dawn (October 1901), 76-81, at 78.
95. Ibid.
96. M.L. Sircar, 'Can Physical Science Enlighten Man as to His Destiny?', The Dawn (November 1901), 101-9, at 102.
97. Ibid., 103.
98. Anonymous, 'Progress -From the Evolutionist Point of View', The Dawn (June 1898), 110-14, at 110.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid., 100. Aurobindo sees in Indian thought the principle of evolution of the soul in nature from 'the vegetal and the animal to the human form', arrived at in its own terms: Aurobindo, op. cit. note 39, 68. Despite the contestable parallelism underlying his argument, it is more interesting to observe the absence of any antagonism toward evolutionary theory.
101. Anonymous, op. cit. note 85, 110.
102. Ibid., 111-12. George Stein indicates that Social Darwinism combined 'religious belief in the forces of nature' with 'a literal transfer of the laws of biology to the social and political arena': Stein, op. cit. note 5, 54. In England, too, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, this fundamental conflation, on which Social Darwinism was premised, was seriously questioned.
103. Anonymous, op. cit. note 85, 112. We are reminded here of similar debates in England. Again Stein (op. cit. note 5, 52) indicates that English liberal rational capitalism was an ideology in search of scientific legitimacy, and not a science in search of ideological legitimacy.
104. Anonymous, op. cit. note 85, 112. The language employed here is highly euphemistic, and the agitated communities and social germs referred to represent ongoing working-class struggles that were a cause of anxiety to the Bhadralok class: see Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 3, 111-12.
105. Anonymous, op. cit. note 85, 112.
106. However, it is interesting to study the infusion of Darwinist and medical idiom into the popular writing of the time.
107. Anonymous, op. cit. note 85,113. See also John Dewey, Theory of the Moral Life (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1908, reprinted New Delhi: Wiley Eastern, 1967), 144. The purpose of citing Dewey here is essentially to draw the parallel in the arguments in two different cultural contexts: but it is not possible to stop at just pointing out this parallelism. For, in addition, a logical momentum is at work in strains of thought, and on this count the influence of the pragmatists and utilitarians on Bengali thought is well known:
108. see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). John Dewey was known to members of the NCE, and when B.K. Sarkar visited the USA in 1918, Dewey introduced him to American audiences and universities: see Das, op. cit. note 46, 493. At the Sarkar-Dewey interview organized in New York on 4 January 1918, Sarkar was asked to outline his programme on education: 'I shall make the exact and materialistic sciences compulsory in the elementary stage . . . Self sacrifice and devotion to the interests of others must belong to the daily practice of the scholar': ibid., 493.
109. Aurobindo, op. cit. note 39, 13.
110. Sircar, op. cit. note 61, 81.
111. Ibid. This argument appears to have been in circulation among Indians from the 1840s onwards.
112. Radha K. Mukherjee, 'Physical Science in the Nineteenth Century', The Dawn (November 1901), 112-16.
113. Ibid., 112.
114. For the influence of Vedanta on the Bhadralok, see D.H. Killingley, 'Vedanta and Modernity', in Phillips & Wainwright (eds), op. cit. note 8, 127-40.
115. Satish Mukherjee, op. cit. note 59, 138-39.
116. Sircar, op. cit. note 81, 79.
117. Ibid., 80.
118. Sircar, op. cit. note 83, 112.
119. Hobsbaum, op. cit. note 48, 17.
120. Sircar, op. cit. note 83, 108.
121. Satish Mukherjee's editorial comments in ibid., 104.
122. Radha Mukherjee, op. cit. note 98, 112.
123. Ibid., 116.
124. Aurobindo, op. cit. note 39, 13.
125. In the preface to the second edition of his Critique, Immanuel Kant informs us that the moral and physical realms are distinct, and that the moral must acquire the methodological rigour ('completeness' and 'certitude') of science: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1956), 13-19. The point here is not to try to reveal cognitive homologies between the thought of The Dawn interlocutors and Kant's perception of the relationship between the discourses of science and morality; rather, it is to stress that Kant was a much venerated figure among The Dawn interlocutors, and that the way they interpret him was to provide the terms of a rapprochement.
126. Aurobindo, op. cit. note 39, 15.
127. Sarkar, op. cit. note 7, 6-7.
128. Ibid., 9.
129. Ibid., 15.
130. Whereas Sarkar's concerns have more to do with laying down the foundations of an Indian sociology, having reckoned with what Michel Foucault (at a later date) refers to as the 'transcendental narcissism of Western civilization' (see Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language [New York: Pantheon Books, 1972], 203), an evangelist of science also from the Bhandralok circle, Keshab Chandra Sen, was to write that the greater the commitment to science, the deeper the grounding in religious life: see
131. Sen, The Place of Science in Religion (Calcutta, 1870), 2-8.
132. In Samkhya metaphysics, 'prakriti' refers to the world that is the seat of change and transformation, and opposed to this is 'purusa', that is pure consciousness which is also an existence. Prakriti is one, and purusas are infinite: see Raju, op. cit. note 77, 309.
133. Sarkar, op. cit. note 7, 26-27.
134. Raina & Habib, op. cit. note 4.
135. B.K. Sarkar, quoted in Das, op. cit. note 46, 40.
136. Ibid., 41.
137. Ibid., 41-42.
138. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1972), 59.
139. Arnold Thackray, 'History of Science', in Paul Durbin (gen. éd.), A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine (New York: Free Press, 1980), 3-68, at 3.
140. John Dewey, for one, writes: 'There are periods in history when a community or a group in a community finds itself in the presence of new issues which its old customs do not adequately meet. The habits and beliefs which were formed in the past do not fit the requirements of contemporary life'. The ensuing moral struggle is apparent in the challenge posed for customary morality, as prevailing norms and modes of action come up for interrogation. Dewey refers to this transitory state of interrogation, in which a novel set of dispositions and attitudes are being defined, as 'reflective morality'. See Dewey, op. cit. note 94, 5-8.
141. Sircar, op. cit. note 83.
142. See Sayyed Hossain Nasr, 'The Role of Traditional Sciences in the Encounter of Religion and Science, Journal of Islamic Sciences (Aligarh), Vol. 1, No. 1 (1985), 9-30, at 12-14.
143. For a fairly recent reading of the history of the sciences, see Mohamed S. Fakir, 'Towards an Externalist History of Islamic Science', The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1992), 188-201. Fakir sees in Eurocentrism the motive to universalize Western values: 'the fundamental error of Eurocentrism is the tacit postulate that since modern science and technology, which indeed flowered in the Europe of the Renaissance, are universal, then everything that is European is universal': ibid., 191.
144. In the early days of the freedom struggle, Indians often confronted the rulers with their neglect of the political norms that justified their rule. For one of the classics of this genre, see Dadabhai Nauroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901).
145. See David Gosling, Science and Religion in India (Madras: The Christian Literary Society, 1976).
146. The poet Rabindranath Tagore's son, Rathindranath Tagore, reports that his father stopped attending NCE meetings after some time, since he felt that those predisposed to science and technical education would, in the long run, hold sway over the NCE's future: see Rathindranath Tagore, On-the Edges of Time (Hyderabad: Orient Longmans, 1958), 71.
147. This is a feature even Vivekananda shares with Aurobindo. In fact, Vivekananda reinforces Orientalist stereotypes: 'To the Oriental the world of the spirit is as real as to the Occidental is the world of the senses'. The point we have sought to make here is that the NCE members reconstructed Vivekananda's world view to suit their own programme, which was at variance with the Orientalist one. For this more contemporary reading of Vivekananda, see Romila Thapar, The Past and Prejudice (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1990), 5.
148. The journal Science and Culture was founded in the 1930s by M.N. Saha. It continues to be published from Calcutta by one of Saha's students, Santimay Chatterjee.
149. Satish C. Mukherjee, 'John Dalton, Jacob Berzelius and the Atomic Theory', Modern Review (Calcutta, November 1909), at 449.
150. See also P.C. Ray: 'It is to Europe that we must now turn our eyes for the realization of the ideal presented by our Rishis -unflagging and concentrated devotion to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake': Ray, op. cit. note 26, 304.