Across the world, mythological tales are filled with flights of imagination. As children, when we hear them, they enchant us and remain alive in our memories. But in the end, they are only stories.
In recent decades, however, a new trend has emerged. The right-wing rulers of our country have begun presenting mythological stories as if they were factual. This began on public platforms when Prime Minister Narendra Modi reminded doctors and the nation that ancient India must have had plastic surgeons, otherwise how could the head of an elephant have been placed on Lord Ganesha’s body?
I have no wish to hurt anyone’s sentiments, but when I tried to understand this from a medical perspective, I concluded that even today such a feat is impossible. I also discovered that Egyptian mythology too mentions deities with animal heads. What is interesting about the Egyptian gods is that the animal head corresponds with their nature. For example, Sekhmet, the goddess of war, had the head of a lioness, symbolizing how fearsome and cruel she was. There are many such fascinating deities.
Equally curious is that during the regime of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, there was a serious claim that jinns could be an inexhaustible source of energy. Discussions on this were even taken up at sessions of the Science Congress. Ideas such as a telecommunication network based on jinns and using their power to develop missiles that could evade radar were presented. A new research field—“jinn chemistry”—was even said to have been born during Zia’s tenure, with the suggestion that it had scope for further development. In the 1970s, a director of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission even proposed replacing petrol, diesel, and nuclear fuel with energy from jinns. One hopes that Pakistan never acted on such mythology-based fantasies!
These memories come to mind because recently two senior BJP leaders made statements about space travel. On National Space Day, while addressing schoolchildren, former Union Minister and MP Anurag Thakur asked them who was the first human to go into space. In unison, the children replied, Neil Armstrong. Thakur said, no, that is not the right answer. The correct answer, he insisted, is Lord Hanuman. Thakur urged teachers to look “beyond the textbooks written by the British.” He asked them to focus instead on “the Vedas, our books, and our knowledge... According to the well-known story, Lord Hanuman flew across the skies and brought back the mountain that held the life-restoring herb.”
In the same spirit, Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan claimed that long before the Wright brothers invented the airplane, there already existed the Pushpak Vimana. Remarkable! Even someone with the most basic knowledge of science knows what is needed to create a flying machine. The dream of flying in the air has always inspired humanity, and scientists worked tirelessly in laboratories and open fields to make it a reality.
It is hard to say whether these gentlemen who present mythological tales as real history actually believe what they say or whether they are doing it to undermine the scientific temper.
Chouhan went further, asserting that India during the Mahabharata era was highly advanced in technology. According to him, “The drones and missiles we have today were already available thousands of years ago. We read all this in the Mahabharata.”
This seems like a competition to make the grandest claim about the achievements of the past. Since Modi began presenting mythology as science, various BJP leaders have followed suit with assertions that modern technological feats existed in ancient India. For example, Vijay Rupani once said, “Narad was like Google, a source of information.”
According to a report in The Tribune, former Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb declared on 17 April 2018 that “India has been using the internet for ages. In the Mahabharata, Sanjay gave Dhritarashtra a live account of the battlefield. This was possible only because of the internet. Satellites also existed in that era.”
Former Minister of Science and Technology Dr. Harsh Vardhan, himself a doctor, claimed, “Every Hindu ritual is infused with science, and every modern achievement is linked with ancient scientific accomplishments” (March 16, 2018). These are only a few pearls of wisdom distributed by BJP leaders. All of this runs counter to the scientific temper upon which India’s modern scientific institutions were built. One shudders to think what might have happened if, immediately after independence, people with such a mindset had been in power and had framed policies based on such notions.
In the early decades after independence, India established many scientific institutions, which trained scientists and launched research.
Why then do ruling BJP leaders present mythological fantasies as scientific facts? At present, knowledge and thinking based on faith dominate public life in the country. There is an atmosphere of reverence for godmen and for glorifying the past. Knowledge, however, develops gradually and transcends national boundaries. Ancient India certainly made significant contributions to science. Aryabhata, Sushruta, and many others enriched the treasure house of knowledge. This process advanced alongside social development.
Faith and rational thought have clashed many times in human history. The status quoist sections of society cling to faith-based understandings, while those who advocate change, equality, and justice uphold rational knowledge and scientific temper. The thinking of the BJP and the wider Sangh Parivar is rooted in social values based on inequality. The Indian Constitution, by contrast, gives us the chance to move towards equality and social change. It also places great importance on scientific temper. The Sangh Parivar, including the BJP, looks backwards and continues to oppose both scientific temper and the Indian Constitution in multiple ways.
Political ideologies come as package deals. The Indian Constitution, which values scientific temper, also promotes social transformation. Hindu nationalist ideology, on the other hand, wants to reverse the direction of thought that emerged during the freedom struggle and was enshrined in the Constitution. The soldiers of faith, who are opponents of scientific temper, are simultaneously undermining rational thinking and weakening the ideas of freedom, equality, and fraternity, thereby dragging the country backwards.
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The author formerly taught at IIT Mumbai and is President of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism
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