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Science and Hindu Nationalism
How Postmodernism Aids Vedic Science
Daniel Thorner Lecture
Maison des Sciences de I'homme,
[This typescript of the author�s talk, which takes into account her handwritten annotations, will be replaced by her corrected final version when received � SV]��
1
I consider it a great honorted for this year's
Daniel Thorner conference. At the first glance, the questions I am going to
raise about such matters as postmodernism and Vedic science may seem far
removed from the largely agrarian issues that engaged Daniel Thorner all his
life. But the abiding strength of Daniel's and Alice's scholarship lies in
their commitment to scientific rigor and their avoidance of easy,
politically-correct answers. In their essay, Shaping of
Modern India, Daniel and Alice
highlighted the many critical junctures in
2
This is a time of great hopes and great
challenges for
Clearly, then, the partisans of secularism in
3
MY THESIS: My presentation today is meant to initiate just such a critical engagement not just with the politics of Hindutva, but with the history of science in Hinduism on the one hand, and with postmodernist relativization of science, on the other.
Ten years of BJP rule has given us a good preview
of a genre of discourse, often called "Vedic science" which freely
and without regard to contradictions, combines modern physics and biology and the Hindu
conceptions of prakriti, shakti, Brahman and guna. We are all familiar with the re-writing
of history of science in which every known theory of modern science, from
quantum mechanics to theory of evolution was made to appear as a belated
affirmation of the existence of Brahman in nature. We have lived through the outrage of Vedic
astrology, yaganas and Vastushastra receiving state support for
research and education. [We are all familiar with how Hinduism was declared to
be superior to other faiths because of its unique compatibility with science. �
struck thru, SV]
I will propose to you that in order to challenge this doublespeak of Vedic science it is important to understand its history and to see its overlap with postmodernist philosophies of science. � struck thru [SV]
Admittedly, the contemporary Sangh Parivar did not invent this business of treating the Vedas and Advaita Vedanta as scientific: such attempts date back to the 19th century neo-Hindu reformers, including such iconic figures as S. Dayananda, S. Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and even S. Radhakrishnan.
But�and this central to my thesis�this romantic, neo-Hindu inclusivism regarding science has found new sources of support from the fashionable theories of postmodernism. I will argue that part of the responsibility for the doublespeak of Vedic science lies with the anti-Enlightenment, nativist and postmodernist turn that Indian intellectuals took during the later half of the 20th century. (POMO was a worldwide movement but [has] an exceptionally strong affinity with intellectuals of Indian origin). Long ago, Julien Benda wrote in his La Trahison de clercs, that when intellectuals betray their calling�that is, when intellectuals begin to exalt the particular over the universal, the passions of the multitude over the moral good�then there is nothing left to prevent a society's slide into tribalism and violence. I believe that postmodernism represents a treason of the clerks which has given intellectual respectability to reactionary religiosity.
It is true that fundamentalists in all religious faiths have welcomed the postmodernist attacks on the Enlightenment rationalism. But, it is my contention that of all religions, it is the modern, nationalistic Hinduism that shows the maximum overlap with the relativism, holism, and syncretism of postmodernism. Indeed, I will go so far as to argue that in the name of respecting difference of the cultures of non-Western, women, and other marginalized groups, postmodernist philosophies of science have rediscovered the orthodox Hindu mantra that "Truth is one wise men only call it by different names," or "all paths to truth are valid." This golden rule of Hindu eclecticism, in which modern Hindus take so much pride, is not too far from the postmodernist view that all sciences of all cultures are equally rational and equally true by their own standards defined by their own paradigm or cultures.� The big difference, of course, is that while postmodernists use this multicultural relativism to defend the worldview of women, the subaltern, and the oppressed, Hindu nationalists use the same arguments to claim the status of science for their own mystical and irrational beliefs. [PROPHETS?]
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THE OUTLINE. The argument I will present to support my thesis is rather complex. So let me give you a rough map of how I will proceed.
� First: I will start with a quick review of Vedic science under BJP.
� Second: I will define what I mean by postmodernism and why Indian intellectuals were drawn to it.
� Third: I will ask why religious fundamentalists in all faiths are so obsessed with modern science.
�
Fourth: I will take a closer look
[at the] peculiar strategy of hierarchical inclusivism by which Hinduism has
always co-opted all challenges to the orthodoxy. I will compare Manu, the 2nd
century Hindu law-giver with
� Fifth: I will try to connect the dots between inclusivism of contemporary Hindu nationalists and the relativist philosophies of science.
� I will conclude with some thoughts on why Vedic Science is problematic and Enlightenment matters [and why universalism and the scientific temper are fundamental for fighting the fundamentalists].
5
Let us start with the doublespeak issue.
Recall how double-think worked in George Orwell's 1984? Words came to mean their opposites: war meant peace, freedom was slavery, history was endlessly revised to make the present look like a confirmation of eternal, unchanging truths known to the Big Brother alone.
Under the BJP rule, superstitions started getting described as science; mysticism got the label of empirical experience, history of science in ancient India was constantly rewritten to make modern science look like a fulfillment of Vedic truths, "true secularism" meant mixing up Hinduism with politics, while separation of religion and state was labeled �pseudo-secularism,� [and �mental colonialism�]. Orwell's Big Brother would have been proud of BJP's accomplishments.
Murli Manohar Joshi and his RSS brethren 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, or TM [Transcendental
Meditation], or vastu, or Vedic creationism, or ancient humoral
theory of disease taught by 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 bomb became
the awesome appearance of God in the Bhagvat Gita, the indeterminacy at quantum
level served as confirmation of Vedanta, atomic charges became equivalent of
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
in Hinduism and so on. ... [science and Vedas treated
as parallels, as homologues which can be used interchangeably��������� )
Another sign of doublespeak was this: On the one
hand, BJP and its allies presented themselves as great champions of science�as
long as it could be reconciled with the Vedic worldview. But on the other hand,
they aggressively condemned the secular and naturalistic worldview of
science�the disenchantment of nature�as un-Hindu, un-Indian and a sign of
Western materialism. Science yes, and technology yes, but secular thinking no,
that became the mantra of Hindutva. (Reactionary modernism).
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What do I mean by postmodernism? Many versions�all marked by a suspicion of universal metanarratives. Concentrate only on postmodernism as applied to science � philosophical arguments for establishing equivalences [hybridism, holism, rational unity�].
� Universalism of modern science of nature: There is only one science. Scientific theories hold for all societies. Criteria of justification of scientific claims cut across national and cultural differences. You can have culturally relative tastes in art, music, food but not in science.
�
Not that other
societies do not have pre-modern sciences, but they flow into one
universal science.
� Oppose use values, but respect rational unity.
With postmodernism, this ecumenical, universalistic view of science_ comes to an end. [Unity of science = Western Eurocentric myth. Possibility of alternative sciences] Critics begin to question not just the uses but the very logic and content of science.
The political context: in the West,
disillusionment with the military industrial complex; in
Neo-Gandhians, third-positionist intellectuals in the environmental and alternative development movements who were critical of Marxist left and the state-led modernization. Marxists did not buy them but made strategic alliances with them. Quote Nandy, Shiv Viswanath:
� that state led modernization is a new kind of barbarism�could not be checked.
�
not just bad uses of science but the "innate
violence of science" which leads to a disrespect for the integrity of
indigenous traditions.
These more radical critiques found theoretical justification in theories of social constructivism, also called the Strong Program in sociology of science that claimed to follow Thomas Kuhn's work (even though Kuhn repudiated them). Strong program claimed that not just the agenda but the very content of natural science were socially constructed. In their view, all knowledge, regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, whether it is modern science or traditional knowledge of non-modern cultures is equally conventional or perspectival. In all cases, it is the social interests and cultural and religious meanings, metaphors and metaphysical assumptions that decided how natural world will be classified, what kind of observations will be accepted as legitimate evidence and what kind of logic will be accepted as reasonable.
Granted there are alternative, culture dependent descriptions of nature. But can we not say that modern science provides us a closer, a more approximate representation of nature?
Not so, according to social constructivists, because the standards of truth and falsity are also relative to the culture. To quote Barry Barnes and David Bloor, "the labels 'true' and `false' are simply different names for cultural preferences" (consensus position of ssk and cultural studies).
Social constructivists do not deny that modern
science has discovered some truths about nature that are
universally valid�
universals which could heal the logocentrism of modern science�(Ashis Nandy and
[The feminine side of the West held in trusteeship
by the East.] Despite many philosophical problems, social constructivism became
extremely influential in the academia. Feminist epistemology made
common cause with this view and claimed that women will construct facts
differently than men. Critics in India also embraced the idea of
ethno-sciences. Vandana Shiva wrote glowingly of Indian views of non-dualism as
superior to Western reductionism. Ashis Nandy embraced the paradigm bound thinking he
derived from Kuhn and Feyerabend and declared astrology to be the science of
the weak. [Theosophy] Alternative medicine, Marglin openly defended prayer to
goddess as no different from vaccination. (
The grand conclusion of this school of thought is that all ways of knowing are at par because all are culturally embedded attempts to understand brute reality. There is only one reality, different cultures approach it differently, each of which is rational in its own context. (If you replace culture with caste in this statement, you get the golden rule of Hinduism that all paths to truth are different only in name.)
The critics went further: They argued that if, in
the final analysis, all representations of nature are cultural constructions,
then different cultures and subcultures should be permitted to construct their
own representation of nature. To judge other cultures from the vantage point of
science, as the Enlightenment tradition demanded, amounted to committing an act
of "epistemic violence" against the other, as Gayatri Spivak called
it. This became the foundation of what is called postcolonial theory, which
combined a perspectival epistemology with Michel Foucault's notion of power of
discourse and Edward Said's theory of Orientalism. Postcolonial theory led to a
flood of discourse analyses showing how the modernist critics of
tradition -- especially Nehru, but also the nationalist neo-Hindus like Bankim
Chandra, Ram Mohan Roy and other leading lights of the Indian Renaissance �
were mentally colonized because they were seeing
Two final observations need to be made before we
leave the subject of postmodernity in
First is the issue of anti-dualism or anti-logocentrism: Feminists and ecologist critics condemned the separation of the subject from the object as a sign of masculine and dualist Judeo-Christian thinking. Dualism or logo-centrism was bad because it treated nature as mere matter. Turn to goddess and nature religions. Allso defense of local traditions of medicine.
Finally, there is the issue of hybridity or
pastiche. If there are so many different but equally reasonable sciences, how
does one choose. The answer: you don't choose; You combine. You create a bricolage, a pastiche, a cyborg. You
create borderland epistemologies. Contradictions OK.
Just become difference. Don't worry about it.
7
From POMO I want to move to how religious fundamentalists see science.
The important thing to understand about religious
fundamentalism is that it is an ideology of a closed society. Closed societies,
if you follow Karl Popper, are societies that do not allow any rational
criticism or falsification of their fundamental moral laws, which they treat as
having the backing of inevitable laws of nature put in place by God or by
history. As the experience of
Fundamentalists are no different. On the one hand,
they loudly demonize science when it is used by rationalists to challenge
religious myths and superstitions. But on the other hand, they want to lay
claims on modern science as being on their side, as affirming their god-centered cosmology and the moral and social
norms that follow from that cosmology. (For example:
intelligent design creationists claim that existing biological evidence�fossil
record, development of the eye etc.�if read through Christian assumptions,
actually supports design. In India, similar theories of spiritual evolution:
You should see the recent book on Vedic Creationism. Evidence from paranormal�)
Why this eagerness to the backing of science? Clearly the idea is to evade refutation, deny the obvious contradictions and take on the cultural authority of science for their teleological reading of nature as exhibiting a moral order. (For Hinduism: also deeply nationalistic purpose.) This hyper-scientism is a phenomenon of modern age. In the pre-modern era, science needed the support and consent of theology in order to appear trustworthy and reasonable. In our time, it is the other way around: it is theology that needs the support of science in order to appear trustworthy and rational. No one, except the extreme fanatics like the Taliban perhaps, can afford to just say no to modern science, especially at a time when they are all using the technologies from Internet to the nuclear bombs.
Not just fundamentalists,
though. Also many devout people who sincerely want to bring their faith in
alignment with science. As long as it is a personal idiosyncrasy, without any
institutional-political support, without being linked to nationalism, it is
harmless.
8
So, all fundamentalists want to and try
to use modern science as affirming their particular worldview. There are two
ways to go about doing it: either by exclusiveness which tends toward literalism,
or by inclusiveness, which tends toward relativism, hybridity and an Orwellian
doublespeak.�
Exclusiveness is the preferred method of Christian and Islamic conservatives: They treat the sacred books as the only truth, valid for all people, for all times. [- False; - not so white and black, therefore accommodation; - something of George Bush = either / or]. Other ways of seeing were judged against the Revealed word of God..they were not allowed to exist within their own co ext. (Modern science could not be brought under the church / Christian fundamentalists are a belated attempt to assert the authority of the Bible over science / reformed epiistemology/ literal truth [� struck thru � SV]).
Inclusiveness is the preferred method of Hinduism. (A key concept). What makes Hinduism an inclusive religion?
It is not that Hindus don't have their exclusive
truths which they consider eternally true and universally true: they obviously
do. Belief in Brahman as the sole ultimate reality, belief in karma and rebirth,
hope for nirvana are all central dogmas of Hinduism�they constitute the hard
core of Hinduism which has survived through all the changes brought about by
modernization (Zaehner). It is not a lack of
exclusive dogmas, but a certain relativistic hierarchy that makes Hinduism
inclusive: for example, while the goal of liberation from the endless
cycles of birth and rebirth by realizing the Brahman within you is preached as
mandatory for all Hindus, indeed for all spiritual people universally, the means of achieving
the goal are decided by the innate capacities, tastes and inclinations of
different people, born in different castes, different social contexts and even
different countries. While the knowledge of Brahman is considered essential for
liberation, the means of achieving the knowledge are left open. As Vivekananda
put it, "the absolute can be realized, or thought of, or stated only
through the relative�" (This, incidentally, is exactly
the position of cultural studies of science: universal natural rationality is
not denied, but expressed in so many forms). But in Hinduism, this relativism does not
follow from liberal doctrine of choice, but from hierarchy.
The flip side of this relativism is what is called �bandhu� or correspondences in traditional Hindu texts and what postmodernists call bricolage or pastiche. If all ways of knowing or achieving nirv�na are considered merely partial or context-bound expressions of the same aspiration, or the same goal, to know reality of Brahman, then, one is free to simply treat different ways as functional homologues, as saying "the same thing," or based upon "similar fundamentals," differing only in their level of complexity and in their choice of words. If this is so, then one can safely take in an element from an alien tradition, for e.g. quantum physics which deals with non-causal, indeterminate mechanisms, and proclaim it to be "similar to," "saying the same thing" as the Vedantic description of consciousness working through matter. The two become simply different standpoints, different perspectives on a given slice of reality. This kind of parallelism is repeatedly invoked by Hindu nationalists who simply proclaim that, to quote the words of Swami Vivekananda, "the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions Vedanta reached ages ago, only in modern science they are written in the language of matter� (it is of no import that naturalism actually contradicts the present of spirit, or atman...) you appear generous and non-judgmental but you have evaded falsification by establishing a false analogy, or a false equivalence, between two entirely different or in fact contradictory systems of thought.
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I want to take a quick look at how inclusivism
emerged in
Let us go back to the beginnings and compare what
was happening in
By the time Manu wrote his Manusmriti,
the Upanishads, had been written,
What was going on in Christianity? By the time
What is of interest to us is the difference
between how the two emerging faiths dealt with whom they saw as heretics. First thing to note are the amazing
similarities. Both Manu and
Let us look at
Of course, we know the later history: hardening of Christian dogma, wars and forced conversion. But Augustine did set the tone/Galileo
Let us go back to Manu. He is equally vehement
against the heretics, but he lacks Augustine universalism: the rational unity
of mankind, the idea that the heretics could be right and that the Brahmins
had something to learn from them just
does not occur in Manu or in the subsequent law books. (the
possibility that melecchas could have better
technology is allowed). There are passages in Manusmirti
where Manu condemns all non-Vedic doctrines as evil, dark
and bringers of bad karma (12.95). He does make small concessions here and
there: he allows that you can use reason, as long as it does not challenge the
Vedas (12: 106). But when it comes to the status of heretics, he is
uncompromising: he equates them repeatedly with lower castes, with impure
people and even with animals including cats and � for some strange reasons �
herons. Even in later more popular religious texts like the Mahabharta
and Ramayana, materialists and rationalists who dare to challenge the Vedas are
made to appear as jackals or chandals which were the
most impure of all castes.
The hierarchical relativism that led to inclusivism was a result of this caste logic: heretics were not considered partners in a mutual dialogue. Brahmins felt no compulsion to bring them into their own fold, either through persuasion, conversion or violence, as was the case in more universalistic religions like Christianity and Islam. The knowledge of the Vedas was considered too special and too pure to be handed out to the lower orders. If you don't want to share your gods and your books with others, you can't possibly deny them their gods and their books.
But non-Brahmin castes and non-Vedic sects were
not left free to develop their own worldviews and practice. Their gods and
their rituals and their cosmologies remained subordinated to the knowledge of
the Vedas. Due to the control of rituals, which gave them enormous power, the Brahminical ideals of mystical, non-sensory knowledge of
Brahman remained as the gold standard of truth and knowledge. All others were
seen as limited and inferior paths to the knowledge of Brahman: they were true
as partial, inferior attempts to get to the ultimate knowledge accessible only
to those who know the Vedas. In order to get any hearing at all, non-Vedic
thinkers had to show that their ideas did not contradict the Vedas and that
their purpose was the same as prescribed by the Vedas. There is ample
historical evidence that important scientific developments in astronomy and in
medicine went no where: even the most learned astronomers like Brahmagupta had to suppress their naturalistic understanding
of eclipses in favor of superstitions about demons eating up the sun or the
moon, physicians in the Ayuervedic tradition had to
make concessions to atman and karma when they actually had a naturalistic
theory of disease. (quote SND here). The end result
was that natural philosophy was not totally absent but it was subordinated to
the higher truths of the spirit. [As Surendranath
Dasgupta put it in his famous History of Philosophy in Hinduism.]
Islamic period: I have not studied the period in details. But was a period of resentful brooding. No attempts to understand Arabic systems of sciences. Akbar was a mleccha.
A terrible irony: RAJARAM/ DAVID FRAWLEY/ SUDARSHAN: Semitic monotheisms are condemned as suppressing science, while Hinduism is deified as a religion of reason where there was never a conflict between faith and reason: conflict was never acknowledged, contradictions were never resolved because ordinary people�who worked with their hands and bodies and ordinary senses of seeing and reasoning were not considered equal partners in debate. They were allowed to have their "lower knowledge" which was OK for their caste context, but it was not allowed to challenge the "higher knowledge" which could only be neti neti.
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The state of affairs continued until the encounter
with the British colonialists. Interestingly, when the thinkers of the so
called Hindu renaissance encountered modern science brought in by the British,
they took this upper-caste inclusivist stance toward
science: they did not deny the importance of modern science, but declared it to
be an inferior and limited kind of knowledge which only gave us knowledge of
"mere matter," which needs to be taken to a higher level where matter
becomes one with consciousness, the know [?]. In keeping with the cultural
habits of Hinduism, neo-Hindu thinkers from Ram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan all
simply denied any need to revise the Brahminical
idealistic knowledge in light of modern science. They simply fitted science in
the� hierarchical scheme, with spiritual
knowledge at the top. There��������� were
(rationalist voices) Ambedkar and secular humanist�but they never acquired
sufficient social capital. (
11
Let us pause here and take a stock of the argument so far: We have examined the relativist trends in social theory, we looked at the history of hierarchical relativism and how it has allowed the Hindu orthodoxy to simply declare all truths to be true within their contexts without confronting contradictions between them. It is time now to pull these various strands together and see how postmodernism [of the left � struck thru] supports the Hindutva's appropriation of science.
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If you read the contemporary Hindutva's literature on Vedic science carefully, you will see inclusivism in action. The same strategy as neo-Hindus, Vivekananda and Aurobindo, are their heroes. To quote David Frawley, Vamadeva Shastri: �The Indic traditions largely accepts Western science as valid within its own sphere, but regards that sphere limited... the Indic tradition aims to spiritualize the Western tradition by integrating science into a deeper spiritual cosmology of yoga and Vedanta. " (that there is a life-force, which is self-aware and neti-neti....)
[NOT FENCES, BUT INCLUSION] Pastiche / critical traditionalism
This eagerness to turn natural science into a handmaiden of Vedic cosmology is motivated by three ultranationalistic goals: I am going to run through these goals, and the strategies and how they use postmodern �arguments
- BJP's manifesto,
-
Deen Dayal's Integral Humanism, which is very similar to Oswald Spengler. Each society has a soul, a citti which is monistic, does not separate. (Science must derive from citti � Hindu citti)
- POCO have also emphasized that science must be organic with the cultural gestalt. Different sciences are possible.
-
Hindutva agitators see themselves
as POCO theory. Charge that the West treated Indian ways of knowing as
irrational because of its Western prejudices: 
]:
They see their attacks on
II. Rewriting History: "Cradle of Civilization"
How did they know? RELATIVISM: within the monistic paradigm, mysticism is empirical: Explicitly use SSK literature. Exactly the same argument by Marglin: prayer is not irrational.
III. Hinduism as the religion of future:
- God is dead, but the subtle god of Vedanta lives on
- Hindu god over comes logocentrism
Postmodernism DOES NOT SHARE THE NATIONALISM, BUT at all levels, it ends up providing arguments which overlap with the nationalists.