When Does Reverence Begin to Replace Reason?

When Does Reverence Begin to Replace Reason?

Every institution needs ceremony. The question is what the ceremony teaches. A university exists to train people to doubt - so what should it make of rituals that ask them to bow?

The case the critics are making In August 2026, at IIT Delhi's convocation, where the Prime Minister was chief guest, students were reportedly instructed on how far to bow while receiving their medals and asked to stand for Vedic chants. Critics, including geoscientist C.P. Rajendran writing in The Hindu, argue this is not a harmless cultural flourish. Their reasoning runs like this:

• Science advances by questioning authority, not deferring to it. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein each overturned what their eras held sacred.
• A calibrated bow to a political office teaches that authority is to be obeyed, not examined.
• A religious invocation at a scientific convocation implies that revelation has a seat beside evidence.
• The Constitution itself, through Article 51A(h), asks every citizen to develop the scientific temper and the spirit of inquiry. The context sharpens the worry. The Scholars at Risk Free to Think 2026 report rates academic freedom in India as severely restricted and India's Academic Freedom Index score dropped from 0.38 to 0.14 between 2022 and 2025. In that climate, a ceremony of deference reads less like tradition and more like a signal.

The case for ceremony, taken seriously But the opposite view deserves more than a nod.

Rituals are how communities mark what matters.

• The graduation gown and hood are themselves medieval European rituals and no one thinks they threaten physics.
• Doctors graduate by taking an oath. Nations stand for anthems. None of these claim to settle a scientific question - they mark commitment and belonging.
• For many Indians, a Sanskrit invocation is not a claim about truth but an expression of civilisational continuity and banning it from public life can feel like being told one's heritage is embarrassing. Even Rajendran concedes the point in part: he suggests Tagore's Where the Mind is Without Fear is one tradition worth defending - perhaps even chanting at a convocation. The quarrel, then, is not ritual versus no ritual.

Where the

line actually falls TAN's view is that ritual becomes corrosive when it replaces questioning, not when it coexists with it. Three tests separate the two:

1. Whom does the ritual honour? An oath to one's profession binds the graduate to its standards. A calibrated bow to a political office binds the graduate to a person with power over the institution.
2. Is it chosen or compelled? A shared ceremony people opt into builds community. An instruction on how low to bow is a lesson in hierarchy.
3. What does it signal about the questions allowed? When ritual appears alongside falling academic freedom, it stops being decoration and starts marking which questions are unwise to ask.