Nehru became the first President of the Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI), a trade union of scientists with at least a BSc degree or its equivalent, founded in the late 1940s. One of ASWI’s stated aims was to promote scientific temper. Pushpa Mitra Bhargava was on its first Executive Committee and, between 1950 and 1953, served as Secretary of its Hyderabad branch. The association began well but soon slid into virtual irrelevance. Among its early members was M Channa Reddy, then a young minister and later Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. As his political stature grew, his reliance on superstition grew alongside it. So anxious was he about holding on to power that he carried a “lucky” wand prescribed by a godman to ward off the evil eye.

ASWI’s decline was rapid, and by 1963 its revival was virtually impossible. Bhargava, along with Satish Dhawan and Abdur Rahman, decided to start afresh. They set up the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Temper, convinced that the country needed a national body devoted solely to this purpose. They published a statement on scientific temper in Seminar, spelling out what the term meant and why it mattered. The postal address of the Society was Post Box No. 237, New Delhi-1. Membership, at Rs 5 per annum, was open to anyone over eighteen willing to sign a declaration – a simple but demanding condition:

I believe that knowledge can be acquired only through human endeavour and not through revelation, and that all problems can and must be faced in terms of man’s moral and intellectual resources without invoking supernatural powers.

The Society was launched on the sidelines of the international symposium on nucleic acids held at RRLH in January 1964, the same meeting that brought Francis Crick and several leading molecular biologists to Hyderabad, as described earlier. Mohit Sen and Maqdoom Mohiuddin were also present at this launch.

What no one anticipated was that the Society’s most modest requirement would prove crippling. To the astonishment and growing discomfort of those involved, scientist after scientist across the country refused to sign the short declaration affirming a rational premise: that no agency outside the scope of scientific explanation could solve individual or collective problems.

Why any scientist would hesitate to endorse what amounted to the bare minimum definition of scientific temper was baffling. Yet this seemingly innocuous condition became the Society’s undoing. There were scarcely any takers within the scientific community for a principle they were presumed to practise. The extent to which scientific temper was missing, not only among the public but among scientists themselves, was only beginning to reveal itself. In any scientifically advanced country, such a response would have been unthinkable.

The Society for the Promotion of Scientific Temper died before it could even learn to walk. It marked Bhargava’s first failed attempt to institutionalise scientific temper in the country, and the failure was sobering. It showed him, first, that scientific temper could not be assumed even among scientists in India; second, that commitment to it was as essential to scientific and technological progress as it was to social and economic health. Its absence not only nourished superstition, but also degraded the quality of science itself. The episode did not dampen Bhargava’s resolve; it hardened it by revealing the scale of resistance he was up against.

Bhargava was not one to give up. He used every available opportunity to press the case for inculcating a scientific attitude. By the 1970s, he had become a well-known and persistent advocate of scientific temper, writing incisively and speaking widely across the country. His commitment to rationality and his clarity in articulating the scientific method marked all his writings and public engagements.

In the mid-1970s, Rais Ahmed, a physicist from Aligarh Muslim University, was Director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). He is best remembered for shaping the prevailing 10+2+3 system of education across the country. He also formulated the national policy on vocational education, intended to allow students to choose between vocational training and university education after school – a reform that, in practice, did not unfold as envisaged. Bhargava knew Rais Ahmed well, and their shared commitment to scientific temper strengthened their association.

In May 1975, on his return from a visit to Africa, Rais Ahmed was quarantined at Delhi airport for not having taken the mandatory yellow fever inoculation. Bhargava happened to be in Delhi at the time and went to see him. Both being deeply interested in rational thinking, their conversation quickly turned to the problem of how science was being taught to children. Science, they agreed, was not merely physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology, nor a catalogue of facts, laws, or technological achievements. Teaching science as spectacle or gadgetry, as was common, entirely missed the point. What was needed was a way of conveying the excitement of doing science: the method it follows, its underlying philosophy, how it expands knowledge, and how it equips one to think clearly and solve everyday problems.

Rais Ahmed floated the idea of creating audio-visual material for a new kind of science exhibition that would do precisely this. If Bhargava agreed to conceive and set it up, NCERT would provide financial support. The exhibition would form part of the National Science Exhibition in Delhi, held every year on November 14, Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday.

The idea appealed to Bhargava. Translating something as abstract and elusive as the scientific method into a visual form that could engage both children and adults was intellectually demanding and called for real imagination. He accepted the invitation.

Excited, and with ideas crowding his head, Bhargava returned to Hyderabad and stayed up through the night writing the first draft – a 50-page script for the proposed exhibition. Over the next few days, he also worked out the accompanying audio-visual material and live experiments, determined that the exhibition should not collapse under the weight of text. The proposal would go through several revisions, but when the exhibition finally took shape, the basic format laid down in that first draft remained largely intact.

The scheme was so engaging, and the exposition so deliberately simple, that had anyone warned Bhargava that this attempt to explain the basic tenets of science would provoke a major storm, he would have laughed it off. No one, not even the shrewdest, could have imagined that a serious and honest attempt by a scientist to explain to young people what science is, how knowledge is generated through its method, and what obligations follow from accepting that method, would escalate into a major confrontation with the establishment.

Yet that is precisely what happened. That controversy would eventually draw in the Government at the Centre, a State Government, the country’s most influential national body responsible for research, policy, and the production of educational material for primary and secondary education, and India’s apex organisation for scientific research. Along the way, it would entangle two Prime Ministers, two Union Ministers for Education, one Chief Minister, one State Education Minister, two Directors of NCERT, three Directors General of CSIR, several Secretaries and Joint Secretaries in central and state ministries, and a long list of politicians, scientists, educationists, and artists.

It was at NCERT that Bhargava came face to face with an old acquaintance from his Lucknow days, Athindra Nath Bose, an MSc classmate, whose professional path crossed his again, somewhat ironically, after years of no contact. In fact, Bose was the only classmate he encountered again, precisely because their ideological trajectories had diverged so completely. Bose was now heading NCERT’s science division. It soon became clear that the distance between them had only widened: Bhargava had moved steadily leftwards, while Bose had travelled in the opposite direction, towards the extreme right.

Their ideological divergence was not new. Bose’s views had earlier clashed with Bhargava’s iconoclastic approach when Bhargava authored Learning Science – Part I for Class Six, a national textbook that broke decisively from convention by presenting science as an integrated way of understanding everyday life rather than a collection of facts. Bose did not approve of it, but Bhargava had won that battle. Bose had not forgotten it, and he was in no mood to lose another.

An unsuspecting Bhargava threw himself into the task and began assembling a team that could handle everything the exhibition demanded – writing, drawing, painting, design, photography, videography, film, sound, models, instruments, experiments, and more. The core group included Bhargava, Manorama; Laxma Goud and Surya Prakash, two outstanding painters; A Shareef, a teacher of art history in Hyderabad; M Hasan, an exceptional photographer; Kaiser Jamil, a scientist; PV Satheesh, a documentary filmmaker; MW Pandit, a scientist who was also a magician and musician; PS Kolhatkar and P Gopinath, two gifted instrument engineers; and Sanjar Ali Khan, a physicist and head of the Hyderabad Science Society.

The first meeting of this large group started after dinner at 9 pm on June 28, 1975, at C-3 RRLH, Bhargava’s house, and went on till midnight. Meetings twice a month soon became routine.

The idea was powerful enough to change how people thought, especially in a society steeped in superstition. The exhibition had to be concept-oriented, not fact-oriented. It grew out of the need to explain to students and teachers what science really was: its method, its philosophy, its attitude, and how this way of thinking could be extended to other disciplines and to everyday problem-solving. Unlike most science exhibitions that celebrate achievements or gadgets, this one would focus on the method by which scientists acquire knowledge.

Excerpted with permission from PM Bhargava and The Man and The Making of Modern Biology in India, Chandana Chakrabarti, South Side Books.

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