The title of this Malayalam book translates as “Knowledge Revolution: A Cultural History”. It is essentially an illustrated socio-cultural history of ideas primarily of the modern world with science decisively at the centre. Ostensibly simple, it is an impressive, scholarly volume of encyclopaedic dimension. Born out of decades-long effort, the work is a treasure-house of knowledge that combines in itself a bewildering range of diversity and depth.
The book, which has 42 chapters grouped under seven heads, is dedicated to the late G. Narayanan, the author's friend, philosopher and guide. It offers an admirable testimony to Govinda Pillai's sustained engagement with an intellectual world where culture and creative genius unite. Every chapter is complete in itself, and the reader is left free to choose where to start from.
The introductory part is devoted to a discussion of themes such as history and culture; truth and beauty; the nature as science and ethics; the scientific, pseudo-scientific and unscientific; wisdom and science; and the expansion of knowledge and brilliance.
The author maintains that science is a culturally contingent product too, in the sense that, sometimes, even the beliefs and rites of scientists influence their discoveries. This, he says, is exemplified by the lives and theories of scientists like C.P. Snow, S. Chandrasekhar, Einstein, and Heisenberg. While one may agree with the author's dismissal of Evangelists, Methodists and other anti-intellectual groups, there may be reservation about the inclusion of Immanuel Velikovsky and Paul Feyerabend among pseudo-scientific writers like Fritjof Capra.
The ontology and epistemology of Eurocentrism is analysed in the second part. The focus is on its politics, history and geography, knowledge revolution in the non-European world, and the conclusions of the Penang summit, which asserted the third world rights, sustainable development, appropriate technology, etc., instead of hi-tech and big science. Eurocentrism as an ideological construct of early capitalism stands exposed. A strong case is made out, even if briefly, of the non-European origins of the Copernican Revolution in cosmology.
Renaissance
The third part deals with ‘Renaissance', its elite and popular phases, the Machiavellian statecraft, and the last twin lights, Thomas More and Erasmus. This is followed by a discussion on the ‘Reformation', which highlights the explosion in the Black Fort, the roots of the movement, the subsided Savonarola, and the unending flames of John Huss, efforts of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, the darkness at mid-noon, the Protestant Reforms and the Roman Reaction, the age of religious war, and the aftermath. The fifth part, which is on the Copernican Age, examines in depth the knowledge revolution, the Copernican ascendancy, Vesalius and inner meanings, Tycho Brahe's world system, Kepler's obscurantism, and Tommaso Campanella's clarion call. Galileo, the silver star in the horizon of knowledge; the methodology of science as enunciated by Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes; the European Social Revolution; the new communication-interaction fraternity; the Franco-Spanish creative genius; and the British Empire, its literature and politics — these themes are analysed in the next part.
The last part is on the hegemony of knowledge, the focus being on topics like the intellectual genealogy of Isaac Newton, Harvey's science of blood circulation, accomplishment of the microscope, the brightness of Newton, and the philosophical confluence of sciences. The volume has three appendices: an annotated bibliography; a chronological list of milestones in history; and a concise name index of authors.
The book does not hinge on the ideographic methodology followed by George Sarton, the pioneering historian of science, or by the subsequent ‘Internalist' historiography of science, which focussed on the method of rationalist reconstruction of ideas as confined wholly within the scientific world. It is not rigidly Marxian either.
Role of ballistics
Govinda Pillai's perspective is closer to that of Ludwik Fleck, who theorised the socio-cultural nature of knowledge, particularly science, than to that of Boris Hessen, who propounded a connection between economy and science and between growth of knowledge and the art of war, and argued that ballistics played a central role in the making of Newtonian physics. Some stray printing mistakes apart, the volume is well produced and will appeal to all kinds of readership.
