Gauhar Raza

NISCAIR · Science Communication through Multimedia

India remains a deeply religious country, yet the public at large has debated notions of secularism, scientific rationality and modernity there for more than a century. For more than 50 years, the state has supported that debate. However, recent developments have shown a resurgence of religion, and that has included religious violence.

Spreading scientific temperament and communicating science to the public at large is a cultural and political undertaking. This article looks at a recent transition in Indian politics, the nexus between majoritarian religious leadership and political leadership, and its impact on science, science communication and scientific temper. ¹ In the first...

The objective of cyber capitalism is to colonise cyberspace and generate and use big data for further enslavement of people. The battle between freedom and enslavement has now shifted to cyberspace.

During the first general elections, Jawaharlal Nehru visited his constituency. An old woman said, ‘azadi ke baad bhi kuchh nahin badla, hamari halat to waisi hi hai’, Nehru replied ‘amma aap yeh baat wazire azam se kah sakti hain ke us ne kuchh nahin kiya, aur use badalne ke liye vote daal sakti hain, yeh kya kam bada badlau hai’ (the old women sai...

The most precious gift the Indian democracy gave us is universal suffrage. On the one hand ‘equality of voting right’ gave us freedom to choose a party to govern the nation, states and local bodies, on the other, and more importantly, made us equal citizens, in an utterly unequal society. In the past, there have been many efforts to subvert the ri...

This chapter is a result of 25 years of research on public understanding of science (PUS) in India. The authors have since 1998 carried out PUS surveys during every Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh Mela (a religio-cultural fair visited by millions of Hindus) held at Sangam (confluence of three holy rivers), Allahabad. The analysis carried out and results obtai...

The extent of information among various sections of society is termed by many scholars as ‘scientific literacy’ and there is widespread realization that the level of scientific literacy in many sectors is still too low. The term ‘scientific literacy’ is contentious for the simple reason that no citizen could be defined as ‘Scientifically illiterate...

TV is a powerful medium of mass communication, and therefore, since its invention science communicators have competed primarily with news and entertainment, programmes on politics, sports, films, economics and social issues, to expand its share of telecast space (Farmelo G, 1997, 2005 ) This article focuses on cultural mismatch between the science...

This paper is based on the research on Public Understanding of Science (PUS) conducted during Kumbh and Ardh-kumbh festivals in India. The analysis carried out on the data collected during survey study and results obtained during this period were reported after every survey. The conceptual model known as ‘cultural distance model’ and empirical meth...

Spreading scientific temper in culturally diverse societies is a complex undertaking. While science progresses by means of what is called the scientific methodology, peoples’ culture is rooted in tradition and convention. And while a common citizen does not have the wherewithal to validate knowledge through the rigours of scientific methodology, th...

The notion of a ‘scientific temper’, embedded in the political discourse in India, transcends the boundaries of ‘science’. It is rooted in ideas promoted by the European Enlightenment, and is generally expressed as a secular value system. In the course of introducing the notion of a ‘scientific temper’ to the Indian population bitter debates ensued...

It is only a few illiterate Business Management Experts who believe that they generate wealth and deserve pay packets in tonnes. Wealth generation is rooted in scientific and technological knowledge, innovation and labour, which in turn transform society. A society that does not value science and re-invents science-society relationship, is doomed t...

In India, as can be observed in any society, scepticism runs parallel to dogmatism, through history. A society must be judged by dominant philosophical consciousness that determines the social, cultural and intellectual thought structures and consequent actions of a common citizen. The process of formation of thought complexes in societies with his...

Introduction

Though the studies in the area of public understanding of science started with probing the publics' attitude towards science and scientists, more recently, efforts to map the understanding of public/s started with varied notions such as scientific literacy, civic scientific literacy, public engagement of science, public understanding of science, cu...

There exists a distinct disconnect between scientists' perception of natural reality and people's worldview. This 'disconnect' though has dialectical relationship with science communication processes, however, causes impediments in the propagation of scientific ideas. Those ideas, which are placed at large cultural distance, do not easily become a...

In this discussion I will argue that science played an important role in the historical development of a democracy in India. This development was slow but persistent and was aided by modern scientific ideas coming to India through books and travellers somewhere around the 18th century. The pace of scientific dissemination increased with the establi...

Early history The flow of scientific ideas from west to east was a gradual process and had started in seventeenth century. However, the history of 'modern science' communication goes back to the latter half of the nineteenth century (Raza et al 2009, 310) 1 . The intrusion of new technologies, which constituted the bedrock of British imperialism, t...

But cultural development is historical and the cultural history of human society is expressed in the human being's mastery of nature by the discoveries of science and advance of technology from the stone implements to molecular biology, agricultural chemistry and the micro chips, et cetera. It is this recognition of the obsolescence that overtakes...

The history of science communication in India, though largely a neglected area of investigation, suggests that the first efforts to communicate modern scientific ideas originating in the West were made during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of science books were translated from English into Indian languages. Small groups in the...

There exists a distinct disconnect between scientists' perception of nature and people's worldview. This 'disconnect' though has dialectical relationship with science communication processes which, causes impediments in the propagation of scientific ideas. Those ideas, which are placed at large cultural distance, do not easily become a part of cogn...

The present article investigates public understanding of HIV/AIDS related issues that touch the thought structure of common citizen, among the Indian public. Analysis is based on a representative sample collected from 10 states of India. The authors have also analysed the relative cultural distance at which men and women, as separate groups, could...

The history of science communication in India, though largely a neglected area of investigation, suggests that the first efforts to communicate modern scientific ideas originating in the west were made during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of science books were translated from English into Indian languages 1 . Small groups in t...

1 Public Understanding of Science is an area constituted by those scholars who essentially acquired expertise in various established academic disciplines and shifted their attention towards a few specific issues related to the science-society interface. The discipline though recognised as a legitimate area of research has not come out of all its te...

This chapter gives a historical account of turning points that mark the ever-changing relationship between modern science and the public at large. Scholars recognize the importance of that, but assert that there is a growing gap between the scientist’s way of configuring nature and the people’s world view. This led to an intense debate about the sc...

A large number of young educated volunteers in our country armed with idealism to serve the people take upon themselves the task of disseminating scientific and technical ideas among masses. At times it is an organized effort through science clubs, non-governmental organizations, but the individual efforts, which go unregistered, also contribute a...

The development of an ability to raise questions and seek answers is an important turning point on the trajectory of human evolution. Through the ages mankind has repeatedly asked a large number of the same or similar questions and, in this manner, developed conceptual frameworks to explain natural realities. The divergence between our application...

In the seventies three changes came about. Firstly, masses lost hope that freedom from British will bring about a major change in their lives. They became restless and protested. As a consequence the ruling classes faced a major crisis of governance. Turmoil effected Indian polity intensely. Secondly, this hopelessness was reflected in popular Indi...

Science films need science channel Gauhar Raza India started pondering on notions such as ‘scientific temper’ in the 1940s, much before science communication became a buzzword, but has lost its zeal to fight the unscientific, reactionary and obsolete somewhere along the way. Strange, given that this was the first country to pass a science policy re...

Cover Listening to Faiz is a subversive act January 2011 By Gauhar Raza Yes, even today … Share Tweet alt Sworup Nhasiju Being unfamiliar with the name of Faiz Ahmad Faiz and what it signifies can make one extremely unwelcome in the literary circles of North India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as most of the countries that boast a sizeable So...

We live surrounded by the apparatus of science: the Diesel engine and the experiment, the bottle of aspirins and the survey of opinion. We are hardly conscious of them; but behind them we are becoming conscious of a new importance in science. We are coming to understand that science is not a haphazard collection of manufacturing techniques carried...

Public Understanding of Science is an area constituted by those scholars who essentially acquired expertise in various established academic disciplines and shifted their attention towards a few specific issues related to the science–society interface. The discipline though recognised as a legitimate area of research has not come out of all its teet...

The present article investigates public understanding of HIV/AIDS related issues that touch the thought structure of common citizen, among the Indian public. Analysis is based on a representative sample collected from 10 states of India. The authors have also analysed the relative cultural distance at which men and women, as separate groups, could...

Shabbir Ahmad Khan , was born at a time that is best described by the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ most celebrated book ‘A Tale of Two cities’. “It was the best of times….”. The memories of brutalities that followed the first war of independence, 1857, were fading away and the masses were about to rise against the imperial powers once agai...

In the year 2005, Kashmir was hit by an earthquake. The current quake was the biggest to strike the region in the past 100 years. Entire Kashmir valley, on both sides of line of control, trembled under the influence of shock waves that travelled far and wide. The tremors left large areas of Uri and Tangdhar region completely devastated. On the othe...

The objective of the present paper is an attempt to measure the public understanding of science in the area of health and hygiene and test the efficacy of “cultural distance model”. A pre-tested open-ended questionnaire was used for administering cross-sectional surveys at a religio-cultural festival in India. 3484 individuals were interviewed and...

Indigenous culture as a knowledge system [English] Complex concepts such as cultural identity, gender issues and the effects of colonialism, politics, and power structures on societies form part of the debate around indigenous culture as a knowledge system. This article makes a contribution to the debate by addressing cultural issues encountered du...

In the last week of February, 2002, a carnage was engineered by RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and other Hindu Fundamentalist organisation in the western province of Gujarat, India. It was an organised pogrom, unleashed with the connivence of state and ruling BJP. With the support of Prashant (Ahmedabad) and SHMAT (Delhi), two NGOs, the authors carried out...

This article attempts to define cultural distance and proposes a method to empirically measure it. Using the survey data on perceptions of common citizens, the authors measure this distance in this article by the number of years spent in formal schooling. Cultural distances based on people's explanations of various natural phenomena have been mappe...

The paper discusses and presents the comparative results of large scale surveys, on public attitude towards and understanding of science, conducted in India, in 1989, 1990, 1995, and in Nepal, in 1996. The populace was probed through open-ended questionnaires on four different areas of knowledge viz. "astronomy and cosmology", "geography", "agricul...

In September 1994 a plague epidemic hit a number of cities in India. Though the spread of the disease was controlled within a short period of about one month, its influences on various channels of information, on the functioning of government departments (especially health and sanitation), on the scientific community and on people's scientific info...

Formal education, cultural practices, profession, etc., play a decisive role in shaping peoples' attitude as well as understanding, and is reflected while responding to scientific or natural phenomena. In order to measure the scientific knowledge base of the people and its likely determinants the data were collected during two surveys on peoples' u...

The knowledge base and indigenous technologies within which craftsmen produce their artefacts has been transmitted through generations using ancient technologies and the oral traditions. The advent of modern institutions, including western science and technology, has left these craftsmen isolated due to their marginal role in the world-market econo...