The second-term election victory of George Bush--and India's own
experience with Hindu nationalist BJP rule, off and on, through the last
decade--captures a dangerous moment in world history. We are witnessing the
world's first and the world's largest liberal constitutional democracies,
officially committed to secularism, slide toward religious nationalism. By
voting out the BJP and its allies in the last election, the Indian voters
have halted this slide, at least for now--a heartening development,
compared to the virtual takeover of America by Christian evangelicals and
fundamentalists.
The question that interests me in this electoral route to faith-based
governance is how this counter-revolution is actually accomplished.
I have been watching with concern how modern science itself--perhaps the
single most powerful force for secularization--is being re-coded as sacred,
either as affirming the Bible or the Vedas, or as 'lower knowledge' of 'dead
matter,' in need of spiritualization. My fellow intellectuals in the United
States and India, who identify themselves with social justice,
anti-imperialism, women's rights and sustainable development, have
themselves paved the way for the re-sacralization of science.
Many of the Hindutva arguments for 'Vedic science' find a resonance with the
fashionable theories of alternative sciences.
Indeed, postmodernist and
multiculturalist critics of modern science are re-discovering and restating
many of the arguments Hindu nationalists have long used to assert the
superior scientificity of Hindu sacred traditions.
***
Under BJP rule, superstitions started getting described as science. Hindu
nationalists started invoking science in just about every speech and policy
statement. But while they uttered the word 'science'--which in today's
world is understood as modern science--they meant astrology, vastu,
Vedic creationism, transcendental meditation or ayurveda. This was not just talk: state universities and colleges got big grants from the government to offer post-graduate degrees,
including PhDs in astrology; research in vastu shastra, meditation,
faith-healing, cow-urine and priest-craft was promoted with substantial
injections of public money.
Nearly every important discovery of modern
science was read back into Hindu sacred books: explosion of nuclear energy
became the awesome appearance of God in the Bhagvat Gita; the indeterminacy
at quantum level served as confirmation of Vedanta; atomic charges became
equivalent to negative, positive and neutral gunas, or moral qualities; the
reliance of experience and reason in science became the same thing as
reliance on mystical experience, and so on. Contemporary theories of
physics, evolution and biology were wilfully distorted to make it look as if
all of modern science was converging to affirm the New Age, mind-over-matter
cosmology that follows from Vedantic monism. 'Evidence' from fringe sciences
was used to support all kinds of superstitions, from vastu, astrology,
'quantum healing' to the latest theory of Vedic creationism. Science and
'Vedas' were treated as just different names for the same
thing.
On the one hand, the BJP and its allies presented themselves as great
champions of science, as long as it could be absorbed into 'the Vedas,' of
course. On the other hand, they aggressively condemned the secular and
naturalistic worldview of science--the disenchantment of nature--as
'reductionist,' 'Western' or even 'Semitic,' and therefore un-Hindu and
un-Indian. Science yes, and technology yes, but a rational-materialist
critique of Vedic idealism no--that became the mantra of Hindutva.
Why this overeagerness to claim the support of science? There is a
modernizing impulse in all religions to make the supposedly timeless truths
of theology acceptable to the modern minds raised on a scientific
sensibility. 'Scientific creationism' among Christian and Islamic
fundamentalists is an example of this impulse. But while Christian
fundamentalists in America indulge in creationism primarily to get past the
constitutional requirement for a separation of church and state, in India it
is motivated by ultra-nationalism, Hindu chauvinism and the nationalist urge
to declare Hinduism's superiority as the religion of reason and natural law
over Christianity and Islam, which are declared to be irrational and
faith-based creeds.
Contemporary Hindu nationalists are carrying on with the
neo-Hindu tradition of proclaiming Hinduism as the universal religion of the
future because of its superior 'holistic science' (as compared to the
'reductionist science' of the West). Besides, it is easier to sell
traditions and rituals, especially to urban, upwardly mobile men, if they
have the blessings of English-speaking 'scientific' gurus.
***
Presenting India as a source of alternative universals that could heal the
reductionism of Western science became the major preoccupation of Indian
followers of science studies. Vandana Shiva wrote glowingly of Indian views
of non-dualism as superior to Western reductionism. Ashis Nandy declared
astrology to be the science of the poor and the non-Westernized masses in
India.
Prayers to smallpox goddesses, menstrual taboos, Hindu nature ethics which
derive from orthodox ideas about prakriti or shakti, and even the varna
order were defended as rational (even
superior) solutions to the
cultural and ecological crises of modernity.
All this fitted in very well with Western feminist and ecologists' search
for a kinder and gentler science. The deep investment of these philosophies
in perpetuating superstitions and patriarchy in India was forgotten and
forgiven.
***While the Abrahamic religions are wary of relativism out of the fear of
relativizing the Word of God revealed in the Bible or the Koran, Brahminical
Hinduism (and Hindu nationalism) thrives on a hierarchical relativism to
evade all challenges to its mystical ways of
knowing. Rather than accept empirical theories of
modern science as contradicting the Vedantic philosophy--which they
actually do--Hindu nationalists simply declare modern science to be true
only within its limited materialistic assumptions. They do not reject modern
science (who can?) but treat it as 'merely' one among the many different
paths to the ultimate truth, known only to Vedic Hinduism.
***
They do not deny that modern science has discovered some truths about
nature. But they declare them to be lower-level truths, because they merely
deal with dead matter, shorn of consciousness. Notwithstanding all pious
declarations of the 'death' of the Newtonian world view of matter obeying
mechanical laws, the fact is that any number of rigorous, double-blind tests
have failed to show any signs of disembodied consciousness or mind-stuff in
nature: matter obeying mindless laws of physics is all there is. But in the
Vedic science discourse, the overwhelming evidence for adequacy of matter to
explain the higher functions of mind and life are set aside as a result of
'knowledge filtration' by Western-trained scientists.
Take, for example, the emerging theory of 'Vedic creationism' (which
updates the spiritual evolutionary theories of Sri Aurobindo and Swami
Vivekananda). Its chief architects, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson,
claim that Darwinian evolutionary biologists and mainstream biologists have
been systematically ignoring and hiding evidence that supports the theory of
'devolution of species' from the Brahman through the mechanism of karma and
rebirth. All knowledge, they claim, is a
product of interests and biases. On this account, Vedic creationism,
explicitly grounded in Vedic cosmology, is as plausible and defensible as
Darwinism, grounded on the naturalistic and capitalist assumptions of Western scientists.
Vedic creationism is only one example of 'decolonised science.' More
generally, Hindu nationalists routinely insist on the need to develop a
science that is organically related to the innate nature, svabhava or chitti
of India. India's chitti, they insist, lies in holistic thought, in keeping
matter and spirit, nature and god together (as compared to the 'Semitic
mind' which separates the two). Hindu nationalists have been using this
purported holism of Hinduism as the cornerstone of their argument: any
interpretation of modern science that fits in with this spirit-centered
holism is declared to be valid Vedic science while naturalistic, mainstream
interpretations are discarded as 'Western.' The overwhelming enthusiasm for
Rupert Sheldrake's occult biology (which builds upon the failed vitalistic
theories of Jagdish Chandra Bose) and the near unanimous recasting of
quantum mechanics in mystical terms are examples of the kind of hybridity
sanctioned by postmodernists.
But it gets worse. Hindu nationalists have been keen on proving that the
landmass of India was the original homeland of the 'Aryans,' and therefore
the cradle of all civilization. 'Vedic Aryans,' on this account, were the
authors of all natural sciences which then spread to Greece, Sumeria, China
and other major civilizations in antiquity. To substantiate these claims,
all kinds of modern scientific discoveries are read back into the Rig Veda,
the most ancient of all Vedas.
But such boastful claims raise the question
of methodology. How did our Vedic forebears figure out the speed of light,
the distance between the sun and the earth and why did they code it into the
shape and size of fire altars? Similar questions arise for the more general
claims that are basic to Hindu metaphysics, namely that there is a higher
realm of ultimate reality (Brahman) that cannot be assessed through sensory
means. How did our Vedic forbears know it exists and that it actually
determines the course of evolution of species, and makes the matter that we
all are made of? How can you experience what is beyond all sensory
knowledge? But even more important for the claims of scientificity of the
Vedas, how do you test the empirical claims based upon that experience?
Here one finds an incredibly brazen claim: Because in Hinduism there are no
distinctions between the spirit and matter, one can understand laws that
regulate matter by studying the laws of the spirit. And the laws of spirit
can be understood by turning inward, through yoga and meditation leading to
mystical experiences. Within Hinduism, it is as rational and scientific to
take the non-sensory 'seeing'--that is mystical and other meditative
practices--as empirical evidence of the spiritual and natural realm. This
purported scientificity of the spiritual realm, in turn, paves the way for
declaring occult New Age practices like astrology, vastu, quantum
healing, and even yagnas as scientific within the Vedic-Hindu universe.
Rather than encourage a critical spirit toward inherited
traditions, many of which are authoritarian and patriarchal, postmodernist
intellectuals have waged a battle against science. As the case of Vedic
science in the service of Hindu nationalism demonstrates, this misguided
attack on the Enlightenment has only aided the growth of pseudoscience,
superstitions and tribalism.
