ONE year from now, on Feb 12, 2009, much of the world will celebrate the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, a scientist whose theory — based on laborious empirical observation and once-in-a-millennium insights — forever changed mankind’s perceptions of itself and of the natural world around.

Next year will also mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s great work On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

The man who introduced me to elementary Darwin happened to be a devout Muslim. Maulana Surti who taught a general science course to humanities undergraduates at the Aligarh university was also a genial and witty man, open to disagreements from his students, including questions about his faith, but never failing to rib them back for failing to spar with him as equals.

By the time I went to Aligarh it had begun to decay into an officially subsidised Muslim ghetto. The history faculty was an exception. It was bristling with incongruent energy in the decrepit environs of an increasingly obscurantist campus. The stewardship of Prof Irfan Habib, one of the finest Marxist historians of our times, had successfully put Aligarh on the global map of high academia. It was a status symbol I flaunted for years as a student of history.

But Surti Sahib was a different kettle of fish. “Maulana,” I asked him during a packed lecture on Darwin, “on the one hand you teach us the theory of evolution but by your faith you obviously believe in the precept of creation. That must be very confusing.”

“Young man, who would know better than you that the world is based on contradictions.” The retort came without a second’s pause. The maulana’s prompt allusion to Mao Zedong’s major treatise on contradictions focused on an issue every student at the history faculty was expected to be familiar with. I have since been torn between Maulana Surti’s disarming wit and Irfan Habib’s wry humour, one that always underscored his scathing rebuttal of stereotype assumptions common among the ordinary historians in India and abroad.

Darwin’s work has been trashed and adored with passion but few have questioned as he did the key axiom common to all religions: the precept of creation. In a sense, going by his logic, the world is not about to see a clash of civilisations as much as it is confronting the challenges collectively posed by a diverse array of faiths to the innate questioning spirit of man, a spirit that is the fountainhead of all science.

It took the Pope 400 years after all to pardon Galileo for questioning (a word interchangeable with apostasy in my view) a core Biblical claim that the sun moved around the earth, when in fact it was heliocentric. Other ‘apostates’ have faced worse ordeals across the world, including, of course, in India. After all, most major religions of today were either born in the Middle East or in northern India and they mostly ended up rejecting the idea of evolution.

Orthodox Muslims, Christians and Jews are wary of the theory that questions the axiom of God as the Creator though in contemporary Hinduism a fascinating interpretation seems to have been conjured to balance the idea of Brahma as the creator and Vishnu’s 10 avatars as depiction of evolution from fish to humans passing in between through various stages as turtle, boar and so on.

Darwin’s ideas are not sacrosanct which is to be expected of any research that is open to scientific scrutiny. But the Nazis and their forerunners within the scientific community have manipulated Darwin’s conclusions to engender notions of racial segmentation. The greatest influence in the sudden development of racism in 19th century Europe was the replacement of the Christian belief that ‘God created all people equal’ by ‘Darwinism’.

By suggesting that man had evolved from more primitive creatures, and that some races had evolved further than others, it provided racism with a scientific mask.

For this reason, Darwin has also come to be described as the father of racism. His theory was taken up and commented on by such “official” founders of racism as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

The Nazis and other fascists then developed their racist ideology that found practical implementation. Among the practitioners of this genre of social Darwinism in India, the Hindu revivalist RSS idolised not only Nazi Germany and its treatment of the Jews, but advocated a similar policy for India’s Muslims. Historical obscurantism serves a purpose. It exists not just due to ignorance.

One of the most deified leaders of the RSS, the late Guru Golwalkar, armed his take of racial theory with another bit of obscurantism. He claimed that the Aryans, destined in his view to be the oldest residents of India and therefore its legitimate rulers, were originally inhabitants of the North Pole. But they did not migrate from there to India.

On the contrary, that particular part of the North Pole where the Aryans used to live was once located on the border between the modern Indian states of Orissa and Bihar! Read Golwalkar’s We, Our Nationhood Defined for more on this.

Darwin was not alone in his quest to put up his ideas on evolution to scientific scrutiny. In 1858, he received a letter suggesting ideas remarkably like his own; it was from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was collecting biological specimens in Southeast Asia.

Papers putting forth both points of view were duly presented at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. In an essay strikingly titled ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of revolution’, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, declared: “Without that light (biology) becomes a pile of sundry facts — some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.”

The elucidation of the structure of DNA, the unravelling of the genetic code, and the ability to sequence the entire genome of even complex organisms have served only to lay bare the processes that produce life, which all living organisms share, and show how evolutionary pressures act on those processes.

To many of us, Darwin also remains the quintessential scientist who had a great sense of humour. Who else in their right mind would be ready to exchange the lofty mythology of man’s creation and his great purpose on earth with a thesis that celebrates an accident by which from apes we turned into humans? Maulana Surti’s beatific smile could not mask his acceptance of this sense of absurdity and that is why he had such fun teaching us the theory of evolution.

The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin is as good an occasion as any to share the spirit of enquiry promoted by him. The gift of accommodation practised by Maulana Surti is a bonus.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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