ABSTRACT
Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), the largest People’s Science Movement (PSM) in India, is often appreciated for its organisational endeavours to promote scientific temper and catalyse a people-oriented science in Southern India. This chapter critically examines this claim by situating KSSP within the history of the debate on social relations of science in the twentieth century and its influences on Indian science after independence. The key argument here is that the successful organisation of the movement was closely linked to the constitution of a specific kind of scientific-citizen public that often played against the quasi-publics who critiqued the epistemological relationship between science and the developmentalist Indian state. KSSP thus became the vehicle of a particular kind of public engagement with science under the agency of the progressive middle-class intelligentsia. The movement’s attempt, the chapter argues, was to safeguard science from the epistemological critique from the counter-publics constituted by marginalised social groups and anti-developmentalist and deep ecological movements since the 1970s. This was achieved by formulating a perspective on science-society interface with scientism as its core while developing a sophisticated external shell that accommodated the critiques. The chapter argues that KSSP’s inability to abandon scientism from its ideological core eventually led to its weakening in the late 1990s and after.
