Names such as Shanu Lahiri (1928-2013) and J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) will not ring a bell for most people. Given our general ignorance and apathy, this is not unusual. Lahiri is from one of the earliest batches of female students to enter the Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta in 1947. She went on to become a painter, an art educator, and a sculptor and formed the first women artists’ collective, The Group. She was one of Calcutta’s most prominent public artists.
Haldane was an outstanding scientist and a polymath who contributed significantly to physiology, genetics, biochemistry, statistics, biometry, cosmology and philosophy. He was not formally qualified in these disciplines. His early science tutor was his father, J.S. Haldane, a physiologist at Oxford. Haldane wrote on zoology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, geography, astronomy, meteorology, politics, psychology, non-violence, military affairs, theology, and literature. Along with R.A. Fisher and Sewall Wright, Haldane laid down the mathematical foundations of evolutionary genetics. The three are regarded as the founders of mathematical population genetics.
In my last column, I wrote about the process of electrolysis that can separate the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of water. If the electrical energy that drives electrolysis is non-fossil fuel based, then the hydrogen produced can be the basis for a decarbonised economy. A century ago, in a fascinating lecture at Cambridge, Haldane had said the same thing. “… the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only... Water-power is not, I think, a probable substitute, on account of its small quantity, seasonal fluctuation, and sporadic distribution... Ultimately, we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol.” Haldane had anticipated the need to use renewable energy for electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen.
Drawn by India’s ancient civilisations, religions, languages and cultures, at the height of his professional reputation, Haldane moved to India in 1957 as a research professor at the Indian Statistical Institute and subsequently acquired Indian citizenship in 1961. At ISI, he initiated ecological and biometrical research projects. In his lectures, he often quoted passages and verses in several Indian languages.
Calcutta honoured both Lahiri and Haldane by associating their work and name with the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, now a major thoroughfare. A public sculpture by Shanu Lahiri, Paroma, once graced the traffic rotary at the Science City crossing along the EM Bypass, and a stretch of the EM Bypass between the Chingrighata and the Science City crossings was named J.B.S. Haldane Avenue. Both stalwarts fell from grace when a strange Bengali phrase that translates into ‘World Bengal’ took over. The nearly-40-feet-tall sculpture seemingly disappeared into thin air to be replaced by a metal mesh globe. Irrespective of what the phrase exactly conveys, it is everywhere and associated with everything in West Bengal. This, I presume, is because the powers that be wish it to be so. At the national stage, things do not seem any different.
Disdain for stalwarts and their work is perhaps symptomatic of our collective apathy towards the wider world and the society at large which allows our leaders to do as they wish. Laws, policies, and names of public spaces and roads are changed at will, and it does not seem to matter whether such changes benefit society or not. In a democratic set-up, if citizens are passive and not vigilant, democracy remains procedural rather than substantive, the environmental, social and economic outcomes of which are suboptimal. The order of the three realms is deliberate. No matter what, in the absence of environmental sustainability, a society cannot be sustained, and economic prosperity is nigh impossible in a dysfunctional society. So long as democracy remains procedural, sustainable development will remain elusive irrespective of the utterances of our political and business leaders.
Anamitra Anurag Danda is an environmentalist. Views are personal
