Science and religion have confronted each other, but kept a porous boundary between them

The Indian Science Congress would usually pass every year after eliciting as much interest as the Major League Baseball but this time it succeeded in drumming up heat and dust comparable to the Indian Premier League. As a thriller writer interested in the history and philosophy of science, one of the themes my work explores is the connections and correlations between ancient and modern science. I was naturally piqued by the topics taken up at the Science Congress and the sharp reactions they have evoked. One group of people nearly had me shading my eyes and scanning the skies for spacecraft returning home after completing its 9,000-year-long intergalactic voyage; whereas another set of people almost made me wonder if yoga was invented by Americans who hold the patents and copyrights to their name and whether I should start paying royalty each time I sit cross-legged on the floor.

The history of science is a much more complex, unwieldy and colourful beast that cannot be confined in a cartographic cage of any kind. Scientific ideas and their development over the millennia transcend geographic boundaries and beautifully defy any such dogmatism. And there was no electric fence separating science and religion or even superstition. Science and religion confronted and even collided with each other, but they did not shy away from each other; they always maintained a malleable and porous boundary between them and kept seeping into each other. We need to look no further than the life and work of Srinivasa Ramanujan to see much of this in evidence.

The short, snappy equations that Ramanujan scribbled out on scrap papers have professional mathematicians scratching their heads to this day, almost a century after his premature death. The equations are as rational and logical as modern science would like to have it. However, Ramanujan himself claimed that an equation held no meaning for him unless it expressed the thought of God. He even went a step further and said that it was the Goddess of Namagiri who appeared in his dreams and revealed those equations to him. How do we think about Ramanujan’s equations without also wondering about what he thought of them and where they came from?

On the flip side, what would have become of the ultra-orthodox Vaishnavite Brahmin in India if he had chosen to remain so and not cut off his kudumi and set sail for England? Or if the rational, atheist Englishman G.H. Hardy in imperial Britain hadn’t seen the spark in the raw, unschooled colonial clerk and taken him under his wings?

If the Gods were willing to gift Ramanujan with theorems, the Japanese reversed the flow, offering theorems to the Gods. It was a religious custom that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries in the Edo period when Japan secluded itself from the rest of the world, sort of like North Korea now. Geometric theorems were colourfully etched on wooden tablets called sangaku and hung as offerings in Shinto and Buddhist shrines around the country.

Frederick Soddy, a British scientist who had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, discovered a peculiar geometric phenomenon involving six spheres, in the 1930s. Soddy’s hexlet, as the idea became known, now has applications in computer graphics. Much to the surprise of mathematicians, the same hexlet was found etched on an old sangaku tablet in an ancient Shinto shrine in the outskirts of Tokyo.

Japanese were not the only people who portrayed mathematical phenomena in places of worship. The intricate artwork on the walls and ceilings of medieval mosques and madrassas in the Islamic world house a treasure trove of geometric patterns that are now being analysed by modern mathematicians. One such place is the Darb-e-Imam shrine in Iran. Completed in the 15th century, Darb-e-Iman’s shrine’s marvellous girih designs display a near-perfect replica of what mathematicians call an aperiodic pattern, something that became popular in the late 20th century: Penrose tiling.

Unlike Persian artisans of old, Roger Penrose was able to patent and copyright his discoveries. That served him in good stead when Kimberly-Clark took the market by storm by embossing the same aperiodic patterns on their brand of toilet papers; Penrose was able to sue and make them withdraw the rolls from the shelves.

Back home, divine sanction may or may not have been granted to the Devadasi system, but Devadasis happened to be some of the most learned people in ancient India. They were the custodians of the 64 arts through the generations. One of those arts was mlechita-kutarka-vikalpa, which roughly means the art of communicating illogically or incomprehensibly like a foreigner. This art came in handy to Devadasis when they wrote love letters that they wanted only the designated patron to understand. The Kama Sutra, in one of its less popular portions, provides a nice description of this communication technique. Modern cryptographers call this method encryption by substitution.

Substitution ciphers were widely used in the ancient world for military communications. They remained uncracked for a long time, but not forever. Late in the 9th century, Abu Yusuf Al-Kindi, an Arab scholar from Basra in Iraq, published a technique for cracking substitution ciphers. Based on what is known as frequency analysis in modern statistics, Al-Kindi presented the first PoC (Proof-of-Concept) for another buzzword doing the rounds these days: analytics.

While the world rightly celebrates Alan Turning and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park who effectively won World War II for the Allies, let’s also spare a thought for Abu Yusuf Al-Kindi. And for the Devadasis for their little-known contribution: millennia before the counterculture movement took root in the world, these ladies were using science to make love not war.

(M.N. Krish works in consulting and is the author of The Steradian Trail: Book #0 of the Infinity Cycle . E-mail: krish@mnkrish.com .)