Prof. A.B. B. Shah

7. A. B. Shah

A.B.Shah (1920-1981) was the founder- president of Indian Secular Society, which is an important non-political organisation working for the promotion of secular human values in Indian Society.Among prominent Indian secularists of twentieth century, Shah is perhaps the only one who has paid much attention to Islam and to the problems of Indian Muslims.According to Finngeir Hiorth, Shah was a tireless fighter for secular humanism "which he preferred to call 'secularism'."

Biography

A.B.Shah was born in 1920 in Gujarat in a Digambar Jain family.He was an atheist since his childhood.However, until he went to college in 1937 at the age of 17 and read Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe and Hyman Levy's The Universe of Science, he was a believing and, to some extent, a practising Jain.These two books convinced Shah that not only God, but even the soul whose existence Jainism believes in, had no existence outside the human mind.Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man completed this phase of Shah's mental evolution.

The next phase began four years later when a student friend introduced Shah to the works of M.N.Roy, namely, Man and Nature, Science and Superstition, The Ideal of Indian Womanhood and Memoirs of a Cat.According to Shah, "Roy opened out new vistas of thought and intellectual freedom which gave positive content to my negative atheism."Bertrand Russell's books and those by Marx, Engels and Lenin, most of which Shah had read by 1944, completed this second phase.
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From 1937 onwards, Shah was what he describes as "conscientious atheist".He did not feel the need for the consolations of religion even during some of the worst crises in his life.On the contrary, he increasingly came to believe that "man can be truly human when he is on his own and refuses to use the crutches of traditional religion or take recourse to drugging of religious mysticism, which claims to take him beyond the 'illusion' of this world with its good and evil."

Samaj Prabodhan Sanstha

A.B.Shah was one of the founder members of Samaj Prabodhan Sanstha, an organisation founded in 1950's for propagating modernist, critical social thought and values among the common people of Maharashtra.At the instance of the executive of the organisation, Shah prepared a manuscript on "Scientific Method".The Marathi version of the manuscript was published by the Samaj Pradbodhan Sanstha, whereas the English book Scientific Method was published by Allied Publishers in 1964.

Interest in religion as a subject of study

Shah's interest in study of religion from the social point of view was not aroused until he began to take interest in the problem of development in 1964.Religions struck to Shah as the "residual" factor in the theory of stagnation.He began to wonder whether "the glaring contradictions between the professions and practice of most Hindus did not had something to do with the persistence of the religious mode of thought which determined the response they made to the challenges of modern world".

It was at this time that Shah came across the typescript of Philip Spratt's Hindu Culture and Personality.
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This book "explained" to Shah why the average Hindu, even if highly educated and "modernised" in many respects, fails to develop the kind of virtues that the citizen of a modern, open society should have.Shah's own study of Hindu scriptures and philosophy confirmed, to him, Spratt's basic thesis that Hindu personality is essentially narcissistic, that is, suffering from excessive self-love.Shah concluded that the Hindu personality is "incapable of coping with the contemporary world unless it sheds its narcissistic traits."
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Shah began to take interest in Islam as a culture only after meeting Hamid Dalwai (1930-1977) in 1967.
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As Shah's says, "it was a constant dialogue with Hamid, in which his remarkable understanding of the Muslim mind was confirmed by external events on a number of occasions, that prompted me to undertake a serious study of Islam".
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In November 1968, Shah founded the Indian Secular Society (ISS).Two years of vigorous efforts by A.B. Shah and Hamid Dalwai to mobilise public opinion in favour of secularism preceded the foundation conference of the Indian Secular Society on November 24 at Bombay.
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A.B. Shah in his introduction to the Report of the Foundation Conference defined the role of the Indian Secular Society:
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Besides, in the aftermath of communal riots in parts of Maharashtra, Shah attacked Hindu communalism in a special issue of The Secularist (January-June, 1970).Shah highlighted the views of Dayanand, Savarkar and Golwalkar under a section titled "Apostles of Hindu Communalism".Shah was of the view that "communalism, like war, resides in the minds of men and that is where it has ultimately to be fought".
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On 30 May 1972, Shah participated in a programme organised by Yuva Kranti Dal for burning of the Manusmriti.
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A.B. Shah's important book Religion and Society in India, published in 1981, is dedicated to the memory of Hamid Dalwai whom Shah describes as a "friend and comrade in the fight against religious obscurantism".
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A.B. Shah's important book Religion and Society in India, published in 1981, is dedicated to the memory of Hamid Dalwai whom Shah describes as a "friend and comrade in the fight against religious obscurantism".
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In addition to being the founder-president of the Indian Secular Society, Shah was the editor of the society's journal The Secularist until his death in 1981.Besides, Shah was the Director of the Institute for the Study on Indian Traditions and an honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Education at the time of his death.Both these institutes as well as the headquarters of the Indian Secular Society were situated in Pune, Maharashtra.

Publications

A.B.Shah, as mentioned earlier, was the editor of The Secularist, the journal of the Indian Secular Society.Besides, he was also the editor of the New Quest, journal of the Indian Association for Cultural Freedom.His publications include Scientific Method, Religion and Society in India, What Ails our Muslims?, Challenges to Secularism and Planning for Democracy and Other Essays.Besides, Shah edited several books on education, politics and culture, including Jayaprakash Narayan's Prison Diary written in jail during the Emergency of 1975.
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The book is dedicated to M.N.Roy who influenced Shah.The book, says Shah, is meant "primarily for the educated layman".Shah laments that the students of Indian universities, whether in humanities, social science or in natural science and technology, are not exposed adequately to the history of science and its methodology.They may go through years of university education without any systematic acquaintance with the history of science as a human quest or with the method adopted in it.There is no recognition of science as a cultural discipline, whose significance reaches out beyond the field of its formal inquiry.

According to Shah, this situation is not likely to change unless deliberate and determined efforts are made for it."The absence of a dialogue between science and philosophy in Indian universities", says Shah, "has resulted in making philosophy anemic and science supercilious".Worse still, it prevents the emergence of generation of teachers who have access to both philosophy and science and who alone can break the present impasse between the two.Until this happens, maintains Shah, the wider intellectual implications of science would continue to be neglected in the education of the non-specialist as well as of the would-be philosopher or scientist.One of the purposes of his book, according to Shah, is to highlight the need of such a change in Indian universities.

Shah's book contains several chapters including "The Impact of Technology on Human Life", "The Liberating Effect of Scientific Knowledge" and "Scientific Method and Ethics".Apart from a detailed exposition of scientific method, the book also gives a glimpse of Shah's own earlier philosophical ideas, that is, before he became seriously interested in the problem of development, came into contact with Hamid Dalwai, and founded the Indian Secular Society.

What is Science?

According to Shah, science is primarily a quest for knowledge.A scientist, says Shah, may have other possible motivations but is mainly interested in understanding the workings of the world of nature and man. In this respect the scientist, says Shah, resembles the ancient Rishi, who would spurn the riches of the world if they came in the way of his pursuit of truth.Though the scientist and the Rishi, continues Shah, resemble each other in their inspiration, they differ radically from each other i

Prof. A.B. Shah, the Founder-President of the Indian Secular Society, Poona, wrote some articles in a newspaper which brought forth some responses.A Muslim friend put some questions to Shah and he responded to them in his characteristically frank and outspoken manner.Then there was his correspondence with Shankaracharya of Puri.All this material has been published in 1968 in a book under the title 'Challenges to Secularism'.