Newton And The Problem Of ‘Cargo Cult’ Hindutva

Attacking Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin has become almost a trend in Hindutva circles. Before getting into the details of this disturbing phenomenon, we need to distinguish between an earlier type of critique of Newton’s worldview and the recent attacks on him – the person and his science.

Dattopant Thengadi (1920-2004) and H V Sheshadri (1926-2005) are considered the most profound Hindutva ideologues in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) circles. They criticised Newton’s worldview. According to them, it is synonymous to a mechanical worldview, and is the root cause of all the problems an individual, society and nature face today. They placed Hindutva as the organic alternative to this worldview.

Thengadi, the founder of India’s largest central trade union organisation – the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh – through his lectures had made the critique of Newton’s worldview, integral to his critique of Marxism, which he considered ‘an intellectual parasite on Newtonian science ...’ (The Perspective, 1971). He further considered it as a larger problem in the Western society:

Based on the views of Gandhian-Buddhist economist E F Schumacher, Sheshadri made the following critique:

The importance of the above Hindutva critique of Newton’s worldview is that they contribute to the conceptual evolution of Hindutva by interacting with the deeper value system.

It can be noted here that Newton’s science was not questioned. The critique is on the worldview based on Newtonian physics, mainly in the context of society and the individual. In this, both Thengadi and Sheshadri have not hesitated to align themselves with another Western tradition though not dominant, which can be said to start from the critique of Newton by William Blake to the works on deep ecology and systems of view of life by physicist-author Fritijof Capra.

But that is not the case today. What we have here is ‘cargo cult’ Hindutva, which dominates through memes. It presents a highly-contrived worldview. Here, it is often claimed that Hindus discovered gravity, and Newton 'stole' from Hindus the idea of gravitational force. Such claims come from cultural illiteracy and an inferiority complex, and the ignorance of how global science evolves through contributions from various cultures. More importantly, such claims also deprive the Hindutva supporters of the important work of bringing to the fore the contributions India really made to the evolution of scientific discourse.

Such claims have always been there. However, when such claims were made, they were viewed with scepticism and critiqued. For example, even during the time of Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), it was claimed that Vedic seers knew of the seven colours of the prism and that the horses of the sun were symbolic of that knowledge. But, Tilak did not accept it. He wrote:

Despite Tilak pointing out the ineffectiveness of drawing such parallels, this continues to be a part of the lore of 'Vedic science’. But the real twist in the tale comes from the fact that Newton's idea of seven colours itself emerges from a parallel he wanted to construct with the seven notes of the music scale.

Peter Pesic, a physicist, a pianist and author of Music and the Making of Modern Science (MIT, 2014) says that there is 'no justification in experiment exactly’ and that it represented 'something' that Newton was 'imposing upon the color spectrum by analogy with music'. So much for Vedic rishis introducing the symbolism of Newton’s discovery in the seven horses of the sun!

In recent times, the problem escalated, when a person as important as Minister of State for Human Resources and Development, Satyapal Singh, is reported to have claimed that "there were mantras which codified 'laws for motion' much before it was discovered by Newton”. Even if we give enough discount to the distortions that the mainstream media is capable of making in any Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister’s statement, here unfortunately it is true that the minister could have made such a statement. A few months ago, in November 2017, another BJP leader, a new entrant to the party and now an MP in Rajya Sabha, Dr Subramaniyan Swamy tweeted the following:

The tweet is linked to an article that has a meme, which depicts Kanada – the seer associated with Vaisheshika Darshanam as ‘Vedic nuclear scientist’ and all three laws of motion by Newton are ascribed to the seer – which of course can only be obtained by Zakir Naik-like distortions.

This Kanada-Newton linkage provides an insight into the quasi cultural illiteracy ailment of cargo cult Hindutva. The connection comes from the fact that among the different qualities or gunas of Vaisheshika Darshana is 'gurutva'. Earlier, colonial indologists translated gurutva as gravity, and Vaisheshika sutras associate this quality with falling of the bodies. So, it is quite tempting to presume that Kanada indeed first discovered gravity. While Kanada's Vaisheshika system had in it some of the fundamental and crucial insights into the science of motion, it was still far from formulating the laws of motion and gravitation. Here is an insightful analysis by a physicist:

In this view, though the Vaisheshikas had the means to arrive at the laws of Newton much earlier, they could not do so because they did not have the necessary empirical data. Acharya Seal, in his book The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus, lamented that though good foundation was "laid for the explanation of accelerated motion of falling body, but Galileo’s discovery was not anticipated, as Galileo’s observations and measurement of motion were wanting”. So, what about the laws of motion and gravity?

Dr Chatterjee explains:

In the Vaisheshika system, the objects were qualitatively viewed and motion was thus caused by a quality in the substance. And it did not bother itself with time. It was the Nyaya school, which brought in the idea of series of samskara (impressed motion). According to Dr Chatterjee, with this, the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school also brought in the concept of ‘vega’:

Now, let us come to the Western tradition.

Galileo discovered that the speed at which a body falls is independent of the weight or size of the body. Galileo proved, with experiments, that the objects having different weights (varied gurutva) fall at the same time, if the air resistance is removed. The video below shows a modern adaptation of Galileo’s experiment.

However, Galileo was so much wedded to the ideas of Plato that he rejected the idea of Johannes Kepler of elliptical orbits for planets. For Galileo, the planetary orbits had to be circular.

Newton's first two laws have the contributions of Galileo. Newton himself acknowledged that he was standing on the shoulders of two giants – Galileo and Kepler.

So, if someone accuses Newton of 'stealing' the concept of gravity from a Hindu gurukul, then he should also blame Galileo of the same. But then even for cargo cult Hindutva brigade, as it is for other rational Hindutva supporters, Galileo is clearly a symbol of resistance to the church. And to accuse him would be to undermine their own case. So, the accusation that Newton 'stole' the laws of motion and gravity from India simply falls flat. Far from a person, who steals and publishes, Newton actually had lost all his interest in mechanics until 1684. It was at the insistence of astronomer Edmond Halley that he published his magnum opus Principia Mathematica. That is not exactly the behaviour of a person, who 'steals' and refuses to pay credit.

However, there is indeed a Hindu connection to Newton story. Mathematician C K Raju makes a passionate and plausible case for the transmission of what is called the 'Taylor-series' expansion, which is at the heart of the mathematical tool used by Newton came from India, and Jesuits were instrumental in bringing this knowledge.

However. this knowledge transmission continues to be denied by mainstream historians of science. For example, mathematics historian Kim Plofker of Princeton University, while accepting that the infinite series of Madhava "predate by centuries Newton’s and Leibniz’s versions of them" and that they "did not appear in Latin mathematics until late in the seventeenth century”, wants it to be "economically explained as cases of parallel evolution than as evidence of direct transmission”. He even suggests a change of name: “Madhava-Leibniz series for π/4 and the Madhava-Newton power series for the Sine and Cosine”. (Mathematics in India, 2009). In this connection, it should be noted that as early as 1858, one Pandit Bapudeva Sastri had published a paper in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, claiming Indian origin for calculus.

Another economist from Kerala, George Gheverghese Joseph, had also written a book on the same subject titled A Passage to Infinity (Sage, 2009) when the author was with University of Manchester. There was a bitter controversy with C K Raju alleging that Joseph had used most of Raju’s work. In 2010, the university declared that 'Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years'. It also acknowledged that "the significant body of work conducted by Professor C K Raju in this area”.

So, what Hindutva supporters needs to do is to create more research into the history and philosophy of science and integrate it with the curriculum in an inspiring way. They have their job cut out for themselves.

Take for example, the Leibniz-Newton series. If the present government changes, in the forthcoming textbooks, the name of the series as Madhava-Leibniz and Madhava-Newton series, that would be a great first step in the right direction. The progressives would call it saffronisation and make a fool of themselves. Instead, what we see here is the Hindutva supporters making a fool of themselves with unsubstantiated meme-based childish claims. By such claims, supporters of the Hindu cause even hinder the work of scholars labouring hard to bring out the real contributions India has actually made to the evolution of science.

What is that greatness about Indian scientific tradition that has to be communicated to the students?

Almost a thousand years before Galileo and Kepler, Aryabhatta had declared the paths of the planets and the moon should be elliptical; he also declared that the diurnal changes happen because of earth’s rotation – this was, however, not the dominant view then. The dominant view as reflected in Surya Siddhanta was both geocentric and with circular orbits of planets. Thus in comparison, Aryabhatta, was a rebel for more complete than Galileo. But he was not persecuted. India never produced an index of forbidden books and placed Aryabhatiyam in it. Instead, Aryabhatta was, and to this day, is hailed as an acharya. Of course, Aryabhatta never explicitly stated the heliocentric theory. A nationalist like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee did not try to hide the fact, but lamented that though Aryabhatta “distinctly affirmed that the starry firmament was fixed and it was the earth which continuously revolving produced the rising and the setting of the constellations and the planets”, though it should have led to heliocentric theory it “was never positively put forward”. Still, even if Aryabhatta had explicitly arrived at a heliocentric theory, it would not have created a problem in India. Physicist and historian of science Subhash Kak explains:

This aspect of the non-confrontational, open and flexible nature of puranic cosmology with respect to empirical astronomy fosters and facilitates a healthy scientific outlook in the society. And this needs to be communicated to the student.

And we need to communicate to the student the scientific spirit of Nilakantha Somayaji, who was an astronomer and mathematician of Kerala school. He died 20 years before the birth of Galileo. Nilakantha advocated what Plofker calls "actual, gradual, process of creating a scientific tradition" over "a naive view of scriptural authority”. In his work Jyotirmeemamsa, Nilakantha says:

Such an approach giving primacy to knowledge gained through observation over established authority resulted in the creation of some very impressive models:

We need to show how mathematics in India had no problem like the inhibition in accepting the irrational numbers that the West had, because of its adherence to the concept of Platonic perfection as understood in a limited anthropomorphic way or later because of the West’s over-dependence on abacus-based mathematics. In the words of C K Raju:

Let us also take another crucial domain. Werner Heisenberg had pointed out how some of the earliest deep questions of philosophy reappear in modern physics. And an understanding of the conceptualisation and framing of the fundamental questions about nature by the profound thinkers of our past can help us frame our questions and exploratory tools in the modern context. Let us take the case of the atomic concept of Kanada himself.

Now, for a student, who sees the nature of atom itself undergo a difference from Democritus to Dalton to Bohr model to the modern concept of atom with quantum mechanics, the relevance of Vaisheshika concept of atoms may become relevant. Physicist George Sudarshan points this out:

With such enormous and unenviable task on their hands, the Hindutva leaders indulging in such meme-based frivolous activities is really a betrayal of the historical responsibility that society, dharma and time have entrusted upon them.

When the temptation of meme-based momentary glory lures Hindutva supporters, they should consider the standard set by Tilak, who lived at a time when the nation was ruled by the British. The claim that Newton’s discovery was already present in the Vedas would have surely helped him to infuse in the then educated youths a sense of pride. Yet he chose to stand by the truth rather than by false pride. Hindutva supporters of today need to emulate the dharmic standard set by the Lokmanya.

Note: Since the writing of the article Dr C K Raju had brought to our notice the what he considers the elaborate act of plagiarism done on his work by economist G G Joseph. This note is to give full credit to Dr C K Raju of finding the connection and the plausible transmission route of mathematics from India to Europe through the Jesuits.