By Rishabh Kachroo. Inaugurating the forty-fifth session of the Indian Science Conference, Madras, 6 January 1958. Source: The Nehru Archive. The Curious Afterlife of Scientific Temper “Scientific temper” has never been just another term for the Indian republic. Enshrined in the Indian constitution through the 42nd amendment in 1976 and popularised before that in India by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as an intellectual orientation and a civic ethos, scientific temper was imagined as a moral infrastructure for democratic life and a hopeful bulwark against dogma, obscurantism, and the inertia of inherited inequalities. Today, however, it rarely evokes the ethical urgency that it once carried. It merely lingers as a vaguely pedagogical trope, invoked occasionally in textbooks and science day speeches. Before we go any further and discuss why science temper’s decline matters, it would help to have a working definition of the term. In the Indian context, scientific temper is...
Science and society | Communication