The Indian subcontinent is a cradle of human civilization with a rich history stretching back some 5,000 years. Today it is home to a quarter of the world's population. While the boundaries and identities of the modern states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives are recent inventions, the history, cultures, languages, and religions of South Asia are a single tapestry woven from many colored threads over the long millennia of cultural evolution.
South Asia is the home to four great religious traditions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism -- but it also has the largest population of Muslims in the world. South Asia is home to many Christians who trace their lineage back to the Apostle Thomas, who is said to have settled in Kerala in 52 CE. A scene of epic wars and foreign invasions, the conquerors and colonialists were invariably themselves won over, and they were as much changed by India as they themselves changed India's history.
In turn, missionaries and traders from the Indian subcontinent-Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim- spread their religions and cultures throughout Southeast and East Asia, leaving a profound mark on the cultures of Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.
Today, South Asia is a nexus in a global civilization, its children and grandchildren having traveled to every corner of the world, frequently joining the educated elites abroad and making significant contributions to arts and letters, science and industry, politics and finance. The continued story of Indian civilization is now a global and cosmopolitan enterprise and can no longer be contained in geographically boundaries in one corner of the world.
The history and complexity of this cultural tapestry is daunting to the outsider unfamiliar with the geography, languages, and idiosyncrasies of the region. And even those raised and schooled in South Asia generally only grasp a small portion of the whole fabric. To this we must add the recent exponential growth in scientific knowledge and the new understandings that this science and history bring to our different regional and religious narratives. All of this is also accompanied by new technologies and new values that threaten to undermine traditional cultures. India, Pakistan, and the other countries of the subcontinent are in the throes of fundamentalist reactions to modernity and globalization, much as we find throughout the world today in other settings and other idioms.
We have in the person of Varadaraja V. Raman, a gifted and gracious guide, who helps us understand the whole fabric and see the rich details of Indic civilization in this age of universal science. In so doing, he offers us also a way out of dangerous culture wars and clashing civilizations. A wiser and more peaceful man I have never met.
I got to know V.V. Raman first at the annual conferences of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. He became a prolific contributor to Metanexus's online journal and a beloved speaker at our on conferences. In 2004, V.V. was the Metanexus Senior Fellow and gave a series of six lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, which evolved into this book. More significantly, V.V. and I travelled together in 2005 on a grueling and exhilarating three-week speaking tour of India -- Bombay, Pune, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Madras, and Bangalore. A better travel companion and guide to India, I cannot imagine.
Varadaraja V. Raman is a native son of India, now resettled in the United States. Born in 1932 to Tamil parents living in Calcutta, he bridges the divide between southern and northern India, as well as East and West. His native tongue is not one, but four, having grown up speaking Tamil, Bengali, Hindi, and English. In grade school, he learned to recite Vedic hymns in Sanskrit and the Pater Noster in Latin. As a teenager, he witnessed the independence and tumultuous partition of India and Pakistan.
Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity were all part of the rich cultural milieu in which the young Raman was raised, but it was in mathematics and physics that he especially excelled. After receiving his degrees from Calcutta University in 1954, he completed doctoral work in theoretical physics at the University of Paris under Louis de Broglie, where he also learned French and German. His doctoral work was on the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics.
Dr. Raman has taught in a number of institutions, including the Saha Institute for Nuclear Physics in Calcutta and the Universite d'Alger in Algiers. He worked with UNESCO for a few years and eventually settled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he is now an emeritus professor of physics and humanities.
The position at Rochester allowed him also to pursue a growing interest in the history and philosophy of science. He has published scholarly papers on the history of thermodynamics, the origins of physical chemistry, the genesis of the Schrödinger equation, the early reactions to Einstein's theory of relativity, the impact of the Copernican revolution, and on the Euler-D'Alembert controversy in eighteenth century mathematical physics. He has also written on such topics as the history of the theory of gravitation, of the energy conservation principle, and of acoustics. Raman has also devoted several years to the study and elucidation of Hindu culture and religion. He is an associate editor in the Encyclopedia of Hinduism. The manuscript you hold in your hand is his tenth book.
V.V. Raman is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Outstanding Educator Award from the American Association of Higher Education and the Raja Rao award from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has served on numerous boards, including that of the Metanexus Institute and the International Society for Science and Religion.
In this book, Indic Visions, you have an extraordinary guidebook to the history, culture, religions, and sciences of India from a guru like no other. Your guide -- V.V. Raman -- is a rigorous scientist and thoughtful humanist, conversant in multiple languages and disciplines, a bridge builder and peacemaker, a whimsical wordsmith and an activist for peace and compassion, a loving husband and father, and a man I am happy to call my teacher and friend. And no matter where you were born, what languages you speak, what beliefs you profess, what disciplines you practice, India is your civilization too. It is time you got to know her better, and take pride in your neighbor and yourself as we seek together to craft a safer and healthier world at an extraordinary moment in the cultural evolution of our species and the natural history of our planet.
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