Research and innovation have been popular buzzwords across Asia for several years now. They have ignited new realities in China and narratives of wish-fulfilment and minor milestones in India. But on the whole, an impassioned rhetoric about research excellence and their defining role in the prosperity of nations have united a range of politicians, policymakers and private stakeholders. In India, this shows yet again the bewildering paradoxes that make this nation. While research budget remains a minuscule part of our Gross Domestic Product and universities continue to be decimated by political corruption, there is no dearth of media reports and public and corporate declaration of enthusiasm about the indispensability of research innovation to the great Indian success story that remains perpetually imminent.In India, the word ‘research’ almost exclusively signifies developments in the natural sciences, and better still, in applied technology that can be quickly monetised. What the identification of research with STEM knowledge does to fields in various imaginative arts is a subject on which I don’t even want to get started here given the way it troubles me as a stakeholder in the latter. But what troubles me even more is how this aspiration for research excellence in the STEM fields now works in tandem with the active suppression of genuine research in the academic humanities, and particularly the social sciences in India today. Research in STEM fields have always drawn more light, noise, and resources than research in the humanities and the social sciences. To a great extent, many of us humanists have accepted this as natural and even necessary, given the range of real-world problems science and tech are able to address in ways that the humanities cannot immediately do. The social sciences, with their more material entrenchment in human society, are more adept at this. Accordingly, they have had a higher place in the food-chain of research, with greater institutional and funding allocations than the arts and humanities. But the current lop-sidedness of the research narrative between the STEM fields on one hand and the humanities and the social sciences on the other goes far beyond this traditional hierarchy of research importance between the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and technology.The key difference now is political. It is possible to celebrate science and tech research as universal progress and the obvious accelerators of modernity that are benevolent for all humanity. Historians and philosophers of science have long questioned such views of science, but they have always been a tiny tribe among practising scientists and far tinier among tech-entrepreneurs. But in a country like India, even the most superficial attempt at research in the humanities and the social sciences must reveal the inconvenient plurality, and more damningly, the violent inequalities, inequities, and discrimination that have shaped historical and current realities and threaten to define the nation’s future. And while such research of any real depth and honesty cannot be flattering to rhetoricians of a nation eager to champion its image as the great spiritual leader and preacher to the world, it is also inconvenient to the corporate stakeholders in STEM research who are economically and politically invested in a rosily optimistic vision of India. §It is now widely known that independent India started on its developmental trajectory with a keen focus on the production of research and pedagogy in technology, natural and social sciences as articulated in the pioneering vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and his cohort of like-minded policymakers. This focus on knowledge and institution-building played a key role in the making of the independent nation. Eventually, a range of institutions, focusing primarily on the social sciences (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Centre for Policy Research, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Institute for Social and Economic Change) came to thrive along with centres of research in the quantitative and the natural sciences (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Indian Statistical Institute, and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research). Key institutions of advanced postgraduate training, and research, notably Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics, also grew along similar trajectories. But for the most part, the bifurcation of research and teaching has been pretty stark in India, as I’ve discussed in a book on liberal arts education, with research concentrated in the research centres and institutes, and undergraduate teaching confined to the colleges, thus preventing the fusion of research and teaching pioneered by the modern German university and initiated in the US by Johns Hopkins University. History, at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences, has been one of the richest and most distinguished research fields in modern India, though perhaps without the pedagogical appeal of English, which, on the other hand, not produced research anywhere close to the significance or dimension of historical research. Together, history and social sciences such as economics and political science, and perhaps to a lesser degree anthropology and sociology, came to build a vision of the nation both domestically and internationally. Along the way, they trained multiple generations of academics, politicians and policymakers, while also becoming knowledge-portals for various public services examinations for millions of aspirants. How fast all of this has changed since 2014 is also now known to us.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyHow quickly history became colonised by propaganda and ethno-religious ideologies not only by trolls and politicians of questionable education but also by certain public intellectuals is also disturbingly familiar to conscientious historians and citizens alike – there is no point in reiterating them here. The malignant pedagogic and curricular consequence of this colonialism (a particularly ironic term in this context) are also well-known. But all ironies renew in unprecedentedly ways to hear private and corporate stakeholders in higher education as well as eulogists of initiatives such as “Make in India” celebrate narratives of research excellence (even though they are mostly that, narratives), as identified exclusively with science and technology even as research in the contemporary social sciences get stymied and promptly axed/disowned the moment they reveal unpleasant truths about our shining and blooming nation. What honest research initiative can survive this political climate that refuses to hear difficult truths? No centre for political data, no centre for policy research, no critical colloquium on resource and rights can exist in this ecosystem that shrieks the glory of research as synonymous with the glory of the nation. I won’t stoop to acknowledge religious rituals and principles as scientific truths, which may have value on occasion but are exaggerated with absurd grandiloquence not only by self-appointed spiritual leaders but also by many of our elected public officials. The more important question at hand is this: shouldn’t research have both the freedom and obligation to reveal truths that are unflattering to nation and society (to say nothing of its majoritarian ideologues)?Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThat contemporary India is one of the most staggeringly unequal societies is immediately obvious to any casual observer who wishes to rise above wilful denial. To a social scientist of any methodological conscience, such inequities – most notably in caste, class, gender, and the entanglement of religion with most – come across as deep-seated and layered across both space and time. The inequities are as geographically wide-spread as the country itself, both territorially and through its global diaspora. Almost all spaces beyond the Hindi-Hindu heartland – in the north and the northeast, and even in the prosperous south – strain both the idea of the nation and its sovereignty in ways that are historically as plural as they are divisive. Some of it is the very paradox of this country’s existence as a nation in the first place, a miracle in which we can take just pride. But that pride is healthy and sustainable only in tandem with the recognition of the forces that disrupt it, and the deep histories of grievances, violations, and discriminations from which they do so. It would be stupid and self-destructive to question the celebration of science and technology research anywhere, more pointedly so in a developing postcolonial nation. But it is the disturbing political meaning of the polarisation of energy around the techno-scientific versus that behind the human-social domains of knowledge that bends us to this scepticism. In the end, the most damaging consequence of this polarisation of support may lie in the socio-political entanglements of technology itself. That technology always dwells in the veins and nooks of private and collective human lives is a truism that disrupts misrepresented optimism about technology’s ability to engineer social progress. The celebration of mass smartphone empowerment in India without caveats about data-colonialism by cloud-capitalists as well as the government’s violation of data privacy has been damaging enough, to say nothing of the communal destruction wreaked by WhatsApp wisdom and doctored videos. As much of tech-research gravitates in the direction of artificial intelligence, it stares at the stark reality of bot-bias that stands to magnify many times over around the endless hierarchies and discrimination that define Indian society, to which only a well-supported tradition of conscientious social science research can alert us. That wealth generated by AI will deepen inequalities even in the post-industrial West has been pointed out by leading scientists such as Geoffrey Hinton. What will it do in our nightmarishly segregated society? How far can we go on glorifying research in science and technology while suppressing the unpleasant home truths brought to light by the social sciences? Is this the research culture that we wish to Make in India? Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony (2024).