Cultural Anti-Darwinism: The Epistemological Crisis in Postcolonial Societies
Arguments such as “Darwin’s theory of evolution is not something to be celebrated,” “There is no real proof for it,” “It is only a theory, so it cannot be taken as truth,” or the familiar “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still around?” — and even claims like “Our scriptures already knew evolution; just look at the sequence of the Dashavatara!” — frequently appear in our society. Yet these are not trivial notions to be laughed away. They reveal not only deep flaws in our understanding of epistemology, but also a fundamental inability to distinguish between theoretical knowledge and symbolic literature. They expose a cultural temperament unable to differentiate between foundational scientific theory and metaphorical narratives.
At this point, an important question arises: “Anti-Darwin arguments exist in other countries too. Then what is the difference between theirs and ours?”
In the West today, opposition to Darwin is largely confined to religious fundamentalist groups. It is a clash between scientific reasoning and scriptural authority. They have never needed an argument like: “Our ancestors already knew everything, so Darwin is wrong.”
But in India—and similarly in Turkey, Arab countries, and several African postcolonial societies—anti-Darwinism is cultural. Its purpose is different. It is an attempt to protect a wounded civilizational pride hurt by British colonialism and to reassert symbolic cultural supremacy. The real meaning of claims like “Our ancestors already knew all this” lies here. Rather than treat these assertions as shallow arrogance, we should understand them as psychological attempts to reduce cognitive dissonance—an effort to reconcile unchangeable mythic truths with the ever-changing, evidence-based truths of modern science. This is India’s epistemic crisis.
As nationalist sentiment becomes stronger and as the insistence on cultural purity increases, a new claim has emerged: “Darwin’s theory is foreign, therefore we can reject it.” Consequently, the opposition to evolution here is far deeper than in the West.
This culturally rooted anti-Darwinism, spread across multiple layers of our society, may in the coming decades distance India permanently from the modern scientific and philosophical world. This essay is written to underscore that danger.
Darwin’s Theory: A Civilizational Milestone
In the past two or three centuries since the rise of modern science, numerous discoveries and theories have changed human thought. But only a few of them were truly revolutionary. Darwin’s theory of evolution is one such milestone.
Every scientific theory develops through two vectors:
1.Internal intellectual evolution within that field,
2.External socio-economic and political conditions that make new ideas possible.
Applying this framework to Darwin, we must examine both:
How biological thought transformed over two centuries, from Baconian empiricism to Lyell’s geology,And what socio-economic and political conditions in Europe shaped Darwin’s thinking.
When we do this, it becomes clear that Darwin’s theory did not fall from an empty sky. It was the final outcome of the scientific, philosophical, and political consciousness that had evolved in Europe over two centuries. Darwin’s work was shaped by a conceptual atmosphere already created long before he was born.
But Indian thought still imagines the scientist as a brilliant individual mind, not as the culmination of generations of collective intellectual effort. We view knowledge as revelation, vision, or mystical insight—never as the product of systematic research. Thus, the idea that one person’s knowledge may be the outcome of two centuries of collective inquiry feels strange to us.
This epistemic gap applies not only to Darwin but to all scientific knowledge. Modernity, for us, was a historical accident— a colonial import. For them, it was the result of rational philosophical inquiry.
The Two Indian Responses: Mythification & Scientization
This lack of scientific understanding has taken two major forms in India:
1. Mythification of science
Turning every new scientific discovery into something “already present in our ancient texts.” Claiming that the world is finally discovering what our ancestors already knew.
2. Scientizing myth
Treating every line of mythology as hidden science — genetic engineering in the birth of the Kauravas, plastic surgery in reattaching Ganesha’s head, and so on. Asserting that decoding these “mysteries” will reveal India’s superior ancient science.
This has produced a hybrid epistemology where no one can clearly distinguish evidence from belief. It distorts the learner’s relationship with knowledge itself, trapping them between “sacred truth” and “modern truth,” unable to reconcile the two. Without understanding science as a continuous process of debate and verification, students become vulnerable to this hybrid chaos.
We criticize the recent removal of Darwin’s theory from school textbooks — and rightly so. But we must also remember that even when it was in the syllabus, we never taught it as a symbol of modern scientific consciousness. We reduced it to a chapter, a ten-mark question, a five-mark diagram. Students never learned its intellectual depth or philosophical significance.
Darwin must be taught not as an exam topic but as a revolutionary idea that redefined life, challenged religious dogma, and repositioned humanity in the universe. Teachers must take responsibility for this; a syllabus alone cannot cultivate scientific temper.
The Reversal of Enlightenment
Cultural anti-Darwinism is not new; it has long been rooted in our society. But today it is evolving into a reversal of the Enlightenment process itself. If society continues to believe that truth exists only in sacred texts and not in rational inquiry, we may slowly slip back into a pre-Enlightenment era.
Europe once lived under scholasticism — where all knowledge was derived from ancient texts, where intellectual life meant interpreting old books rather than discovering new truths. This created centuries of stagnation. That very mindset is resurfacing in India today.
If this continues for a century or two, what will happen?
India’s very civilizational shape will change.
Rational inquiry, experimentation, and questioning will recede.
Ancient texts will be decoded instead of new knowledge being created.
Interpretation will replace discovery.
Boasting will replace research.
Museums of cultural pride will replace scientific laboratories.
Universities will lose their cognitive vitality.
Students will memorize verses instead of testing hypotheses.
Scientific papers will be replaced by “re-interpretations of ancient sciences.”
Questions will be replaced by quotations.
Unless thinkers like Bacon, Galileo, Descartes — modern rationalists — symbolically re-emerge in India to defend the value of discovering truth rather than rephrasing the old, the situation will only worsen. India’s future in education and culture depends on reconnecting with the spirit of modernity, on claiming rationality and scientific temper as our rightful heritage.
f India is to become the home of another Darwin or another Newton, our society must embrace scientific inquiry with the same intensity that Europe did for two centuries. Recovering scientific temper, therefore, is not merely a pedagogic reform — it is a civilizational necessity.
