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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

For Nehru, science wasn’t an industry. It was a disposition, an etiquette

Rather than a citizenry empowered to question its own reality, India got an enlightenment delivered downward, by edict, with the state installed as the supreme custodian of reason.

There is a photograph of Jawaharlal Nehru that almost everyone in India has seen, even if they couldn’t tell you where or when it was taken — the patrician profile, the rosebud pinned to the achkan, the faint air of a man who has just finished a sentence more elegant than the one you were expecting.

Nehru is the statesman of the midnight speech, the disciple of Gandhi, the architect of non-alignment. He is a figure so thoroughly absorbed into the national psyche that it is difficult to see him as a thinker rather than a monument. Yet, maybe photographs fail to capture the most interesting aspects of Nehru. Before he was a Prime Minister, he was something stranger and more vulnerable. He was a prisoner with a fountain pen, trying to work out, on paper, how you talk an ancient civilisation into changing its mind.

The setting matters. While Karl Popper sat in Christchurch, New Zealand, a refugee from Vienna, teaching at a provincial college, and wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, his furious wartime defense of doubt against dogma, Nehru was writing his own book under guard. He drafted The Discovery of India between 1942 and 1945 in Ahmadnagar Fort, a basalt prison in Maharashtra where the British had deposited him and eleven other Congress leaders after the Quit India resolution.

The book was published in 1946. Two men, two confinements, two attempts to think their way out of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. One of them was a philosopher with the luxury of an academic readership, the other a politician who would shortly have to govern four hundred million people.

It was in The Discovery of India that Nehru gave lasting currency to a phrase that has clung to him ever since, the scientific temper. It is easy to misread the phrase as a slogan about laboratories and engineers. It was nothing of the kind. For Nehru, science was not an industry; it was a disposition, almost a form of etiquette.

Nehru’s famous formulation has the cadence of a creed: the search for truth, the refusal to accept anything without testing, the willingness to abandon a previous conclusion when the evidence turns against you, the reliance........

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