In my childhood I lived in a village without electricity and transport. We went to school walking up the slope of a hill and a couple of miles along a flat treeless plateau. On the near-slope of the hill we had our cremation ground, identified by a lone peepal tree in its centre. On the southeast edge of the plateau there were remnants of an old fort, abandoned a few hundred years ago by an earlier dynasty that preceded the recent one overthrown by the British in nineteenth century. Our elementary school was where the plateau joined the main road.
Children never ventured along this route except in large groups in broad daylight, due to a lingering fear associated with this route. Just before the monsoon rains, an occasional leopard would descend from the hills and kill a few cows and calves. I distinctly remember to have seen once, the crimson carcass of a cow on our way to school. When the leopard announces its arrival by an initial kill, the village elders would fetch a well-known marksman from the nearby town and get the animal shot in a week’s time if it stayed that long. The gunman returned empty handed if the leopard smelt the danger, and decided to quit. At least in certain seasons we were genuinely terrified by the possible presence of the leopard. Later, when I went to High School in the town, nobody would buy our story and we were, en masse, branded superstitious. Those days newspapers were rare and readers few. People in the town firmly believed that leopards never stirred out of the forest to take away cows and calves. Even the teachers smiled away our leopard as hallucinations of a bunch of superstitious villagers.
There was a temple at the far end of the plateau with an adjoining “lake on the rock” in which water was plenty even in dry seasons. Although the presiding Goddess was in an angry mood (presumably after killing a demon) and desired to be propitiated preferably with chicken and a dash of alcoholic drink, everyone heaved a sigh of relief at the shelter offered by the temple. After all, the leopard could do little if the Goddess decided to protect you. There were also supporting legends, stories, and anecdotes of elders to reinforce our trust in the Goddess. The village, the plateau, the cremation ground, fort, Kali temple and occasional visits of leopards made it an ideal fertile ground to breed a credulous generation of superstitious people. The setting was ideal to instill fear of God in children at an early age. Surprisingly it never happened. On the contrary, most of the children in this village became rationalists, atheists and even communists after they went to high school and grew up further. As no one had demanded any kind of faith in any deity, we could freely discuss religion, god(s) and beliefs and engage in verbal fights even in the temple premises. In the freedom of mind we enjoyed, the leopard and goddess did not matter any further. The country was passing through a period of enlightenment, immediately after freedom, with Nehru at the top and Science education gaining a new impetus. All those who went to college studied science instead of history, language or law preferred by the earlier generation. I think, science education had, in those days had an over-compensating effect on traditional beliefs, and it became fashionable to dub everything beyond our ken as a superstition.
Some old men (not women) in our village often described an animal they named “Kooli”, usually seen on cremation grounds in the night. Most of them were invariably people who used to deal with ghosts and other spirits, and professed courage out of immunity derived from their knowledge and techniques to tackle supernatural forces and beings. Kooli was supposed to represent evil spirits, obviously because it preferred to hang about cremation grounds. The described animal had no skin or hair, only scales all around its body. The moment you disturb it with a stick or stone the creature would fold itself into a ball, roll down the slope and disappear in the bush. A friend told me once that the great grand uncle of a friend of his friend had actually tied one to a tree, but the animal escaped before he could call anyone. There was no way to check the existence or otherwise of Kooli because none of the science educated modern youngsters had the courage to look for Kooli in the cremation ground at midnight. The educated younger generation rejected the very existence of this peculiar animal because they had no method (or courage?) to locate its whereabouts and verify. Of course it took some nerve to wait for the weird creature in a cremation ground at the dead of night. They decided not to believe any of the stories related to this animal. All the rest of us joined this bandwagon of rationalists and strongly believed that there was no such thing called Kooli.
Fifty years later, I was glancing through the exhibits of Natural History Museum in London where I found the embalmed body of a small animal exactly fitting the description of Kooli. (See Photo). The animal’s name is “Three-banded Armadillo” with a zoological name Tolypeutes Tricinctus belonging to Dasypodidae family and found in northeast and central Brazil. Voila!!!! My childhood riddle stands solved right in front of me.
Tolypeutes Tricinctus:Natural History Museum,London.Photo: MPC
I felt great jubilation and shame at the same time. Kooli is after all a poor little creature that did not relish human interference with its life and habitat. Choice of lonely places like cremation grounds and the defensive folding of itself into a ball are perfectly natural and acceptable behavior that did not deserve the insinuation of evil spirit-association. Our science education ought to have enabled us to reject the evil spirit theory, instead of denying the very existence of the poor creature.
Post-colonial science education in India acquired the character of a rebellion against age-old beliefs and traditions. This had, in the early decades of independence brought about a desirable social transformation that affected even the elders in the family who never went to college. Mothers and grand mothers were proud of their English-speaking, college-going children who could tell them a lot of sensible things they were ignorant or unaware of. In this euphoria they were often ready to condone their children’s diminished reverence to traditional godheads and deities. Christian Missionaries who ran a considerable number of colleges were able to influence many Hindu students and wean them away from traditional Hindu gods, as “superstitious” beliefs. A natural consequence was that one had to take it for granted that Monotheistic beliefs were true and polytheistic ones false. Christianity could gain a great deal of respectability among the educated, although conversions took place mainly among the poor and downtrodden, mostly by offers of material benefits such as powder milk and American butter. Hindu religion and traditions were ridiculed as superstitious, while monotheistic traditions were left out of criticism. In this background rationalists and atheists in India even now train their guns usually on Hindu gods, beliefs and traditions while granting a great deal of respectability to superstitious beliefs of other (organized) religions. No one in India questions or ridicules creationism, baptism, circumcision, heaven, hell, Satan or even the nonsense of Purgatory. This behaviour of rationalists is understandable, because it affords them the satisfaction of intellectual courage (though not honesty) without dangers of physical violence.
Science education in India had other characteristics too. It was widely believed that printed material (particularly those from the West) contained irrefutable truths. Cartesian-Newtonian Science that made a late entry to Indian curricula was often mistaken as the final word of truth, even after Nuclear Physics had gone a long way beyond reductionism. One area that suffered most from Cartesian reductionism was Medical Science. Today, you have a specialist doctor for every one of your organs from head to toe, but none for yourself. This degradation has led to three widespread superstitions: (1) Reductionist medicine cures all diseases (2) All other schools of medicine like Ayurveda, Homoeopathy, Acupuncture, etc. are placebos and hence unscientific. (3) All theories and practices not corroborated and justified by the currently accepted tools and methods are spurious and ineffective. As a result, signals and numbers churned out by “electrical squiggles” (this term was used by Dr. Christian Bernard to describe the much revered ECG) soon gained primacy over doctors’ intelligence and intuition. Holistic systems of medicine that listen to the patient’s description of the problem rather than computer outputs were marginalized even by laws relating to medical treatment.
“Scientific Approach”, by science’s own standards demands that any hypothesis should be approached by understanding all variables, parameters and claims through unbiased verification using appropriate tools. Those (scientists, allopathic doctors, pharmaceutical companies, mercenary lawyers and other vested interests) who dub homoeopathy as unscientific never care to read the abundant literature available on the subject. Some of them subject the medicine to chemical tests, draw a blank and declare that it contains nothing and hence useless. It is like looking at Saturn with naked eye and declaring that Saturn has no rings. The only thing one can say is that Science has not cared to delve deep enough into these therapeutics to understand how they work. It is obviously not scientific to deny that it works on the face of so much evidence on its efficacy. Such a religious denial is no better than our denial of Kooli’s existence. One should consider “how homoeopathic medicine works” as a gap in scientific knowledge and try to figure it out. Testing methods used to disprove homoeopathy are often those specified by its detractors. This system of medicine does not try to “name” diseases and establish a one-to-one correspondence between the medicine and disease of a particular “name” (There are notable exceptions). It needs much more information like modalities, generalities, and concomitants of a “condition” of the body that will not be printed out by electronic gadgets. Employing the “scientific” method of double blind placebo tests apparently fails because it is not the right kind of testing tool. It is just like tying to find the room temperature with a weighing machine. Such beliefs certainly fall in the category of superstitions of the third kind listed above.
This leads me to what I generally call “Scientific Superstition” which is a kind of religiosity found among adherents of Cartesian Science. Sometimes their dogmatic stance is similar to that of religious people. Origins of this malady can be traced to our education systems and styles. Absence of rigour in discussing scientific principles and mathematical theorems is one of the common roots of the problem.
Once I asked an undergraduate student during a viva voce examination why the internal combustion engines were cooled. He said that the Second Law of Thermodynamics would be violated unless we cool the engine. Even if you grant a margin for linguistic inability the flaw in his understanding was quite appalling. It appeared that the whole idea of cooling the engine was to “obey” Second Law of Thermodynamics!! Later I found that use of the word “Law” was the real culprit. People often do not realize that there is no similarity between a man-made Law and a Law of Nature. While man-made laws are prescriptions of how we should conduct ourselves, Natural Laws are only descriptions of how nature behaves. (Bertrand Russell had made these points immensely clear in his writings). Unfortunately, use of the word “Law” to indicate these descriptions gives the impression of a law-maker lurking somewhere behind, probably up in the sky. It was possibly intended so, because philosophy, religion and science were inextricably intertwined in the Middle Ages.
Influence of religion on educational systems even today causes a drag on science teaching all over the world. Faith and belief systems demanded by various religions from early years enter the psyche of the individual and stay there even after he/she “switches over” to science. If you treat Laws of thermodynamics like the Ten Commandments it is only fair that you should “abide by” them. Religious people may not realize this fallacy at all. For them there is no difference between the two types of Law, except that natural laws came into force by divine fiat and the other kind by legislative act. For instance if God decides to annul Second Law of Thermodynamics we could do away with cooling systems in engines because all heat can then be converted to work.
It should be possible if you pray hard.
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