In January every year, since 1914, the best scientific minds in the country gather together, “to advance and promote the cause of science in India,” through the Indian Science Congress.
This time around, however, ‘the cause of science’ took a beating thanks to the assertions — the existence of a helmet on Mars from the days of the Mahabharata, airplanes that could fly between planets in the Vedic Age — made at the 102nd Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai.
Uncannily enough, a peek into The Hindu ’s archives reveals that in the 2nd Indian Science Congress held in Madras, 99 years ago, fighting superstition and ignorance was the primary agenda for charting the course of progress in Indian science.
Surgeon General W.R Bannerman, the president of the conference held at Presidency College, said “Ask yourselves, how many people in India know about these diseases other than as visitations of malign spirits to be warded of by incantation and magic?”
At a time when diseases like malaria, dysentery, cholera, and plague went unchecked, the theme of the conference, ‘the importance of Biology to the Medical , Sanitary and Scientific Men Working in the tropics’, went beyond the realm of mere intellectual pursuit.
However, he noted that the uneducated masses were not the only stakeholders responsible for the poor development of science in India. Bannerman argued that the ‘wealthy Indian’ was equally culpable of ignorance in not committing to the pursuit of scientific research.
He said, “The leisured and wealthy classes do not send their sons to our universities... and when they do, it’s certainly not with the idea that they should spend the rest of their lives doing research work...It is often sons of the middle class or the poor community that have the inclination and capacity for this work...yet, they do not have the means.”
By appealing to the privileged for greater funds to be channelled for scientific research and spreading awareness on hygiene and preventive medical action, Bannerman hoped the spectre of ignorance would gradually be overcome.
Reiterating this, the then Governor, Lord Pentland underlined that while fields like ethnography attracted significant Indian scholarship, it was in the applied sciences, especially medicine, that Indian research fell short.
However, a special mention was made of scientists such as C.V Raman, P.C. Ray and J.C. Bose, whose achievements in the arena of physics, chemistry and botany set a great example to fellow countrymen.
Almost a century later, the Indian scientific community has grown dynamically.
Yet, with the claims arising from the 102nd Congress, the task of fighting ‘superstition and ignorance’, may well be a valuable ideal to revisit.
