Thoughts on Jayant Narlikar
Thoughts on Jayant Narlikar
Introduction
Recently, on May 20th, Jayant Narlikar passed away. Usually, I wouldn’t comment on news like this—but this time, I felt like I had to share a few thoughts. I’ve never been his most prolific reader, or an ardent follower, or anything of that sort. What he was, simply, was an intellectual influence on me. He even got the front-page review by Times of India , which was… fun to see.
My introduction to him wasn’t through any academic reference or someone recommending him. It was pure blind chance. In my final year of undergrad, when I was desperately trying to make use of my soon-to-expire library access, I stumbled upon his book The Scientific Edge. This accidental discovery had more influence on my view of the cultural outlook on Indian science and the public’s understanding of it than any other schoolbook I’ve ever read.
It reminds me of that Emerson quote:
“The great writer is the one who, by his words, awakens the thoughts that are already in the reader’s mind.”
My Relation With Science
For most of my later high school and early undergrad years, I was a science fundamentalist. I was absolutely convinced that rationalism was the best way forward, and every other subject was bullshit. Every runt who ever talked about political philosophy? I thought they didn’t have the “mind” to enter science.
I was obsessed with moon landings, Mars rovers, techno-feudalism, you name it. Morality? Didn’t even register. Even Dawkins couldn’t persuade me to consider leniency or ethical nuance, even though I was ironically a high benefactor of such morality. Yes, I was kinda narcissistic.
But over time, as I read more, a pessimistic itch kept bothering me. Then came Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions which I haven’t even fully read, but even just its influence on discourse shook something loose in me. Funny how sometimes you don’t need to read a book for it to ignite with your worldview, just its shadow is enough. And then there was Narlikar’s book. I had picked it up for a light read. That year, the only other “fun” book I had read was Fooled by Randomness, and compared to Taleb’s flamboyant style, The Scientific Edge felt grounded and civil.
Still, something didn’t sit right. Not about science itself, but about how we frame science. How we frame history. Civilizational progress. Why do we always wrap our histories in golden foil? Why do civilizations compete like athletes in a race for relevance?
Interlude: On Civilizations, Arrogance, and Cooking
Lately, I’ve become skeptical of the “great past” narrative that every civilization seems to cling to. Be it Pax Romana or Pax Indica, it doesn’t feel like the right lens to judge human progress. It’s all too “monkey-build, monkey-praise” for me. To me, civilizations are fleeting attempts at order by curious apes, boiling in a paisa (ಪಾಯಸ) of planetary abundance.
Let us cook yet!
We’ve got millions of years ahead.
I’ve got more to say on this: on historical chauvinism, technological self-delusion, anthropocentric assholism, and more. But I’ll save that for another piece.
What Narlikar offered in The Scientific Edge was fun. His physics-verified brain gave me a kind of clarity that just stuck with me. It isn’t leaking away any time soon.
Thoughts From the Book
They say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but here I am, judging a person by their book. It was the first time I came across a professor with a veteran scientific background who also had an academic interest in Sanskrit and wasn’t just bluffing it. He could actually read it in its original form (or at least read the decryptions of those who did). The only other person I’ve seen do this is Amartya Sen.
He makes calm, common-sense arguments against the glorified takes about India’s so-called “golden past.” That’s when I realized the “great civilization” argument was kinda moot.
He also introduces the idea of “Parishishta” (परिशिष्ट) - things added at the end , and how later writers often appended their own ideas to ancient texts to claim them as part of the original. That blew my mind. It wasn’t just a critique of mythology, it was a systemic critique of how we handle legacy and legitimacy.
But there are two passages from the book that haven’t left my head since1. The first is this story:
“Nana Phadnis, the efficient administrator of the eighteenth-century Maratha rulers, the Peshwas, wanted to build a bridge on the river Karmanashi near Kashi. Attempts by Indian bridge builders failed as the pillars of the proposed bridge kept on collapsing and sinking. The person in charge initiated religious ceremonies to propitiate evil spirits, but those did not help either. When Nana heard of this, he put a stop to the ceremonies and invited an English engineer named Baker. Baker brought suitable machinery for pumping out water and laying firm foundations and was able to complete the job.”
Why should it have taken an outsider to come and solve our problems?
And then, this one:
“…there seems to have been no incentive from the rulers or clever intellectuals to undertake such worldly problems as how to make weapons more effective or how to add to the comforts of the palace by new devices. Even when the British came on the scene and were still not powerful as a ruling force, their weapons were admired and purchased by the rulers for their internecine warfare. But it does not seem to have occurred to a ruler to set up a local research and development effort to duplicate these weapons or to improve their performance.”
This reverse engineering instinct still hasn’t really taken root here. I’m all for intellectual property and all that jazz, but when it comes to genuinely world-class tech, you need a kind of obsessive, garage-born, technological-nerd energy to tear things apart just to see how they tick.
“Used to be, folks’d tear shit down just to know how it worked. Now they just wait for the update.”
The book taught me to think differently. What I’ve got here is a reflection of a reminiscence of that shift. Twenty years from now I might come back to this and feel a faint ripple, like some sediment I didn’t notice back then that still managed to shift the shape of the river just a little. I know I’m judging an entire career, a lifetime of thoughts, ideas, and books from just a few pages.
But I think I’m judging right.
Which brings me to why I wrote all this in the first place…
Respect
My intellectual parasocial relationship with Narlikar might just seem like a blip compared to hordes of fans, science buffs, and nostalgia uncles grieving over the passing of an intellectual giant.
But I’d still like to make a point:
There’s respect.
From a once arrogant, ungrateful pessimist—there’s respect. Rest in peace, great sir.
You’ve ignited a small soul’s mind.
Footnotes
Of course I looked it up. What do you think I am, some kind of genius? I just remembered the feeling it gave me. ↩