‘In my own family that realization – that our knowledge was out of date – came to my grandfather. But it was too late for him to do anything about it. He was born in the 1880s and died when he was fifty-five. But, as I said, he was determined that his son should have the new education.
‘After high school, my father came to Bangalore, to the university. And then he wanted to do research. At that time in India one of the biggest names in research was Meghnad Saha, a Bengali. He was professor of physics at Allahabad. He had made a name for himself a few years earlier with a paper that showed how ionization was related to temperature. This paper of Saha’s was in 1922, and his formula, Saha’s formula, is still the basis for understanding the composition of the stars. Saha, incidentally, was a great nationalist.
‘My father decided he would like to go and work with Saha. And he actually did. For a man who was a first-generation college student it would have been a bit of an adventure for him. I think my father would have been financially supported in Allahabad by his father and father-in-law. My father kept a journal in Allahabad, and one of my projects is to look at that journal.’
The science, the venturesomeness, and then the journal: the longing for new experience, and then the wish to put order into that experience – that was impressive, in a man not long out of a village.
Subramaniam, with his own wish to categorize and define, said, ‘I think it’s a demonstration of the two points I’ve made. The first is that the tradition of science is not new. And the second is that I don’t think that in my father’s mind there was any feeling that he was doing something entirely alien when he was doing science. I think a feeling for that – science and mathematics – was central to many Indian minds.
‘My father came back and taught physics in high schools in Bangalore and in other places in Mysore State. Mysore State was in many ways advanced. In a quiet way. The maharajas, and the ministers they had, were quite often in a peculiar way liberal and forward-looking. One side of them was conservative, but there was another side which looked to the future. Have you heard of Visweswaraiah? He was an engineer who was appointed diwan or chief minister in 1910 or thereabouts. He was responsible for many projects in the state which made it the model state in the country. Mr Gandhi, in the 1930s, when he came to Mysore, said it was Rama rajya.’
It was something many people in Bangalore had mentioned to me. Rama rajya, Rama’s rule or kingdom – it was the highest Hindu praise: Rama the hero of one of the two great Hindu epics, the embodiment of goodness, universally loved, the man who in any situation could be relied upon to do the right thing, the religious thing, the wise thing, a figure at once human and divine: to be ruled by Rama’s law was to know bliss.
Subramaniam said, There was a tradition in the state of benevolent rule. And Visweswaraiah was ahead of his time. He made a five-year plan in the 1920s or 30s. The same man set up the University of Mysore. And Mysore was the first state where electric power was available. The rulers had a lot of local pride.
‘My father settled in Bangalore, and then my grandfather also came here. We grew up in an Indian joint family, a large family. My grandfather was a man who took his religious life seriously. He headed his family, and he did his pujas. I don’t think he was doing anything else at that time. He died in the latter part of the 1930s.
The feeling grew in my father that there might be conflicts between the science he knew and practised, and the way he lived. It did produce conflicts in the house, especially in a house which was very religious, as my grandfather’s house was. My father had the feeling that many things we were doing didn’t make sense. Rituals, for example. Caste barriers.
‘He tried to reconcile the two. He developed a certain outlook of his own – Hindu or brahminical, as he saw it, rooted in a certain respect for ancient Indian scholarship and philosophy. But it tried to be free of all the things he associated with prejudice. There was one thing he did – at that time it was an improper thing to do, and not so minor. All brahmin children go through an initiation ceremony – it’s a serious affair, and usually it’s done when the boy is young, six, seven, eight. My father had a very good friend, not a brahmin, and he insisted that his friend join in this function that was being performed for his own child – me, as a matter of fact. That raised eyebrows. This was in the 1940s. But my father was very clear in his mind about this matter.
‘About rituals, I think my father went through a stage when he rejected them, and then finally he accepted them in a certain modified form. So, in his later years, he used to perform puja, but in a very unobtrusive way. I remember arguing with him about the puja he performed, and he said it was sufficient that it gave him a certain mental peace and privacy for a part of the day. He can be described without paradox as a man who was conservative in one way and liberal in another. In matters of caste, etc., he was liberal. But he was not westernized at all.’
I asked Subramaniam, ‘Do you perform pujas?’
‘I don’t perform pujas. But I still have a feeling for the small shrine in the jungle, with the family deity.’
‘How does a family get a deity like that?’
‘A family deity is something given to you. It might have been adopted at some stage. Some event fixed it. Some teacher perhaps. It may be that a person asks a favour of some temple and is granted the favour, and becomes a follower of a deity of that temple.
‘My father remained a teacher almost all his life. After he retired as a teacher he worked in a mental-health institute, mainly helping with the electronics on an electro-encephalogram, to measure “brain waves”. And, by the way, one of the bits of research they did was on a sadhu. They put electrodes all over his head and tried to find out how these brain waves were behaving when he went into a trance. They did find that he was in fact very calm.
‘My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing books on science in the local language. He saw that that was the way things were going to be changed – that you speak of science in the language of the people, and not in English. Those books were pretty good. Some very good. He wrote on energy long before energy-conservation became a topic. He wrote on astro-physics. He wrote a little book about sound. This talked about the physics of sound, and then it tried to tell the reader how this physics was related to the music he heard, the local music. This book was written in the 1940s. It’s a small book. It used to be sold for two annas.’ One-eighth of a rupee, less than a penny.
‘How did you think of yourself when you were growing up? Poor? All right?’
‘I felt we were middle class.’ Middle class in the Indian way, meaning not poor, but with a suggestion of simplicity and making do, not middle class in the European or American way. ‘Not rich. A strained middle-class house. There was never money to spare. Never. I would say that this was something which was taken as part of life, not something we went around thinking about all the time. There are certain advantages in the big joint families: things are taken care of. It’s like a little state: you have friends, you carry on.
‘The fact that my father had done science influenced me. And my father had literary friends, because he had written books in the local language. Quite often there would be arguments in the house about science, religion, literature. It was a very educated atmosphere, very cultured, very stimulating. The background was simple only in an economical sense. Not at all in a cultural sense. And this is quite important in an old country like India.’
I understood what he meant. It was what I felt – in a lesser or different way – about my own Indian family background in far-off Trinidad. I felt that the physical conditions of our life, often poor conditions, told only half the story: that the remnants of the old civilization we possessed gave the in-between colonial generations a second scheme of reverences and ambitions, and that this equipped us for the outside world better than might have seemed likely. But I also recalled something else: the shoddiness of the Indian books we bought, sometimes out of piety towards the ancestral land. I re
membered the poor paper, the broken type, the oily ink, the sloping lines, the uneven margins, the rusting metal staples. The idea of India was part of our strength, and it received part of our piety; yet there was this other idea of the Indian reality, of poor goods, of poor machines poorly used.
Subramaniam said, ‘If I go back to the time the British were here – and my recollections are vague: I was born in the 40s – we saw then that things made in England or Europe – there was little of U.S. goods – we saw them as good things. We saw Indian things as not so good quality. I think that people of my father’s generation must have had a remarkable mental or intellectual strength to preserve their souls in the middle of all this Indian shoddiness. People knew that things were not very good. But they had some inspiration they drew from a real or imagined greatness. They had some innate feelings of old cultural strength, which preserved them. So you would see people admiring things from Britain, but at the same time we were going to say, “That’s great, but we’re not going to capitulate to that.” ’
‘Didn’t it give you some doubts about the possibility of an Indian industrial revolution, and the capacity of Indians to manufacture things that would feel finished and real?’
‘I never had any doubt about that. Never. We saw that as a matter not of whether, but when. We complained that it was too slow.’
‘You don’t think the shoddiness had a psychological effect on people?’
‘I felt a little ashamed. There was certainly a feeling that a lot of businessmen were making money without making quality goods, and that gave a feeling of ill-gotten wealth. One looked forward to a pretty distant future when things wouldn’t be so. We saw that the answer was to have a strong science in the country. My own feeling was compounded of shame, ignorance and hope. I think these attitudes would not have been widely shared. On the hope there would have been widely different views.
‘Quite a few Indians at that time felt that the British Raj would last forever – not a large number, but quite a few. One of my most vivid recollections was of an argument between my father and my mother’s father. He was a doctor.’
‘A doctor!’
‘As I told you, the background was simple only in an economic sense. The argument – during the war – was about what the future might be. My grandfather, the doctor, thought that Europe, the West, was very powerful, and that it was almost impossible for India to get rid of the British. And even if the British lost the war, the Germans would be there. So he saw the future as still dominated by the West for a considerable time. And he also thought that Indians were incapable of taking care of the country – running it, ruling it.’
That sent me back to another set of early feelings about my ancestral culture. In Trinidad, in the late 30s and early 40s, I used to see poor Indian people sleeping in the squares of Port of Spain. These people were peasant emigrants from India; they had served out their indentures 20 years or so before, had not been given their passages back to India, and had then become destitute, abandoned by everybody. In the colonial city they were further isolated by their language; and they were to live on the streets until they died out. The idea came to me, when I was quite young, seeing those destitutes, that we were people with no one to appeal to. We had been transported out of the abjectness of India, and were without representation. The idea of the external enemy wasn’t enough to explain what had happened to us. I found myself at an early age looking inwards, and wondering whether the culture – the difficult but personal religion, the taboos, the social ideas – which in one way supported and enriched some of us, and gave us solidity, wasn’t perhaps the very thing that had exposed us to defeat.
Subramaniam said, ‘I felt that, but in a different way from you. The foreigner was here. The country had become slaves and had been plundered. But that wasn’t just because of the culture. It was because over the centuries we had become weak and stagnant.’
He began to talk of the pattern of Indian history.
‘I go back to Alberuni’s comments about the Hindus.’ Alberuni, the Arab historian of about 1000 AD at the court of Ghazni, in what is today Afghanistan. Subramaniam had mentioned Alberuni at the beginning of our talk. Alberuni’s book was one of the sources for what was known about ancient Hindu science and learning; but Alberuni had also written some famous words about Hindu arrogance in that learning.
‘We became complacent. A system had been evolved here whereby the preservation of the country’s culture and its social organization was independent of the military masters who ruled the country. The country was run on principles that assumed that kings would change, that wars would be fought, but that society would go on, pretty much undisturbed by those events.
‘Up to a point that is why Hindus are a-historical. If you look at what Indian culture remembers – we preserve our books on mathematics, astronomy, grammar. We preserve Bhaskara and Charaka.’ Seventh-century scientists. ‘Among the things which are preserved are not the names of kings or their battles – that is not part of our tradition. We know Bhaskara and Shankaracharya.’ Shankaracharya, a ninth-century philosopher who travelled all over India, revitalized Hindu philosophy, set up religious foundations (which still exist) in certain places, and is thought to have died at the age of thirty-two. ‘But if you ask, “Who ruled this part of the country in 1700?” people wouldn’t know, and basically they wouldn’t care.
‘That, however, has been the weakness of the country, and it has brought on us military defeat. But it changed with the British. When the British came here, it slowly became clear to Indians that these political and military defeats were things they couldn’t ignore. What in other places would have been a natural reaction, a natural assumption, in India had to be an intellectual conclusion. It took a long time. The realization came very late, in the 19th century.
‘It was a widely shared feeling. That is why people went to English schools. I went to an English-medium school. But it was a very Indian school. It was run by people who were orthodox Hindus, but convinced that we had to learn English, science, technology. It was very stimulating. I remember lots of disagreement among my teachers about the future. Even Gandhi was a subject of controversy. Looking back on it, I am astonished that there were some people there, teachers, maybe half a dozen – and their wages would have been very low – who were actually driven by the desire to get people to learn. You got a feeling of mission. I remember one of my teachers who, for no reason I can imagine now, took a great deal of interest in me, gave me a book on the lives of great scientists, and did so out of his own pocket.’
‘Was he a brahmin?’
‘He was a brahmin. It was a brahmin-inspired school.’
I thought of the brahmin contribution to the independence movement, and the regenerative social ideas that had come with that movement. I thought of the brahmin contribution afterwards to science.
I said, ‘So the brahmins have in a way paid their debt back?’
‘I’m not sure they’ve paid it back yet. They’re responsible still for many things on our social landscape.’ Subramaniam broke off here, to continue on a related theme. ‘A great social revolution took place in this state after independence, and it was as a consequence of independence. The social revolution was that the identity of the politically powerful classes changed in a few years. It was a bloodless revolution, but it was a revolution, though people outside India don’t know about it. Before independence, the administration in the state was in the hands of brahmins. A few years after independence, power changed hands – and I mean the way power changed hands in other parts of the world. The people who now sit in the offices are of a different social class.
The prime minister’s science adviser was saying the other day that the trouble with Indian science is that it is too much a brahmin science, and that we needed a more lower-caste kind of science. But the fact that so many brahmins are in science is only a development of history.’
‘Do you feel threatened?’
‘No doubt about it.
Entrance to universities is not based strictly on merit. There are quotas for different classes. Many brahmins feel now that even education has become difficult. There are the quotas, and private colleges are expensive. It may partly be responsible for the large number of Indian professionals abroad.’
My thoughts, as I had driven down from Goa, through the untidy but energetic towns, full of the signs of growth, and then through the well-tilled fields at harvest time, had been of the Indian and, more specifically, Hindu awakening. If Subramaniam was right, there was a hidden irony in that awakening: that the group or caste who had contributed so much to that awakening should now find itself under threat.
Education and ambition by themselves would have taken people nowhere without an expanding economy. Perhaps, even, the expanding economy explained the shift in Indian education. For Pravas, an engineer, the expansion had started some time before independence, when the old British emphasis on law and order (especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857) had been modified by the idea of development.
‘Many people were sucked into that process. There was an explosive growth in India around 1930. It built momentum around 1947, had a big growth thereafter, and is now slowing down. In 1962, when I was thinking of universities and a career, I had a choice of professions and institutions. People today have to struggle hard. But these things have a positive side.
The average aspiration of the Indian is to grow under a shadow – and this is all right as long as someone else throws the shadow. In concrete terms, this means you look for employment, you try to get into structures created by other people. That’s how we got governed in the first place. The attitude is: “As long as the local environment is the same, I don’t care who is running things at the top.” I read something in a paper some time ago. It was to the effect that, before the British came to India, the Indians were like bees in a garden. And that’s fine, as long as someone else looked after the garden. And then of course the Britishers became both the owners of the garden and the gardeners, the malis – with those other guys, the bees, going happily from flower to flower.’