Science and religion in India: beyond disenchantment

In his 1917 lecture on Science as a Vocation at the University of Munich, sociologist Max Weber observed that “the fate of our age” is that “the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life.” And why is that the particular fate of our age, asked Weber, just before the end of the mass killing of WWOne? His answer was that it is due to his/our age’s “characteristic rationalization and intellectualization,” and “above all [to the] disenchantment of the world.” Since its publication in 1918, Weber’s interpretation has been applied strongly to explain the presumed detachment of scientific communities and individual scientists from spiritual and/or religious life, if not hostility to religion. Even occasional anti-theist movements among scientists have been explained by using Weber’s reasoning. In my case, as a young sociologist and anthropologist among scientists in the 1960s, I inhaled the Weberian premise, expecting to see few signs of the “spirited” or “enchanted” world among people in the labs which I was going to study in Chicago and India. By my mid-20s, I was accustomed to expect a disenchanted world. In 2011–2012, Renny Thomas walked into a nuclear spectroscopy lab in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in order to see whether he would be accepted sufficiently to observe the life of the lab and gradually engage the scientists in focused interviews. His timing was perfect. Bangalore was reaching its zenith for a world-wide reputation in high-tech research and development, and with its sublime climate and cosmopolitan culture, it was the place that scientists wanted to live in. He did his fieldwork inside a prestigious 110-year-old research-oriented Institute there. At that time, comparable cities in Latin America would have been Bariloche, Guadalajara, Sao Paulo, not to deny the status of megacities like Mexico City and Buenos Aires. But Bangalore was not (by Indian standards) a megacity. The ultimate leader of this lab had a nickname before Thomas arrived, and he was known in the Group as “Boss.” Fortunately, Boss was intrigued by Thomas’s focus on the religiosity of the scientists in his group and enabled him to become incorporated as a member. Thomas became “a lab member” and thus participated in the required Saturday morning group meetings which were about both ideas and plans for further work. He was allowed to reside and eat in an adjacent hostel for doctoral students. This group, doing work in Ultrafast Raman Loss Spectroscopy, was one of the largest in the Institute. Suspicious of Thomas at first, most of the 35 members of this group (post-docs, doctoral students, technicians, etc.) eventually accepted him and, as in all successful cases of ethnography, treated him as part of the furniture, part of the background. They even welcomed his return in 2016 for some follow-up interviews. Thomas found a high percentage of South Indian Brahmins and South Indian Christians in this well-known lab. There is/was high representation of both of these communities in professional scientific communities (doctors, lawyers, university professors, etc.) in Bengaluru and across India. There were also others in the lab who had not originated from these two groups (e.g. Muslims). But his major focus group were members of research communities