Popularising Science for Social Change: M Singaravelar
January 17, 2004
Modern science for M Singaravelar was to be used to emancipate the working class as well as to introduce rational thinking in public life. While science came in to legitimate the set agenda, its aims and goals were reconstituted, providing credence to the slogan 'science for the people' – making science popularisation an essentially political activity.
Senthil Babu
M Singaravelar was born in 1860, in a rich fishing family of Madras province. After his schooling at Hindu High School, Triplicane and graduation from the Presidency College, Madras in 1894 he studied law to become a Madras High Court ‘vakil’ in 1907. His introduction to Marxist ideals occurred probably in 1902 when he went to London to attend a Buddhist conference. He acquired prominence in the Madras political circle both as a pioneering trade unionist and as an active Congress worker, which he left after the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement. He started the Labour and Kisan Party on May Day 1923, probably inspired by the positions of the Third International. Two periodicals, The Labour and Kisan Gazette in English and the Thozhilalan (The Worker), in Tamil, were also started alongside but were banned after a year. He had also tried to visit Moscow to establish contacts with the Communist International but never made it. He died in 1946 at the age of 86.1 Periyar E V Ramasamy Naicker, the leader of the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu, met Singaravelar in 1931, and from then till 1936 Singaravelar regularly contributed to the periodicals of the Self-Respect Movement: Kudi Arasu, Puratchi, The Revolt, Pudhuvai Murasu, etc. He was instrumental in formulating the critique of the socialist wing within the Self-Respect Movement in the mid-1930s and many influential leaders within and outside of the Self-Respect Movement including Thiru Vi Kalyanasundaram and P Jeevanandam, were strongly influenced by him. In his final years, he wrote prolifically in the periodical, Pudhu Ulagam (New World) on science, philosophy and politics, once his differences with Periyar EVR grew in 1935. Apparently, he had one of the best libraries in Madras.
In the following discussion, we try and elucidate how for this Marxist science and religious beliefs were dialectical opposites. For him, politically, rationality was scientific where the method of science would provide the epistemic resources to dispel ignorance and superstitions. Interestingly, models of scientific change were espoused to legitimise models of social change and progress. Sources for legitimacy were sought in this case, from within the very structures of science. Naturally, this would entail a particular understanding of the nature of science which we try and elucidate below.
For Singaravelar, there could only be two kinds of beliefs in the world – “right beliefs and wrong beliefs” [Singaravelar 1973:3]. Since the latter was seen to be all pervasive in indigenous society, science as the embodiment of the former was to be disseminated to the people to demonstrate to them ‘how non-scientific their beliefs were’.2 Why was science the only correct knowledge? Such a question for Singaravelar was to be answered out of a serious engagement with the local traditions and cultural practices prevalent among the people, albeit only in the light of a philosophy of materialism, which for him was quite clearly embodied in the nature of science that he perceived it to be. In other words, indigenous traditions of knowledge were selected, located in a materialist reading of history, measured against science, to be invalidated. Then, reasons for the ‘non-development of science’ in indigenous society were squarely located in such chosen traditions and forms of authority associated with them, say institutionalised religious practices.
For Singaravelar, all philosophies were “just imaginations...they don’t signify any material existence” [Singaravelar 1970: 2, 11]. All philosophies deal with the ‘relation between the people and the universe’, but their limitations were such that they can’t be validated by practical experience. In history, since ancient times, all philosophies have done this, in their own terms but they all ‘remain just as rhetoric’. Here, he would include both Indian philosophical traditions and the western, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Spencer. “Brahmam, Sat, Absolute, the Unknowable, the Idea, the Will are all just figments of imaginations...are based on arguments of analogy which does not always hold true” [Murugesan and Subramanyam 1975b:15].
In the local context, he would attribute all human sufferings to the ‘Vedantist maya illusion that has always made people look for other worlds, ignoring death and disease in this world’. It was this vedantist illusion that was responsible for the non-development of modern science in India. He asks, “if the vedantist insisted that the world was an illusion then how could we have enquired into phenomena scientifically? ...so our country gave up scientific research” (ibid:18).
Interestingly, causes for the non-emergence of modern science in the indigenous tradition were located locally, in a scheme of history, that would otherwise evaluate philosophies universally. Implicit in this interpretation is the notion that “all human actions are to lead humanity towards happiness...in fact, that is the real aim of all civilisations – betterment of humanity as a whole”.3 Since religion and the philosophies in India have only kept people in the dark, modern science was the real available alternative. He says, “the development of science has made our understanding of the world better; science enlightens our factual knowledge; it inspires honest and objective thought in us...it is the knowledge of the utmost worth”.4
However, better alternatives need not necessarily be the right/proper alternatives. For him rightness was to be judged on the basis of the benefit that knowledge could accrue to human society. Both science and historical materialism as philosophical systems meet this criterion for Singaravelar. For him, any human activity including science was always connected with the changing nature of human use and with an understanding of the natural world only insofar as it can be used to change that natural world for human betterment.5
Even philosophies could be so construed for him. It is only historical materialism as a philosophical system that is concerned with people’s life – “it is the only philosophy that problematises people’s life...all philosophies should change the life conditions of the people, otherwise they lose their relevance.”6 Philosophers so far had not deliberated this issue, according to him, because philosophy as a product of lesiure was not connected with the process of labour, they overlooked such ground realities and despite this, became dominant. The necessity then was not to harp on east and west or material and the spiritual dichotomies at the civilisational plane, but to get down to the problems that the masses encounter. Such ‘irrelevant pursuits’, could only be those of the ‘bourgeoisie philosophers’.7
In Singaravelar’s understanding science and historical materialism acquire a significant relationship. His characterisation of the nature of scientific change and progress in history drew heavily on historical materialism, while science was ‘popularised to the people’. We try and elucidate the terms in which he could construe such a relationship and make it relevant to the audience that he was trying to address in the then Tamil society. What is interesting to note is that episodes from history of science are drawn upon to substantiate his views on change – both scientific and social. First, we deal with the social.
For Singaravelar, historical materialism, the only valid philosophical system, was based on the principle that social life of various ‘historical epochs’ were born out of their economic conditions. In the classical base-superstructure mould, he argues that it is the economic base that defines all other characteristics in those societies, including ‘politics, religion, philosophy, justice, morality and forms of labour, art and culture’. It was the change in the nature of the tools of production within the economic sphere that characterises such changes [Murugesan and Subramanyam 1975b:125]. Further, he draws heavily upon the behavioural science8 of those times to portray how man was implicated in a ‘universal stream of events, characterised by endless changes’. As he argues, ‘behaviour’ has been vital in the way societies have changed. Behaviour is common to everything, for everything is part of the universe and has similar constitutive elements like atoms and molecules which are not static. Each entity in this world, then, has both qualities of change and statics and it is man who will have to rationally decide upon those qualities which are amenable to change. It is through these choices he makes that fundamentally similar entities acquire differential qualities, including man himself and so are the values associated with particular societies (ibid:34-35). Thus, man implicated in such a scheme and organically so, could make choices that in turn would be reflected in the arena of use of varying tools of production in the economic sphere.
Now, let us see what was parallel to tools of production in the model of scientific change that he tried to articulate. This could best be explicated through an example that he himself chose from the history of astronomy – the history of the development of the nebular hypothesis – which assumes that stars are born out of nebulae, planets out of stars and moons out of planets. In the history of the development of this hypothesis by Kant, Laplace and Herschel respectively, it was not mere ‘speculation’ that characterised the development of the hypotheses, but changes in the mode of production of evidence to substantiate each of their hypotheses. Each stage was marked not by falsifying the previous one, but by accrediting the same with newer evidence. While Kant conceived of such a hypothesis in the first instance out of his ‘observation’ of the white clouds, the French mathematician Laplace produced mathematical evidence for it. Laplace was followed by Herschel, who with his telescope produced substantive evidence for the hypothesis.9 In Singaravelar’s model of scientific change it is the mode of evidence that occupies prime place. Each epoch produces its own modes of evidence or instruments of validation; in other words, evidence occupies the place that ‘tools of production’ do in the model of change as envisaged by historical materialism. Further, in the same mould he would argue that mathematical branches of science – arithmetic and algebra – were similarly born in history [Singaravelar 1973:48], in a way anticipating Boris Hessen who was to present his landmark paper only four years later, which supposedly had marked the beginning of the externalist mode in the historiography of science. The economic base and the scientific method acquire a very intimate relationship to the Marxist ‘science populariser’.10
The nature of truth as perceived by Singaravelar was drawn out of this particular understanding of the relationship between science in history on the one hand and science and society on the other. He distinguished between the nature of the role of ‘speculation’ in science and its opposite, philosophy, as he envisages them to be. The role of speculation in science was respectable and admissible. Though speculation cannot probably be ‘empirically appreciable’, it could lead to “newer vistas of thought, towards truth”.11 On the contrary, philosophical speculations could never be permissible for they could never ever be empirically validated. He does admit that the mark of philosophy was to move to realms of thought on the basis of limited experiences.12 If so, such speculations are allowed only insofar as they are relevant to the material problems of the masses. He could find such qualified philosophical speculation in what he calls, “...better imaginations...practicable utopias that could guide us in struggling to achieve the same”.13 Then truth was characteristically scientific for him, which again was located within the contours of historical materialism. To use his own words, “there are no everlasting truths, they are not possible because they are not material entities that could endure...truth can only be probable. Well, they could be more probable or less probable. However, the most probable is the highest truth.”14 Thus far, we have only partly answered the question as to why science was the only right knowledge in Singaravelar’s terms. We have done this by reconstructing Singaravelar’s notions of science in the light of his political philosophy. But besides the reason that it provided better and accurate descriptions of the real world, what more was in it that made it further unique, vis-a-vis other possible forms of knowing? For him, what made science unique was its method – it was the scientific method as postulated by him that would epistemologically privilege science over others. Such epistemic coordinates were to judge the validity of the prevalent cultural practices of indigenous society.
Scientific method, for Singaravelar, was characterised by two crucial resources – ‘observation and experiment, substantiated further by the method of induction’. Such method was sought for in a society where, for him, “there exists a mentality to generalise from particulars...even worse, such particulars themselves are hasty conclusions drawn out of coincidental happenings in the real world” [Singaravelar 1973:3]. Further, the endurance of particular beliefs over time would not necessarily make them true. In the case of astrology, he says though it had been around for centuries, it would obtain the status of science only if it fulfils certain criteria as demanded by the inductive method – “When would astrology become science? Take a range of such astrological predictions over vast time spans; correlate between their predictions and real events; such correlations will have to be tested by mathematical experts; results thus obtained are to be compared across the globe; if they concrur, then it would be called a science. But for the last 5000 years, since the time of the Assyrians and the Egyptians we have witnessed how astrology has failed to stand up to such scrutiny.”15
Scientific method was also characterised by its ‘aim’ and the way enquiries are to be undertaken. The unique aim of science was to enquire into the causes of phenomena in the material world. “Any occurrence has a cause and is very closely related with it. It is difficult to know such causes...to get to know such causes is precisely the aim of science” [Singaravelar 1973:58]. What is to be noticed here is that utilitarian values were not explicitly alluded to in defining the perceived aim of science but only causal enquiry. However, science was to serve humanity, by the fundamental nature of it being a human activity – as all human actions are/should be aimed at enhancing ‘human happiness’. Further, scientific practice was unique for another of its essential characteristics – ‘openness’. Indicting indigenous traditions of medicine on this basis, he says that we could afford to believe in herbal medicine, only “if it cures a record number of patients”. Apart from fulfilling this inductive criterion, they will have to come out of their secretive world of practice and knowledge. “..may be true that our ashes and herbs are good but, since we have the habit of doing things behind the screen, how would the rest of the world come to know of them. The important criteria for scientific method is to do things in the open” (ibid:5-6).
Apart from inductive method, causal enquiry and openness, scientific method also demands practitioners who would live up to its standards and along with this unstinting support from the society too. “Scientific achievement requires consistent material and physical support and a very strong persuasion” (ibid:50). Though, the culture of scientific practice in itself was unique for him, scientists, as individual participants in this culture, lack such consistency and tend to deviate. In an interesting episode of an encounter between such a high culture of science and a ‘popular/low’ variant, Singaravelar seems to opine that scientists, as moral beings are only incidental to the culture of scientific practice, which reigns supreme despite such occasional deviations. In Calcutta, in 1931, C V Raman, the physicist was called upon to witness a public show, where a ‘saint’ apparently swallowed pieces of glass and iron. According to the reporter of this incident, C V Raman was ‘dumbstruck’; and was at a loss to find any scientific reason for such a proven possibility, and left the show in a hurry. The same reporter had asked Singaravelar for any convincing reason. Singaravelar replies, “what if C V Raman was dumbstruck? Such a reaction from him does not necessarily make the saint’s act a proven possibility. Scientists very often have fallen to such tricks including William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Barrett, etc. What is more important is to clearly observe the phenomena to find out possible causes and test it further.”16
We have so far seen how for Singaravelar science was unique not just because of the progressive values associated with it but more because of its unique method of scientific enquiry. This was possibly why he found his contemporary atheist critique of religion and superstitions, primarily advanced by the then strong Self-Respect Movement, ‘naive and abstract’. Their critique would have to be substantiated by the scientific method as theirs was merely founded on a sociology of rationality. In fact, he even envisaged an atheistic culture wherein man would realise that he is governed by the “same laws of existence as million others are”.17 In another instance, he drives home the point by saying “man invented god and the same man now disowns him on the solid achievements of science... It is upon this impregnable rock that the atheist has to build his edifice for struggle.”18 As the scientific method was to substantiate the atheist critique of the Self-Respect Movement, understanding of the ‘economic base’ was to substantiate their political praxis. He would tell them that “untouchability was basically an agrarian problem” and should be treated as such.19 Singaravelar, however, was very supportive of the Self-Respect Movement led by E V Ramasamy Naicker and seems to have had great faith in their activities. He would appeal to the self-respecters that economic conditions of the people ought to be their utmost priority as it is important to “relieve life from hunger as knowledge from the darkness of ignorance”.20 Socialism was to be the final political solution for, as long as economic differences exist, ‘religious reforms, caste reforms and political reforms are of no use’. Writing in the official publication of the self-respect movement, he says, “we don’t need name and fame. We just need food for hunger, clothes to wear, place to live, education to learn and employment to work...just to confine ourselves to rhetoric of god and caste could only prove to be a treachery on the people in the long run...what is going to sustain here is poverty and disease...if caste and religion are to be demolished, the state and politics that sustain it will have to go first.”21
Singaravelar’s dream of a ‘new world’ was more proximate if the agenda of social movements and the state could be ‘science education to the masses’. Characteristic of any ideology of social change, he brought up heroes and martyrs from the past to legitimate the revolutionary praxis that he was advocating to the Self-Respect Movement. Characteristically, Singaravelar perceived science to have been the counterculture in the past in questioning the orthodoxies of the ‘old world’, whereas in the ‘new world’, it was to be the dominant culture. “Each epoch has its own martyrs in history who question the orthodoxies. It is important for us to know about them in our fight for a new world. We derive inspiration from the saga of the martyrs like Bruno, Galileo, Socrates, Campanella, Vanini and many more...”22
In the new world of Singaravelar, led by the working class, science that had been called into existence by industry would itself control the productive system. Gandhian ‘swaraj’, for Singaravelar could only be meaningful if it envisaged the central role of labour in society. In his famous ‘Open Letter to Gandhi’, he writes, “only communism – meaning common ownership of land and industry for the benefit of the workers – would mean real independence...without this no form of swaraj is worth having... no compromise in matters essential to freedom in politics and industry. Declare that in our coming swaraj, none of us can hold any land which we will not cultivate or a factory where we will not work or a house in which we will not live.”
Singaravelar called the Gandhian programme of rural industrialisation ‘absurd’. For him, technology has enabled the worker to move to higher forms of life from his previous ‘animal existence’. “It has secured him some leisure for the higher pursuits of life...to drive him back to manual labour is not only simply cruel but absurd.”23 Singaravelar, though he recognised colonialism in its modernising variant, was to propound that it would never solve our problems. Indian labour was the “Cindrella of the East”.24 In the manifesto of the Labour and Kisan Party which he launched in 1923, one can discern his vision of a world socialist society, though ‘Indian dreams’ will have to be realised at the first step. The manifesto clearly promised all necessary provisions for scientific research in the new society.25 Technology was then recognised as a factor in the improvement of the social life of the working class.
Finally, for the revolutionary, the culture of science shall be ultimately realised in a better India – “...in our dreams, dream of a free India, free from exploitation, free from drudgery, from starvation, disease and death, free to express our thoughts without hindrance but enjoying the highest products of art, culture and science...free, to sing the song of labour.”26
In Singaravelar, we could see how a revolutionary communist made the task of science communication a political activity. His later years were spent almost exclusively in the task of science popularisation through the turbulent politics of the Tamil society of that time. When science popularisation becomes part of a political practice, the ‘popular’ will have to be represented to itself, in the light of new knowledge. New knowledge in the process seeks to be a revolutionary force. Reconstruction of this new knowledge was intimately interconnected with the representation of the popular. One was to emancipate the other. For this Marxist purveyor of modern science both, science and politics, essentially as a product of human actions, play mutually reinforcing roles in a struggle for the realisation of the ideal of a ‘new world’.
Notes
1 Biographical details are drawn from Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975a) and Gunasekaran (1984). 2 Dissemination of concepts of ‘pure science’ was considered necessary in this stated task [Padhu Ulagam, May 1935; also in Murugesan and Subramanyan 1975b:6). 3 Navasakthi, June 1921; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975a:157). 4 Pudhu Ulagam, May 1935; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975a:6). 5 Bernal (1952:26-30) points out this characteristic notion as articulated by Marx himself. 6 Pudhu Ulagam, November 1935; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975b:125). 7 He contested Radhakrishnan’s supposedly contrary view in the issue of relevance of philosophy and calls him a bourgeoisie philosopher (Pudhu Ulagam, December 1935 and March 1936; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975b:155)). One wonders if C V Raman, for his contrary views on science would have received a similar appellation as a bourgeois scientist. 8 For he very often cites several books on behaviourism as reference. According to him, behaviourism also had solved the mind-body problem once for all. It had dispelled the myth of mind and spirit attributing everything to physio-chemical processes in the body [Pudhu Ulagam, October 1935; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam 1975b:105]. 9 Pudhu Ulagam, June 1935; in ibid, p 126. In another instance he uses this same history in dispelling the notion of god. Laplace replying to Napoleon’s query about the absence of god in his hypothesis, said, ‘God was superfluous, so, he was left out’, (‘Address at the Madras Atheist Conference’, December 31, 1933; text in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1974:30-55)). 10 Interestingly, this view is shared even today. Shankar Cakaraborty, Paschim Banga Vigyan Mancha echoed Singaravelar, almost verbatim in his speech at the ‘Unity of Science Session’ at the Third All India Peoples Science Congress, Bangalore, 1990. 11 Pudhu Ulagam, June 1935; also in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975b:26). 12 Pudhu Ulagam, November 1935; in ibid, p 121. 13 ‘On Utopia’, Pudhu Ulagam, June 1935; in ibid, pp 37-39. 14 ‘What Is Truth’, Pudhu Ulagam, September 1935; in ibid, p 91. 15 ‘Astrological Obscenities’, Pudhu Ulagam, June 1935; in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975b:52). 16 Kudi Arasu, February 28, 1932; in Selvaraj (1985c:3-4). 17 Kudi Arasu, February 28, 1932; in Selvaraj (1985c:73). 18 Address at the Madras Atheist Conference on December 31, 1933, Madras; text in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1974:30-55). 19 Presidential address at the First Communist Conference held at Kanpur, December 1925; text in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975a:183). 20 Kudi Arasu, August 30, 1931; in Selvaraj (1985a:5). 21 Kudi Arasu, November 1, 1932; in ibid, p 8 and Kudi Arasu, February 20, 1932; in ibid, p 21. For a detailed description of the circumstances that led to their departure, see Rajadurai and Geetha (1996:268-89, 378-447). However, I feel that the authors’ privileging act has not given a symmetrical treatment to Singaravelar. 22 ‘An Open Letter to Gandhiji’, The Hindu, May 24, 1921; in Murugesan and Subramanyam (1975a:152). 23 Presidential address at the First Communist Conference; ibid, p 183. 24 Labour Kisan Gazette, Vol 1, No 4, January 1924; in ibid, p 166. He further proclaims: “The denouement is fast approaching, while the haughty brothers, the bourgeoisie will sink into the neglected Cindrella. The Labour of India, proclaimed as the highest alike in worth and beauty will reign supreme.” 25 Draft Manifesto of the Hindustan Labour and Kisan Party, May 1, 1923, issued jointly by M Singaravelar and M P S Velayudham; text in ibid, pp 172-87. 26 Address at Kanpur, op cit; in ibid, pp 194-212. It is at the same conference that Singaravelar proposed that “Indian Communism did not and should not mean Bolshevism”.
References
Bernal, J D (1952): Marx and Science, Marxism Today Series No 9, Lawrence and Wishart, London. Gunasekaran, M (1984): The Great Thinker Singaravelar, (in Tamil), Madras. Murugesan, K and C S Subramanyam (eds) (1974): Singaravelar Speeches, Part I (in Tamil), New Century Book House, Madras. – (1975a): M Singaravelar – The First Communist of South India, Peoples Publishing House, New Delhi. – (1975b): M Singaravelar: Notes on Science and Philosophy (in Tamil), New Century Book House, Madras. Rajadurai, S V and V Geetha (1996): Periyar: Self-Respect-Socialism (in Tamil), Vidiyal Publishers, Coimbatore. Selvaraj, K (ed) (1985a): M Singaravelar: Society and Economy (in Tamil), New Century Book House, Madras. – (1985b): M Singaravelar: Society and Politics (in Tamil), New Century Book House, Madras. – (1985c): M Singaravelar: Society and Religion (in Tamil), New Century Book House, Madras. Singaravelar, M (1970): God and the Universe, (in Tamil), Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Association, Thiruchirapally, first published in 1932. – (1973): Scientific Method and Ignorant Beliefs (in Tamil), Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Association, Thiruchirapally, first published in 1934.