On Ancestors and Epigones by Shiv Viswanathan

7/30/2019 On Ancestors and Epigones by Shiv Viswanathan

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On ancestors and epigones

S H I V V I S V A N A T H A N

THE importance of environment as a policy issue can be traced back to the colonial

era. One can cite the various protest movements against colonial forestry in the

Garhwal region or the tribal revolts chronicled by the historians of the subaltern

school.1 The classic example would probably be the problem of flood control. As

early as 1900, the British engineer, Francis Spring, suggested that the appointment of

a river commission for the organized study of the great alluvial rivers would be... anact worthy of the state.2

The problems of flood control inspired the astrophysicist, Meghnad Saha, to speculate

on the problems of river valley planning in India. He established the journal Science

and Culture to popularise the need for statist planning to confront such environmental

issues.3 The work of the science and culture pressure group contributed to the

establishment of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) which was modelled on the

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). However, environmentalism as statist ideology is

a more recent phenomenon.

It was a result of the necessity of responding to the Naxalite and Chipko movements,

out of a desire to suppress one and co-opt the other. Environmentalism as a reason of

state is concurrent with the Emergency era. A concern for the environment provided a

liberal dressing for the oppressiveness of the regime. It helped portray its humanistic

concern for the victims of development. Such an ensemble of tactics must be

differentiated from the holism of an ecological worldview. The grammar of the latter

is radically different. It reflects the affinity of a society for nature, an intrinsic sense of

the sacred regarding plants and animals, and an attitude to technology impelled by a

sense of communitas.

As examples, one could think of various tribal worldviews or the culture of the

Bishnois. GandhisHind Swaraj would represent another embodiment of such a

worldview. For an environmentalist, on the other hand, a concern with nature or for

other cultures is an afterthought of his commitment to the project called development.

It reflects the essential hubris of the state-science nexus and the belief that a little
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or even minorities, are cleared under town planning or family planning welfare

programmes.

4. It fails to challenge the fact that the Indian state is an anti-ecological phenomenon

displacing cultures and communities through dams, or destroying people through

repressive forest bills introduced as an expression of its environmentalist concern.Environmentalism is a technocracys attempt to depoliticise the implications of

ecologically inspired groups such as the Chipko, Appiko or even the Kerala Sastra

Sahitya Parishad (KSSP).

5. It is illiterate about the possibilities of science itself being a mode of violence as

expressed for instance in the idea of vivisection (the infliction of pain justified in the

pursuit of scientific knowledge or Triage (the withholding of relief to certain

communities justified on rational grounds).4 It fails to see the violence of the Bhopal

disaster, nuclear energy or the green revolution as banally intrinsic to the dominant

paradigms of science and technology.5

6. It abandons a civilizational view of nature and technology for the glorification of

the nation-state and legitimizes managerial models as the styles of technological and

political coping, sanctifying the expert technocrat as a special kind of man.

One could challenge such an ideology through a political critique of the state or

through an evaluation of the technocratic conception of knowledge. But what I would

like to do is to confront it on its own grounds as an imagination. I would like to

suggest that it is a second-rate imagination and its mediocrity can be underlined by

confronting it with its own genealogy within the national movement. Ideas, like

families, need genealogies particularly to point out that they may have fallen into the

wrong hands. The epigons must confront the ancestors particularly when the latter are

more relevant.

I shall confront the current models of environmentalism with some of the collective

wisdom of the debates on science and technology that were prevalent before the

current model of statist development drove them underground or caricatured them

through bowdlerization. I want to concentrate in particular on the critique of the

Swadeshi movement of 1905. Swadeshism itself was the original embodiment of the

garbled mix of nationalism and technocracy that we now call the import substitution

model of industrialization.


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The year 1905 was a landmark in the history of India. The partition of Bengal

triggered the Swadeshi movement which demanded a greater degree of autonomy and

initiated moves to indigenise industry. While its concerns were basically politico-

economic, it was accompanied by an efflorescence of cultural debates. The movement

produced in its aftermath a spate of self-criticism revolving around the civilizational

question of science and state, focusing particularly on the question of university

education and industrial development.6

Two aspects of the debate make it particularly relevant. It saw western science and

civilization not merely as a fact out there, coercive and colonial, but as an inherent

possibility within its own self. Secondly, it held that any solution should be relevant

not only for the Indian village or neighbourhood but also to the whole world as a

possibility. The neighbourhood had to reflect the concerns of the wider cosmos. The

basic groups involved were the Gandhians, the Theosophists, the Swadeshi advocates,

the Traditionalists, the Neovitalists and the Intermediate technologists. I shall restrict

myself to a discussion of the last three groups.7

The solutions that all these groups offered were fascinating and provocative. They

held that India could not reduce its identity to a scientific civilization. They saw

science as problematic and sought to embed it within an ecology of other knowledges.

Ecology, of course, is a modernist term. The equivalent exercise would contain theidea of a critical tradition or the use of tradition as a critique of modernity. The critical

encounter between modern science and the civilizational traditions in India has not

been fully played out. But even the first few acts offer a fascinating spectrum of

possibilities.

The attempt was not to deny science, but to confront it with life giving myths orinject it with what the philosopher, Arne Naess, calls postulates of impotency. Theviolence and hegemony of science, they suggested, could only be controlled by

working towards a pluralist ecology of knowledges. They sought to confront science

with the wisdom of the other that it had subdued as pre-scientific, non-or pseudo-

scientific. When modern science confronted the primitive, it reduced him to a lower

order of mentality. When traditionalists tried to introduce into science the order of the


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symbol, pleading for an iconography of technology, this was dismissed as a

millenarian vestige. I shall now outline some of the solutions offered, beginning with

the work of the traditionalists as represented by the writings of Ananda

Coomaraswamy.

The traditionalists challenged the swadeshi conceptions of science and technology to

prevent the repetition of a tragedy. They realized that the West had lost the great

traditions of medieval technology. But, in India, tradition was still alive and craft

technologies were still living orders of doing and being. These technologies were gene

pools of an alternative imagination which had to be sustained and eventually made

available to the West. The problem lay in the fact that the nationalism of the Swadeshi

movement was a mechanical one, seeking merely to substitute in industry, Indian

personnel and ownership for the western colonial order.

Ananda Coomaraswamy asked: What has Swadeshi done for Indian art? Almost

nothing. Efforts are made to establish all sorts of factories for making soap, matches,

cotton, nibs, biscuits and what not, while men who can still weave, still build, still

work in gold and silver, copper and wood and stone, are starving because their work is

out of fashion.8

The traditionalist critique of western bourgeois science and technology centred around

the museum. The museum represented an attitude to nature and culture which had to

be challenged. To the West, the museum as a collective representation, represented its

humanistic concern for other cultures. Yet, to Coomaraswamy, the immiseration of

cultures through science was represented in the paradox called the museum. As an

institution, the museum embodied a classification of dead cultures, collected and

classified by the very scientific-industrial mind that had forced them into

obsolescence. We preserve folksongs at the same time our way of life destroys the

singer.9

The museum and the reservationboth as part and zoowere complements of the

violence of science in the laboratory. The first sought to preserve the artifacts of dead

cultures, the other protected and embalmed cultures and species which were dying.


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What troubled Hume was the fact that such knowledge was empirical, concrete,

embedded in a local matrix of nature and tradition. Further, such knowledge was not

purely secular but coloured by religious tradition. Hume listed a number of

agricultural proverbs which governed the cycle of ploughing, sowing and reaping.

Yet, unlike the modern agricultural scientist, Hume realized the importance of

beginning with an analysis of such proverbs because it is impossible to introduce any

improved system of agriculture without realizing the extent to which the present

practice of such an art is governed by superstition.19

What puzzled Hume throughout was the fact that science was thought to be abstract

and agricultural policy general; but here was a system of local sciences, embodied in

proverbs, with its own vocabulary which incorporated empirical truths. Hume

emphasized the importance of adapting science to local ecologies, especially in

modifying machine technology to meet the needs of local agricultural systems.

Unlike traditionalism, the idea of intermediate technology consisted of an eclectic set

of experiments. What was characteristic was the attempt to combine science asuniversal knowledge with local knowledges since these, even if para-scientific, had

produced rational viable systems in symbiosis with other aspects of the culture. One

must emphasize however that ethno-science and intermediate technology were

relative rather than pluralistic orders. They only sought to humanize the movement

from the traditional agricultural view to the scientific-industrial perspective. But the

logic of their work led them to a realization that tribal or traditional agronomy as a

system might embody a more ecological worldview than scientific agriculture.

The intermediate technologists saw swadeshism as a failure of the technological

imagination. They felt that intermediate technology could provide that missinggrammar, a blend of both technological competence and meaning. The role of the

intermediate technologist lay in his ability to improve existing methods of technology

without disrupting the culture or the ecology of the system and also in helping to

facilitate a gradual movement towards industrialization. As evidence of the first, one

can cite Nicholsons work on agriculture and of the second, his efforts towards

improving fisheries in India.


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Nicholson, in his study of agriculture, showed that economics had to be ecological,

that any system of intermediate technology must use what is generally under-utilized

or ignored as waste. For technologists like Nicholson, the garden was the model,

mediating between agriculture and industry. In hisNote on Agriculture in Japan he

remarked, Allland is treated like gardens, agriculture in Japan is horticulture.20

It was Japanese intensiveness in the utilization of land and waste that impressed the

British technologist. With characteristic ingenuity, villagers contrive to attract mules,

(the plan does not succeed with horses) to particular spots on the roads by odorising

such spots with donkey droppings and urine; no passing donkey or mule fails to

respond to the suggestion.21 In fact, so intensive was the use that even city

corporations obtained income by leasing out the collection of dejecta to farmers and

scavengers.22 It was precisely such economy that Nicholson advocated for Madras

which was poisoning itself with natural wastes festering on village sites.

Nicholson faulted both colonialism and swadeshism for ignoring such everyday

technologies. Nicholson articulated his vision of intermediate technology in a

remarkable passage on fishing. One should notice in particular his attempt to locate

various forms of technology into niches. There is a vague popular idea that

development means steam trawlers; that there is an illimitable sea harvest outside

needing only to be gathered in by a modern plant and by starting steam trawlers. Myown idea of Madras needs and methods is, on the contrary, that we do not need or

want steam, save for particular cases; that to jump from the catamaran to the steamer

is impossible and unwise if possible, and that our true method is to proceed by the

ordinary and historical process of slow development; revolutionary methods, here as

elsewhere are a mistake. We want to develop,gradatim et parti passu, the fisherfolk,

the fishing industry and the fishing trade by methods which will not necessarily

reduce fishing folk to hired labour under capitalists, European or otherwise.23

Within intermediate technology, thus, science becomes a tool to prevent the

proletarianization of labour. Nicholson claimed that it was the sailing boat and the

curing yard rather than the steam trawler and the refrigerating car which should be the

focus of attention. He realized, however, that the days of steam trawling would come,


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the medical systems, where physicians of many faiths were comparing not only their

drugs but their doctrines. This medieval university then became the Renaissance

university by imbibing the new learning from the fugitive Greeks, the new astronomy

from the persecuted heretics and the results of the new art of printing from wandering

scholars and craftsmen.25 The Renaissance university eventually grew into the

contemporary German system. For Geddes thus, no university was complete withoutits dissenting academics. The relation between the two provided for both stability and

mutation.

Geddes remarked that India, in rebuilding its universities, faced a similar challenge.

Rather than mechanically importing the western university, one had to innovate by

counterposing the western university to the civilizational possibilities inherent in

indigenous systems of medicine, agriculture, law or architecture. The tragedy lay in

the fact that India had failed to respond to the challenge and produced not a post

Germanic university expounding new notions of biology, law and medicine but

second hand pre-Germanic universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. These

universities were unable to respond creatively to the possibilities of their environment

and were reduced to being examination machines. What was true for the university

was true for the scientist.

Geddes once observed that he was not against Indians travelling abroad for science,but he warned against the insidious power of western thought. Let the Indian student

come to us by all means... but I think merely to be a more or less faithful or weak

reproduction of ourselves, be it in sports or games, as minor functionary or convert,

not even if he were to surpass our ideal. Prince Ranjitsingh is most welcome; he has

done us no end of good; he has raised the popular esteem and respect for India in the

man in the street more than a new Buddha would have done. We admire the Saxon

Ivanhoe for overthrowing Norman champions at their own tournaments. Yet Ivanhoe,

masquerading in a culture foreign alike to his deepest traditions and his highest

aspirations was... but the first snob, the first misleading example to his own culture.26

Today, Indian science has produced many of these lesser Ranjitsinghjis. One can cite

the names of Bhabha, Sokhey, Saha or the Krishnans and the Swaminathans as


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Tagore argued that each university was an embodiment of an archetypal set. The

western university, as the microcosm of the civitas, reflected the mind of the city. In

India, however, civilization was associated with the forest taking on its distinctivecharacter from its origin and environment. Its intellect sought spiritual harmony with

nature, while the mind of the city sought its subjugation, extending its boundary walls

around its acquisitions. The sage in the forest hermitage was not interested in

acquiring and dominating, but in realizing and enlarging his consciousness by

growing with and into his surroundings. Even when the primeval forest gave way to

the farm and the city, the heart of India looked back with adoration upon the great

ideal of strenuous self-realization and the simple dignity of the forest hermitage.31

The West on the contrary took pride in subduing nature. As a result, the American

wilderness, unlike the Indian forest, lacked an animistic power. For the West, naturebelonged to the category of the inanimate. Western thought posited a disjunction

between nature and human nature but the Indian mind freely acknowledged its kinship

with nature, positing an unbroken relationship with all.

Thus, while a city science sought to subdue nature, in India a whole people who

were once meat eaters gave up taking animal food to cultivate the sentiment ofuniversal sympathy for life, an event unique in history.32 Tagore predicted that the

dialogue between the two universities would be between a city science and a forest

science, between a mode of being that sought harmony with nature and a way of doing

that sought possession of it.

Tagore did not deny the power of western science or the dynamism of the western

university. He felt however that the dialogue of knowledges could only begin when

differences were understood and recognized. It was in a similar spirit that Geddes

sought a return to an agricultural view of science, to a biology that would replace the

hegemony of the machine as reified metaphor. Geddes letter to Sister Nivedita abouthis idea of the proposed Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore could have been

written by Tagore. One arrived at vitalism through the poetics of a leaf, through

understanding the implications of the forest as meaning, the other through the

synoptic eye that sought communion with the life-giving tendencies of science. It is in

such a context that Geddes vision of the Indain university should be seen.


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hiding behind the innocence of a Lego set. To counter this Geddes advocated two

methods: (i) the diagnostic survey; and (ii) conservative surgery.

The practitioners of the diagnostic survey like the general practitioner knew their city

as a person. They did not begin with palaces and the great civic buildings and only

later penetrate the older parts of the city and then, too often, only to sweep it pastbefore them. They began by understanding the inner labyrinth of the city. Like all

organic forms this may at first seem confused to our modern eyes, that have for so

long been trained to a mechanical order, but gradually a higher form of order can be

discernedthe order of life in development.34 Life to a gardener is capable of repair,

rebirth and revival. Like the gardener, one pruned only certain selected parts, the

dilapidated sections, but only to encourage life processes. This whole act of

conservative surgery should be achieved through cooperation and persuasion.

Three notions become fundamental to the post Haussmanic Geddesian city: a notion

of order that goes beyond the grid iron and understands irregularity, a notion of spacethat links domestic space, the village square and temple shrine to cosmic space and

the idea of a city that internalizes the biological wisdom of the rural world.

Geddes held that the degradation of the city was due to the deterioration of a peasant

people deprived of their old contacts with other earth.35 He felt that renewal could

only come through innovations by the people themselves across the three spaces

mentioned above. His observations are still fascinating. Everywhere in the slums we

see women toiling and sweeping, each struggling to maintain her little hovel above the

distressingly low level of municipal paving.36Theplague, said Geddes, is product

of the uncleanly victory of the rat over the housewife. This of course is not her fault

but of our masculine inefficiency as businessmen, city rulers and state controllers.37

Thus, the first task of the planner was to liberate domestic space, make the

innumerable little adjustments which help the housewife maintain a healthy

environment. Few realize, Geddes added, the hygiene of tuberculosis consists

above all of getting everyday a verandah fit to sleep and a chabutrato sit on.38 The

economic life efficient wisdom of the housewife needed the garden as a complement.

It is not only the place for the tulsi plant but the shade giving fruit tree, preferably the

banana, rather than that present icon of industrialism, the eucalyptus.

Geddes argued that this garden had to be different from that of the suburbias of

western planning. These garden cities were urban suburbs which had neither


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agricultural productivity nor provided real contact with nature. Rather than being an

antiseptic collectin of ornamental trees or an assembly line of flowers, gardens,

Geddes argued, had to be efficient means of waste disposal. It is the disaster of India

that her great religious systems were formulated before the realization of the

significance of manure; while it is the strength of China and of ancient Rome that

their religious systems fully and frankly appreciated and even idealized the manurialprocess.39

But more than being a source of food and a pollutin absorbent, the garden provided a

different notion of time, work and rhythm embodied in the peasant view of science. In

his Gardeners View of Science, Geddes remarked, The ancient correlation of

astronomy with climate and vegetation and through these with animal life, with

human occupation, is thus for us as fundamental as for primitive science... Within the

zodiac, the sun, the moon, the world of life and labour all become unified as of old

within a single education, a single initiation in which cosmic unity and human ideal

unite.40 It is this integrated view of the world that the garden preserved in the city. If

the gardener was the peasant in the city, the zodiac was his compassa compact

cosmos of life giving rhythms integrating folk, work and place.

I have described above some of the conceptions of nature and technology elaborated

by the critics of the Swadeshi movement. The question one must ask is, how are theyrelevant to the contemporary Indian nation-state proud of possessing the third largest

cadre of scientific personnel and the fourth largest army in the world? Firstly, the idea

of ecology is relevant for the conception of the nation-state itself. Such ecologically

sensitive concepts like survival, plurality and the commons are more open-ended than

ideas like security, development and social contract with which contemporary

political systems operate.

More importantly, while environmentalism is more of a behaviouristic response to

nature, ecology seeks more meaningful mediations between nature and culture. In this

context, it seeks to challenge the hegemony of the one nation-stateone science view

of the world. It realizes that the relation of the nation-state to the various ethnic groups

is analogous to the relation of western science to traditional and folk knowledges. It is


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also aware that the survival of tribal and peasant groups might lie in conserving their

ethnosciences.

Both the nation-state and modern western science as victorious regimes speak the

language of domination and defeat. Within such a framework, defeated knowledges

are either museumized or disappear altogether. An ecological approach seeks to gobeyond this zero-sum imagination and speak instead of the language of inequalities,

the language of difference.41 The language of inequalities allows mainly for erasure

through defeat or equalization through uniformity. The language of difference leads to

complementarity and reciprocity based on the recognition that various forms of

knowledge contain different truths. It recognizes the unique rather than the

universalizing, contending that truths like germ plasm cannot be stored in genebanks

and museums but must be lived out.

Let us consider how scientific environmentalism or the nation-state handles

difference. The problematic object is generally a recalcitrant peasant or a tribalfollowing his own truth. The following possibilities exist:

I. Genocidethe total erasure of a people and their knowledges.

II.Assimilationthe loss of identity and absorption into the mainstream.

III.Museumizationpreservation in parks, reserves and museums of defeated

cultures, a embalming that does not allow for growth or mutation.

IV.Dualism,Apartheidthe existence of a defeated culture as a lesser unit separatebut unequal.

V. Systems, Cybernetics,Federationsa non-playful notion of the whole

emphasizing unity and stability rather than metamorphosis. The whole seeks to

discipline the parts, the emphasis being eventually on communication and control

rather than meaning and truth.

VI.Pluralisma dialogic relation between different truths in search of a whole or

unity, allowing for emergence, mutation and mystery. The search is not only for

similarities but for understanding of differences, even allowing forincommensurability.


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The first five possibilities are virtually sequences in the developmental process of

which environmentalism is an integral part. Those recalcitrant cultures which were not

destroyed are displaced into reservations or parks, or are incorporated into the process

of development through structures like the school. But the sense of pluralism, of

different systems interacting with and penetrating each other, is missing. The issuecan be understood by examining how the problem of medical systems was confronted

in India.42 The dominant western medical system was regarded as more true and

efficient than the traditional Ayurvedic, Siddha, Unani or folk practices. The latter

were lesser knowledges.

The possibility of Ayurveda confronting allopathy and comparing different notions of

health, diagnosis or disease is alien to such a worldview. Like the cottage industry, the

traditional medical systems exist as separate but unequal forms to be inched,

museumized or even mined. As an instance of the latter, one can cite the case

ofRauwolfia Serpentina long used by Ayurvedic practitioners to treat tension. Thedrug Reserpine was extracted and inducted into the western medical pharmacopia

while the Ayurvedic philosophy itself was ignored. The plant, once common in many

forests, has been so rapaciously hunted that it is regarded an endangered species

today. The old warning of the Ayurvedic practitioners that the future of Ayurveda and

the forests was inextricably linked did not enter the systems view of the

environmentalist.

Consider another example. India possesses the greatest diversity of crops and farming

systems. The diversity of gene-plasm is sustained because of a multiplicity of

agricultural styles. This diversity of nature constitutes part of the repertoire of any

culture. One can make a strong case that gene-diversity, ethnoscience and ethnicity

are inextricably linked. With the coming of the green revolution-monoculture, this

diversity of gene-plasm is being eroded.

Let us examine how the environmentalist confronts the problem. They seek to store

germ-plasm in gene-banks or parks and reserves sustained in artificial conditions.Within such a framework, it is the laboratory and the scientist that become responsible

for the seed and not the farmer. Improved upon, standardized and patented, the seed

becomes the property of a multinational, to be sold back to the farmer at immense

profit. Thus, even concerned environmentalism becomes inadvertently an act of

deculturation. The ecologist, Cary Fowler, in a recent conversation, remarked that in

Nicaragua seeds are regarded as a part of the national heritage like music, and the


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sections of the ruling party used to ravage the city during the genocidal violence of

November 1984.

The pluralistic possibilities of the post-swadeshi visions eventually gave way under

the onslaught of the Bolshevik revolution and its positivist variants. Such alternative

worldviews were made to appear romantic, arcadian, reactionary, or even revivalistand lost their power as life-giving myths. The great impact of the Russian revolution

was to deaden the importance of local knowledges and highlight the importance of the

two great mega-machines of modernity, the nation-state and Big Science, both

encompassed within the dreariness of statist development. As a cognitive map, this

can be best understood in terms of a shorthand from R&D monographsthe

innovation chain, which incoporates the various processes relating to technology

transfer.

The innovation chain is more than just a managerial schema. It embodies the

technological civics of knowledge and power in modern society. As a cognitive map,

it reflects the importance of science and technology in the construction of the

collective self of modern society. As a process, it involves a rite of passage from

tradition to modernity, from underdevelopment to development, from a pre-industrial

to a post-industrial regime. The flow of science and technology is from centre to

periphery, metropolis to satellite. Even pollution seems to follow this trajectory.Environmetalism is a part of such a managerial schema, providing the softness of the

human relations approach to the hard Taylorism of many transfer of technology

models.

As a statist ideology, environmentalism is anchored on two axioms which are

essential to the perpetuation of science as a hegemonic form of knowledge. One can

dub them irreverently as the doctrine of the immaculate conception of science and the

doctrine of the fall.

The first assumes that science as a method is neutral and as a mode of truth can be the

basis of the planetization of the world. It also believes that science is good or

potentially so and that the available corpus of scientific knowledge if well used can

solve the basic problems of inequality and starvation. The second axiom, the doctrine

of the fall, bemoans the fact that science and technology have become increasingly

consumerist, intensively polluting and excessively militarized.


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7. For a discussion of the Gandhians and the Theosophists, see Ashis Nandy and Shiv Visvanathan, Modern

Medicine and its Non-modern Critics, Mimeographed paper presented at UNU/WIDER Conference on Development

and Technological Transformations in Traditional Societies: Alternative Approaches, August 1986.

8. Ananda Coomaraswamy,Essays in National Idealism (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981) pp. 74-75.

9. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy (London: Dennes Dobson, 1947), p. 8.

10. Ibid, p. 22.

11. Ananda Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art(New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p.

98.

12. A. Coomaraswamy, The International Congress of Applied Chemistry and Aniline Dyes, Modern Review,

Vol.VI, No.3, September 1909, p. 275-278 and Coomaraswamy, 1981, p. 201-206.

13. Coomaraswamy 1909, p. 275.




17. A. Coomaraswamy, Love and Art,Modern Review 14(11), May 1915, pp. 574-84, 576.

18. Allan Octavian Hume,Agricultural Reform in India (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1899), p. 5.

19. Ibid, p. 58.

20. F.A. Nicholson,Note on Agriculture in Japan (Madras: Government Press, 1907), p. 29.

21. Ibid, p. 45.

22. Ibid, p. 45.

23. F.A. Nicholson,Madras Fisheries Bureau:Papers from 1899 (Madras: Government Press, 1915), p. 83-84.

24. Patrick Geddes, On Universities in Europe and India,Five Letters to an Indian Friend(Madras: National Press,

1904), p.19.

25. Ibid, p. 3.

26. Ibid, p. 95.

27. See Ashis Nandy,Alternatives Sciences (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980).

28. Quoted in S.P. Basu (ed),Letters of Sister Nivedita (Calcutta: Navbharat Publishers, 1982), p. 778.

29. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes,Life:Outlines of General Biology (London, Williams and Norgate, 1931),

p. 1185.


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30. Quoted in Amelia Defries, The Interpreter Geddes:The Man and His Gospel(London: Routledge, 1927), p. 175.

31. Rabindranath Tagore,Modern Review, Vol.XIV, July 1913, p. 1 (Mimeo).

32. Ibid, p. 2.

33. Geddes, 1904, p. 17.

34. Jayqueline Tyrwhitt (ed),Patrick Geddes in India (London: Lund Humphries, 1947), p. 27.

35. Ibid, p. 88.

36. Ibid, p. 52.

37. Ibid, p. 70.

38. Ibid, p. 70.

39. Ibid, p. 91.

40. Quoted in Annie Beasant, Theosophy in Relation to Human Life (Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society,

1905), p. 113.

41. I am indebted to Jit Uberoi for this distinction.

42. See Nandy and Visvanathan, UNU/WIDER, 1986.

43. Interview at CSDS, 1985.

44. Jagmohan,Island of Truth (New Delhi, Vikas, 1978), p. 10.

45. Ibid, p. 71.

46. Ibid, p. 16.

47. Tyrwhitt, 1947, ibid, 52.

48. Ibid, p. 57.
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