Talk by Renny Thomas (Sociology & Social Anthropology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal)

My book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (2021), explored ethnographically, the various ways in which Indian scientists lived their religious and scientific lives. In this lecture, I attempt to examine conversations and debates from the early days of space science in India by examining how different Indian stakeholders responded to the new developments in understanding the cosmos and how they imagined space and space science. The ISRO, or the Indian Space Research Organization is one of the largest and generously funded techno-scientific projects in post-colonial India with many successes, ups and downs. The intention of this lecture is not to discuss the case of ISRO. Instead, the lecture examines the early days of ‘space science’; the small history of a big scientific project in modern India. Based on archival sources, I look at how the cosmos and space were discussed in the parliamentary debates and the curiosity it generated among various actors in the early 1960s. The lecture analyzes the nature of those debates to see how space science was imagined religiously and how categories from religion were employed to describe the nature of space, cosmos, and space science.

Renny Thomas is currently the Taki Visiting Global Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (NYU-Gallatin), New York (2024-2025) and an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. He has been a Charles Wallace Fellow in Social Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK (2017-2018), and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Cultural History at Friedrich-Schiller University-Jena, Germany (2022-2023). He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations (Routledge, 2022), Religion and Technology: Power, the Sacred, and the Digital (forthcoming), and Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (forthcoming).