Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s critique of science emanates from his dissatisfaction with the divorce of science and progress from morality. He often quoted the scientist Alfred Wallace to argue that people’s moral sense had in no way improved as a result of scientific discoveries. The advance of science had added “not an inch to the moral stature of Europe”. It had not reduced hatred and injustice

Science policy writings in India have hardly ever made mention of Gandhi. Ashis Nandy argues that Gandhi was not opposed to technology per se but to technologism, which was a condition that created a hierarchical relationship between man (those who possess technology) and man (those who do not), and man and nature. Gandhi, according to him, judged a technology not on the grounds of what it replaced, represented or symbolized. Visvanathan sees him as one of the great and most inventive of scientists of the swadeshi era. To escape the modern west, Gandhi had to subvert or transform science, playfully and politically. According to him Gandhi’s was a fluid science of resistance. In Gandhi’s altered organization of science, science would need money the least and that there would be instead of big laboratories, ashrams and gurukuls of science.

While it is true that most of his radical critiques of science and modern professions appeared in Hind Swaraj, the keen interest that Gandhi expressed for an alternate path in science finds little mention in this book. In fact, science finds no direct mention in Hind Swaraj. Yet given its importance in Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization, it has been the main source or text for scholars studying Gandhian thought and by extension science. Out attempt here would be to show that such efforts are grossly inadequate in understanding Gandhi’s views on science. There is enough evidence of Gandhi expressing himself directly on the subject in many of his other writings. On khadi and education, and almost throughout his Collected Works, in letters to his co-workers and speeches, Gandhi regularly uses the term ‘science’.3 These could be seen as new sites to explore his writings on science. Historically too, the emphasis on Hind Swaraj freezes Gandhi’s view on science to 1909, ignoring 39 years of his scientific practice since then. Another site that is often used to study Gandhi’s scientific metaphor that he used for his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, is well known. Similarly, the fact that he made several experiments in the field of brahmacharya, dietetics and food. However, the notion of the experiment in his public life has not been examined adequately.

Khadi movement: An Alternate Science Practice

It is in the khadi movement that the Gandhian understanding of science was translated most into practice leading to the coinage of new terms such as the ‘science of the spinning wheel’ and later ‘khadi science’. Gandhi’s extensive use of the term ‘science’ is found in speeches and discussions with khadi workers. He wanted these workers to become satyagrahi scientists.While much of his attempts to inculcate the spirit of the science of the Charkha were directed at khadi workers, students of his institutions and the Congress, he also sought to further his idea amongst modern scientists.