Truth Knows No Color

India's national motto, Satyameva Jayate, which means that truth alone triumphs, is taken from the Mundaka Upanishad and has been carved above the Lion Capital since 1950. The phrase says that truth wins, and it says nothing about who tells it. The topic makes the same point in a different idiom, that truth knows no color, and it can be read in at least three ways. Truth does not depend on skin, on party or on creed. Truth is not painted by the interest of the person who reports it. And truth looks the same from every vantage point. The essay asks how far each reading holds and where it fails.

The strongest evidence for the first reading comes from the sciences. The relation between the sides of a right angled triangle was known in Babylon, in the Indian Sulba Sutras and in ancient China, discovered by people who had no contact with one another and who shared no language, religion or appearance. The Human Genome Project showed in 2000 that any two human beings are about ninety nine point nine percent identical in their DNA, which undermined the old idea that races were deep biological divisions. A theorem proved in Chennai is as valid in Chicago, and a vaccine works in the same way in every body that receives it.

History is full of attempts to bend this universality, and each has been undone by facts that ignored the ideology. The Nazi regime staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a showcase for racial superiority, and Jesse Owens, an African American sprinter, won four gold medals in front of Hitler's audience. The result was a fact and not an opinion, and no propaganda could alter the stopwatch. The Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected genetics because it contradicted Marxist doctrine, saw the harvests that followed his policies fail. Reality has a way of keeping its own accounts.

Yet the humans who handle truth are not colourless. The philosopher Miranda Fricker described in 2007 a wrong that she called testimonial injustice, which occurs when a speaker is given less credibility than she deserves because of prejudice about who she is. A woman whose pain is dismissed by a doctor, a farmer whose knowledge of his land is ignored by an official and a dalit witness whose account is doubted by a court have all been treated as though the truth of what they said depended on their colour. The claim that truth knows no color is false of the way societies behave, and it is just this gap that makes the claim worth repeating.

The claim that truth knows no color is false of the way societies behave, and it is just this gap that makes the claim worth repeating.

There is also a harder objection. Thinkers who study standpoint, from W. E. B. Du Bois to the feminist philosophers of the late twentieth century, argued that people who live at the margins of society often see truths that the comfortable overlook. Du Bois wrote of a double consciousness that made the Black American see both his own world and the world that judged him. If this is right, then truth may be colourless in itself while the ability to find it varies by position, and a science staffed from one narrow group will miss things that a broader one would catch. Medicine offers a plain illustration. Clinical trials that enrolled mainly men for decades produced drugs whose effects on women were poorly understood, and the oversight was corrected only when women entered the research and asked the missing questions.

The objection should be answered carefully. It does not say that truth differs by identity, which would collapse into relativism and make every claim equally good. It says that people differ in what they are placed to notice. A mountaineer and a valley farmer, standing on different slopes, describe the same range differently, and neither is lying. Their accounts can be combined, and the combined account is more accurate than either alone. This is why a good institution seeks witnesses from many positions and checks their claims against evidence, and does not treat the identity of the speaker as either a credential or a disqualification.

The same logic applies in public debate. A claim should be judged on its evidence, whoever makes it, and the habit of discrediting a statement by pointing to the speaker's party or community is an old and cheap trick. The opposite habit, of accepting a claim because it comes from one's own side, is equally corrosive. The courts, the free press and the scientific journal are institutions designed to separate the claim from the claimant, and they work imperfectly because the people who run them are coloured by their own circumstances. Their value lies in the fact that they exist at all and can be criticised by those they fail.

The case of Srinivasa Ramanujan shows the ideal at its best. In 1913 a clerk in the Madras Port Trust, with no university degree and no standing in the mathematical world, sent a letter of unproved theorems to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. Many a professor would have thrown it away. Hardy read the formulas, judged them on their merits and concluded that they must be true, since no one would have had the imagination to invent them if they were not. The accident of who had written the letter did not decide the matter, and the letter is remembered because the reader let the mathematics speak. The story also shows how rare such fairness is, since it depended on one man's willingness to look.

A last image may be useful. In 1666 Isaac Newton passed a beam of sunlight through a glass prism and showed that white light, which looks like the absence of colour, contains every colour inside it. Perhaps truth is colourless in the same way. It would not be empty of perspectives but would be the sum of them, visible whole only to a mind that can hold every angle at once. No human mind has ever done so, and it remains unclear whether any could. Until then each person sees one band of the spectrum and calls it the light, and truth, which knows no color, depends on all of us for its brightness.