The Surya Tilak project at the Ram temple in Ayodhya has been the subject of recent public interest. It involved constructing a mechanism to direct sunlight onto the forehead of the idol. This was to first happen at noon on April 17, the occasion of the festival of Ram Navami this year. The mechanism was to be designed so as to repeat its task every year on the festival date.
The difficulty is that this festival follows a lunisolar calendar. Purely solar or purely lunar calendars follow the motion of the sun or the moon respectively. Special festival dates, if they follow a solar calendar, are the same each year. However, if such festival days are at all tied to the phases of the moon, they will fall on different calendar dates each year.
Dates for most Indian festivals, including Ram Navami, have a lunar calendar component. Lunisolar calendars combine lunar and solar cycles. In Indian calendars, Ram Navami falls on Chaitra Shukla 9. The Navami is the lunar component, referring to the waxing of the moon, or Shukla; the solar Chaitra month relates to the positioning of the constellations.
For the Surya Tilak, once this date is calculated each year, this would translate into changing the position of the mirrors according to the shifting position of the sun to direct the sun’s rays appropriately. To design a system that ensures that sunlight falls precisely on the idol each year thus requires some calculation.
Given the complexity of problems that typically occupy astronomers, this is not excessively difficult. The appropriate dates corresponding to a lunisolar calendar can be calculated as far in the future as we want (Indeed, there are phone apps for this).
The setting up of the necessary equipment was done by scientists and engineers at two government-funded organisations, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru and the Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee. IIA is an autonomous institute wholly funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The Central Building Research Institute (CBRI), a government institution, is under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
In a post on X, viewed more than four million times at last count, the Secretary of the DST highlighted the work of these two organisations, speaking of “the accurate calculations and well-optimised design” of the Surya Tilak.
The comments on his post provide an interesting window into modern India. A random sample of these comments reads: “Our ancestors did this also without the help of modern tech. Good to see we are following our ancient roots in the new world also”; “Is there caste reservation in IIA?”; “The divine culmination of Bhakti and science, just like how it used to be in the ancient days”; and “What high school kids in other countries do as a project for a science fair ends up as a something that astrophysicists on Govt pay in India do for a temple”.
Is this really a high-school science-fair project? The computation of the 19-year cycle, the Metonic cycle, after which the Ram Navami date repeats, is not too complicated. Such calculations were known to ancient astronomers. The design of the periscope arrangement needs expertise. Constructing the actual periscope arrangement using a system of mirrors, capable of movement in a graduated manner, is not as easy as it might sound. Some knowledge of telescope design is called for. Also a familiarity with design and machining, but perhaps not of the sort of accuracy that might require high-precision equipment.
It would have been possible to construct a combined electronic and computational mechanism that would have directed the mirror arrangement. However, keeping in mind the need for robustness, the designers took the not-unreasonable option of designing a manual system that only required adjustment once each year.
The core question, though, is whether such a project, explicitly politico-religious in character, should at all have been taken up by government institutions, required to function within the letter and spirit of our Constitution.
Since Independence, we have largely followed the principle that public institutions should not be asked to participate in explicitly religious activities. This in no way restricts scientists and engineers at those institutions in doing so on their own time. It is possible that this happened here, although the DST secretary’s highlighting this achievement from a laboratory directly under him, admits no such nuance.
But how can publicly-funded institutions push back against such demands? Can they refuse such directions, even if routed indirectly via the government agency that funds them? What’s to prevent another government, with different priorities, directing research institutions funded by it, to controversial political uses?
It is interesting that even the small number of distinguished former administrators of government funding bodies who have written in favour of the Surya Tilak project, have tended to evade these questions, focusing instead on its value as science outreach.
These are relevant especially in a country where essentially all funding for research flows from the government. India spends close to just 0.7 per cent of its GDP on research, a figure that is much smaller than what China or the USA spends. The slack, pushing scientific funding to 3 per cent or more of GDP in developed countries, is taken up by the private sector. Unfortunately, private-sector science research involvement in India is still at a nascent state.
What alternatives could reasonably have been explored? The Ram temple authority could have announced that it would fund a competition to find the best technical solution. Scientists associated with institutions such as the IIA could have, in their own time, and voluntarily, evaluated these solutions.
An Atal Tinkering Laboratory, from about 10,000 across the country, could have been asked to help with the hardware implementation of the successful idea, with funding for this taken from private individuals or the temple trust. None of this would have required requests to government-funded institutions that would further a religious aim, even ignoring its political overtones.
In political science, the Overton window refers to the range of ideas and policies for which there is large-scale public support. Shifts in the Overton window bring new possibilities, hitherto unacceptable, into the mainstream. Such shifts can happen naturally, as society itself changes, or can be encouraged through deliberate political reframing.
The saga of the Surya Tilak project is instructive because it is a test of how we choose to define and implement the secular character of our state. It illustrates how our prior ideas of what is ethically and constitutionally defensible can be challenged, even as what is done is presented as a fait accompli.
Once we get used to the idea that the government of the day can make such requests, whether directly or indirectly, it would be hard to turn the clock back.
Menon is a professor at Ashoka University, Sonepat. Views expressed are his own and do not represent those of his institution
