“THE TECHNICIANS” (or rather the TECHNOCRACY)
“There is not much to be expected from the third group of Anglicized Hindus, and therefore there is not also much to be said…” … that’s how dismissively if not disparagingly does Nirad Chaudhury write about Technicians (or technocracy) of India in his 1965 book, “The Continent of Circe“.
Well… the engineers, scientists, technologists, IT workers, research fellows, faculty members and the aficianados of government R&D bodies like ISRO or DRDO today on reading Chaudhury’s carping assessments may probably fume, fulminate and froth in the mouth in seething anger and indignation at his sweeping, overly generalised commentary on the so-called “scientific temper” of India that Jawaharlal Nehru was so passionate about 70 years ago and is, in fact, being presently mimicked by PM Narendra Modi too in his own quest for “Vikshith Bharath 2047“. But then, facts of history are facts … and undeniable too. There is no question that the greatest and most impactful of contributions to the STEM domains (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) coming out of Indian all came only in past millennia of its ancient history; and whatever little the Anglicised Hindu Technocracy in post-Independence Nehruvium has accomplished pales by comparison into utter insignificance or inconsequence.
But before we proceed to summarise what India achieved in the bygone Hindu era of past millennia and compare them with the Anglicised Hindu Technicians‘ intellectual accomplishments in the Nehruvium era, let us first quickly skim through a few relevant extracts from the essay that Nirad Chaudhury wrote about on Nehruvium Technocracy. Here they are below:
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“The technicians are not, and will never be, effectual agents, or any kind of agents, of Westernization— not even in the technical field. They can be left almost wholly out of account in assessing the strength of the moral or intellectual force behind the Westernization of India. As a rule, after a sojourn in Europe and America, sometimes lasting many years, they come back almost without any Western outlook in them. What is even more surprising is the fact that this Western sojourn appears to atrophy whatever mental life they were capable of before going abroad. Thus after their return they are put to use somewhat like living spanners by the real agents of the Westernization of India.
“There is a whole series of cumulative reasons behind this in-effectiveness. The first of these is the kind of scientific education they get in India in the schools and universities. These institutions teach science in a wholly mechanical fashion, and develop a handicraftsman’s attitude to it. The general run of Hindus treat scientific education merely as the acquisition of a skill, a sort of necromancy without the supernatural, and never as a discipline for the mind or as a philosophy of life. Therefore in the Hindu student of science the general mental life and the learning of science run in separate channels. This nullifies the undoubted fact that for many decades the brightest young men in India have been going in for science.
“Secondly, the technicians who go abroad enter technical colleges in India early in life, before their minds have been formed, and they soon get entangled in the mechanics of their profession.
“They do not try to improve their knowledge of science as science, and hardly ever go deep into the theoretical principles of the techniques. This purely pragmatic attitude towards technical education is never outlived, and they find the techniques themselves so elaborate and complex that in trying to master them they get culturally sterilized. I have met men who have received their technical education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which certainly in not a mere technical institution, but I would not call them scientists of any kind, in some cases not even educated men. Moreover, many Indian technicians nowadays receive training only in factories.
“Thirdly, the social life they have in the West has even a positively harmful effect on them. Most Indian students who go abroad for technical training come from middle class families with very moderate means, which scrape a little money with great difficulty to send a son abroad to give him a chance in life. So the young men, even when they have the desire, can never afford to live with people who would have been their equals socially. This deprives them of opportunities to acquire new ideas and habits, and they tend to get completely stuck in the idea that Westernization is nothing more than urban industrial work, combined with mass-made popular amusements.
“Yet perhaps the Indian technicians would not have been quite the foremen they often show themselves to be, in spite of their short stay and purely vocational education in the West, if they had gone there with some previous cultural preparation and experience of Western ways. But these young men come mostly from the more traditional Hindu families, and not from the Anglicized class in which certain Western habits and modes of thinking are partly acclimatized. Their parents are normal and traditional Hindus whose Westernization has gone no further than getting an education in English for the sake of making a living.”
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Nirad Chaudhury’s views on the Technocratic Class of Anglicised Hindus in Nehruvium might seem too uncharitable and unduly harsh in their sweeping generalisations. But then, if one were to pause to think deeply about what he wrote on the attitudes, mindset, training and development of that class of Technicians he describes, then perhaps one may have to grudgingly admit he is not entirely wrong. Because the fundamental reasons he adduces to explain why Nehruvium Technocrats could never hold a candle to the ancient Hindu STEM Technocracy are precisely those that must be, today in India, also attributed to why India is ranked 101st for significant STEM achievements worldwide amongst a list of the top-100 countries!
Despite India today boasting that its national literacy rate is 74%, the actual lowly ranking above — based on various factors such as education system quality, math and science scores, and adult literacy rates — clearly suggests the quality and quantum of what India contributes to global STEM is just in the international league.
In the last few decades, some progress has been made, no doubt, but it all still lags behind many other countries. In terms of specific STEM achievements, India can be said to have made only middling contributions in fields like mathematics, computer science, and engineering. We still have a long way to go to catch up with top-ranked countries like the United States, China, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany.
So, given the above stark fact, Nirad Chaudhury was not all wrong in what he thought about the class he named The Technician, a sub-group of the Anglicised Hindu Class of Nehruvium.
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Against the STEM achievements of the Technocracy of the Anglicised Hindu era, we must compare and contrast those of times of the ancient truly Hindu era in its Pre-Industrial history. They were truly outstanding and awesome. Here below is a brief summary of contributions the latter made to the STEM domains which were impactful, powerful and breakthrough discoveries, inventions, and innovations:
Mathematics:
1. Zero (0): The concept of zero was invented in ancient India by Indian mathematicians such as Aryabhata (476 CE) and Brahmagupta (598 CE).
2. Decimal System: The decimal system was developed in India during the Gupta period (320-550 CE) and was later adopted by Arab mathematicians and eventually spread to Europe.
3. Pi (π): The Indian mathematician Aryabhata (476 CE) accurately calculated the value of pi (π) to 4 decimal places.
4. Trigonometry: Indian mathematicians such as Aryabhata and Bhaskara (1114 CE) made significant contributions to trigonometry, including the development of the concept of sine, cosine, and tangent.
Astronomy:
1. Heliocentric Model: The Indian astronomer Aryabhata (476 CE) proposed the heliocentric model of the solar system, where the Sun is at the center and the planets orbit around it.
2. Prediction of Eclipses: Indian astronomers such as Varahamihira (550 CE) and Bhaskara (1114 CE) developed accurate methods for predicting solar and lunar eclipses.
3. Discovery of Seven Planets: The Indian astronomer Lalla (720 CE) discovered the seven planets of the solar system, including the five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and the two invisible planets (Rahu and Ketu).
Physics:
1. Atomic Theory: The Indian philosopher Kanada (600 BCE) proposed the atomic theory, which states that matter is composed of tiny indivisible particles called atoms.
2. Concept of Gravity: The Indian astronomer Aryabhata (476 CE) proposed the concept of gravity, where heavy objects attract lighter objects.
3. Speed of Light: The Indian astronomer Bhaskara (1114 CE) accurately calculated the speed of light to be approximately 1,00,00,000 meters per second.
Medicine:
1. Ayurveda: The Indian system of medicine, Ayurveda, was developed over 3,000 years ago and is still practiced today.
2. Plastic Surgery: The Indian physician Sushruta (600 BCE) developed the techniques of plastic surgery, including skin grafting and rhinoplasty.
3. Vaccination: The Indian physician Madhav (900 CE) developed the concept of vaccination, where a person is inoculated with a mild form of a disease to prevent its occurrence.
Engineering:
1. Iron Pillar of Delhi: The Iron Pillar of Delhi, built during the Gupta period (320-550 CE), is a testament to India’s advanced engineering skills, as it has withstood the test of time and remains rust-free to this day.
2. Water Management Systems: The ancient Indians developed sophisticated water management systems, including canals, dams, and reservoirs, which were used for irrigation and drinking water.
3. Bridge Construction: The Indian engineer Kautilya (300 BCE) developed the techniques of bridge construction, including the use of arches and suspension bridges.
Computer Science:
1. Binary System: The Indian mathematician Pingala (200 BCE) developed the binary system, which is the basis for modern computer science.
2. Algorithm: The Indian mathematician Aryabhata (476 CE) developed the concept of algorithms, which are used in computer programming to solve problems.
Now, let us compare the above ancient millenial achievements in STEM of the Hindu technocrats of first millennium with what have been hailed to be some of the most outstanding achievements in the last 500 years in India of those Technicians Nirad Chaudhuri, if alive today, might have classified them as exceptions to the successors of the sub-group of the Anglicised Hindu Class of Nehruvium Technicians:
1. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920): Mathematician who made significant contributions to number theory, algebra, and analysis.
2. C.V. Raman (1888-1970): Physicist who discovered the Raman effect, which is a fundamental concept in physics and chemistry.
3. Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974): Physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and statistics, and is best known for his work on the Bose-Einstein condensate.
4. Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909-1966): Physicist who made significant contributions to nuclear physics and was a key figure in the development of India’s nuclear program.
5. Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971): Physicist and engineer who played a key role in the development of India’s space program and was a pioneer in the field of space research.
6. The Indian computer scientist Narinder Singh Kapany (1960s) developed the concept of artificial intelligence, which is now a major field of research in computer science.
7. Anil Pradhan, engineer from Odisha, who has been awarded the “Rohini Nayyar Prize” for his exceptional contributions to rural STEM education. He founded the “Young Tinker Foundation“, which has impacted over 2.5 lakh students across Odisha, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu, and plans to expand to Delhi with a goal of reaching 10 lakh students by 2026.
8. Dr. Rohini Nayyar, a renowned economist and bureaucrat who conceptualized the MGNREGA initiative to support rural employment . Her legacy continues to inspire young leaders like Anil Pradhan, who are working towards rural development and STEM education.
Barring a few exceptions in the list above which undoubtedly have had a significant impact on STEM within India, it is debatable how many of the rest have been globally very impactful.
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In two very insighful passages in William Dalyrymple recently published book, “The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the World” (2024)“, I came across what might well be convincing reason for the starkly contrasting quality and quantum in accomplishments made in the global STEM domains of the two different epochal “Technocracies“: the one that Nirad Chaudhury describes in the “Continent of Circe” as Nehruvium and the other belonging to the pre-Industrial one that Dalrymple himself describes as “Indosphere” which existed between 250 BC and 1200 CE.
“For most of late medieval and modern history, India was on the receiving end of a great deal of cultural influence from beyond its borders. Following the establishment of a series of Islamic sultanates throughout India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Persian became the language of government across much of India, and Persianate cultural standards, in art, dress and etiquette, became dominant even in southern Hindu courts. Then, in the nineteenth century, during the rise of the East India Company and the Victorian Raj, English gradually replaced Persian, and India became instead part of the Anglosphere. To master English was now the route to advancement, and Indians who wished to get ahead had to abandon, or at least sublimate, much of their own culture, becoming instead English-speaking ‘Brown Sahibs’, or what V. S. Naipaul called ‘Mimic Men’. In time, of course, Indians became masters in both languages, adopting Persian and English as their own, and, just as Bedil Dehlavi became one of the most admired Persian poets in seventeenth-century Central Asia, so many Indian writers from Tagore to Rushdie, as well as Naipaul himself, became literary superstars in English in the twentieth.
But for a millennium and a half before then, from about 250 BCE to 1200 CE, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation, creating around it an empire of ideas which developed into a tangible ‘Indosphere‘ where its cultural influence was predominant. During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power, in religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, language and literature.
Sanskrit had been a profoundly sacred tongue for at least a millennium before the Common Era, but at some point between the first century BCE and the first century cE, Sanskrit was reinvented as a literary and political language, the start of an astonishing transformation of its use that saw Sanskrit literary culture rapidly spread all the way from Afghanistan to Java. Indeed, in time, as Sheldon Pollock has shown, Sanskrit, ‘the Language of the Gods in the World of Men‘, became the lingua franca across much of Asia and left a permanent mark on the map from Balkh (Sanskrit Bahlika) to Singapore (Sanskrit Simhapura).…. The spread of Sanskrit brought all of Indian literature, arts and the sciences in its wake.
Out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought and devotion ….
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THE YOUTH OF INDIA IN SCHOOLS and COLLEGES
Nirad Chaudhury then turn his attention to the last sub-group of Anglicised Hindus: the Youth of Nehruvium. Of this group he was, in fact, even more peremptorily dismissive than he was of Technicians being ineffective agents or catalysts of the modernization of India via Westernization than
“There remains to consider only the role of the Hindu youth in the Westernizing revolution, which is the process really meant when people talk about the ‘development of ‘under-developed’ countries.
“I cannot, however, share this faith in the Hindu youth to modernize India . For one thing, I do not take youthful rebelliousness very seriously. It is a universal phenomenon, and has no revolutionary significance. The antithesis which is creates is a counterpart of that which exists within the same genetic process between heredity in the strict sense and variation. In normal societies the rebellion of youth stands for nothing more radical than a spring-cleaning of the parental home, so that in settling down in it, the young people might have the cheerful conviction that they have made a new one. Besides, as Plato said long ago, to treat young people with greater respect than they deserve is a concomitant of democracy, and we live in a very democratic age.
“But there are also reasons exclusive to contemporary Hindu society which makes the apparent rebelliousness of its youth and their desire to become Westernized a mere temporary effervescence.
“So far as Westernization is acquisition of Western vulgarity and viciousness, it must never be forgotten that Hindu society has always connived at and even encouraged foreign ways. It likes its youth to sow their wild oats in the hated foreigner’s fields. On the other hand, it has also on the whole kept its balance of mind even when some Hindus have shown a preference for the good features of foreign cultures, having confidence in its own strength. This strength is a thing of which outsiders have no proper idea.
“I ask them, ‘”Over what period or time have you watched them? Six months, one year, two years, five years?
“I was one of them in my time, I have watched them all my life, and in my existence of sixty-five years I have seen at least five shoals of Hindu tadpoles shedding their Western tails and becoming Hindu frogs. Of the scores of revolutionaries I knew in my young days, only one of a sort survives, and that is myself. All the rest have become good Hindus. Young men who would swear by no other name in 1927 but that of Lenin, began to mutter that of Ramakrishna by 1937″.
“The best thing that can be said of the Westernizing impulse of the Hindu youth is that while it lasts it is spontaneous and that in many it has even an idealistic emotional fervour. Another interesting point about these young people is that their enthusiasm for things Western is not the product of education or stay abroad. At this stage of their life none of them virtually goes out of the country. Thus their Westernizing impulses and ideas are independent of direct Western schooling or inculcation. But whatever their early ardour, it does not last. The irresistible reclaiming power of Hindu society kills it, and by the time the young people are thirty they can hardly be recognized as their old selves.
“What are the wispy young people? We Hindus have a legend that when the Ganges was descending from the head of Siva, Airavata, the elephant of heaven and of Indra, presumptuously tried to check its flow and was washed away. The young Hindus ranting against their traditions are not elephants of Westernization, they are the grass of the Hindu fields, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven. They talk in their little day, to be borne down into the everlasting silences of Hinduism; and after that they remain in a chasm which inspires any European who retains his Western sensibility with a superstitious awe:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
— (“Kubla Khan“: Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
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On that pensive and poetic but most unabashedly pessimistic note, Nirad C. Chaudhury wrapped up his “Essay on the Peoples of India” written in 1964 with a clear eye on the country’s future — say, in 2025! — which he seemed to presage with remarkably accurate anticipation. Here below is how he ends it all … with true Chaudhurian flourish:
So, I should really have described and labelled the Anglicized Hindus of India in all their categories as a ‘recessive’ and not a “dominant’ minority. And recessive they will become soon enough, even as soon as the man, who has given them their present position but who is also seventy-three will have disappeared from the scene.
The Hindus are now the largest and also the dominant element in the population of India. They are the masters and rulers. They have regained political power after many centuries, and are fully aware of it, perhaps over-aware. They are also the only source of energy for the country, considered as a human machine; and it is their desires and aspirations which are keeping it running. No other element counts. As the current jargon describes all the non-Hindus, they are only minorities.
The dominant and also dominating position of the Hindus is so patent that one should have thought that it would create interest in them both as individuals and as a collective personality. It has been said that character is fate. Now, if this is true of individuals, it seems to be no less true for nations. There certainly is such a thing as a national character, and once it has been formed it does control all the subsequent evolution of a people. At least, I have no hesitation in saying that if the history of India has taken a certain course in the last fifty years, or for that matter in the last thousand, that is due, above all, to the Hindu character. It has been the most decisive determining influence on the historical process. I feel equally certain that it will remain so and shape the form of everything that is being undertaken for and in the country.
But I hardly notice the interest which the Hindu character deserves, though I see a good deal in reinforced concrete. The contemporary craze for information about material — (infrastructure, physical and digital, I myself might add here to Nirad Babu’s observation) — and external things is not associated in India today with even a balancing interest in the mind and behaviour of the Hindus, though they are a very specialized type of human being, who cannot be managed at all by imputing Western mental traits to them.
At the most, one finds an American, British, or European scholar trying to interpret them in the light of a prefabricated psychology. But Freudian or Freudistic interpretations of the Hindu mind are no better guides to it than any other indoctrinated approach, for example the Marxist … (or modern Liberalism). All these are intellectual games with the Hindus as chessmen, and very interesting they are as games.
But the living Hindu belongs to his own world, which is not less bizarre than the Freudian, nor is it less dogmatic and fanatical than the Marxist (or the Liberalist).
–CONCLUDED–
Sudarshan Madabushi