Re: Make India a knowledge power, says Dr.Manmohan Singh

[Spizz]

"Steve Hayes" <haye...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2spnr1pdms9ba5p9c...@4ax.com...
> On 4 Jan 2006 03:02:09 -0800, "Dr.Sahib.Pandit.Shri.Shri.Rainam Ji Maharaj
> Ji
> Ustad" <praina...@rediffmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who inaugurated the five-day
>>gathering of about 6,000 scientists, paid homage to the slain scientist
>>describing him a 'soldier of knowledge'.
>
> <Yawn>
>

Good grief, I actually agree with you on something Steve. I'd better go and
lie down.

Spizz

[Max Muir]

Steve Hayes wrote:
> On 4 Jan 2006 03:02:09 -0800, "Dr.Sahib.Pandit.Shri.Shri.Rainam Ji Maharaj Ji
> Ustad" <praina...@rediffmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who inaugurated the five-day
> >gathering of about 6,000 scientists, paid homage to the slain scientist
> >describing him a 'soldier of knowledge'.
>
> <Yawn>

Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science'

MEERA NANDA

The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science
must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but
also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both science

and spirituality.

The first part of a two-part article

The Vedas as books of science

IN 1996, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) of the United Kingdom
(U.K.) produced a slick looking book, with many well-produced
pictures of colourfully dressed men and women performing Hindu
ceremonies, accompanied with warm, fuzzy and completely
sanitised
description of the faith. The book, Explaining Hindu Dharma: A
Guide for Teachers, offers "teaching suggestions for
introducing
Hindu ideas and topics in the classroom" at the middle to high
school level in the British schools system. The authors and
editors
are all card-carrying members of the VHP. The book is now in
its
second edition and, going by the glowing reviews on the
back-cover,
it seems to have established itself as a much-used educational
resource in the British school system.

What "teaching suggestions" does this Guide offer? It advises
British teachers to introduce Hindu dharma as "just another
name"
for "eternal laws of nature" first discovered by Vedic seers,
and
subsequently confirmed by modern physics and biological
sciences.
After giving a false but incredibly smug account of
mathematics,
physics, astronomy, medicine and evolutionary theory contained
in
the Vedic texts, the Guide instructs the teachers to present
the
Vedic scriptures as "not just old religious books, but as books

which contain many true scientific facts... these ancient
scriptures of the Hindus can be treated as scientific texts"
(emphasis added). All that modern science teaches us about the
workings of nature can be found in the Vedas, and all that the
Vedas teach about the nature of matter, god, and human beings
is
affirmed by modern science. There is no conflict, there are no
contradictions. Modern science and the Vedas are simply
"different
names for the same truth".

This is the image of Hinduism that the VHP and other Hindutva
propagandists want to project around the world. The British
case is
not an isolated example. Similar initiatives to portray
Vedic-Aryan
India as the "cradle" of world civilisation and science have
been
launched in Canada and the United States as well. Many of these

initiatives are beneficiaries of the generous and politically
correct policies of multicultural education in these countries.

Under the worthy cause of presenting the "community's" own
views
about its culture, many Western governments are inadvertently
funding Hindutva's propaganda.

KAMAL NARANG
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Human Resource
Development
Minister Murli Manohar Joshi at the inauguration of the Indian
Science
Congress in New Delhi in 2001. The obsession for finding all
kinds of
science in all kinds of obscure Hindu doctrines has been
dictating the
official education policy of the BJP ever since it came to
power
nearly half a decade ago.

But what concerns us in this article is not the long-distance
Hindutva (or "Yankee Hindutva", as some call it), dangerous
though
it is. This essay is more about the left wing-counterpart of
Yankee
Hindutva: a set of postmodernist ideas, mostly (but not
entirely)
exported from the West, which unintentionally ends up
supporting
Hindutva's propaganda regarding Vedic science. Over the last
couple
of decades, a set of very fashionable, supposedly "radical"
critiques of modern science have dominated the Western
universities. These critical theories of science go under the
label
of "postmodernism" or "social constructivism". These theories
see
modern science as an essentially Western, masculine and
imperialistic way of acquiring knowledge. Intellectuals of
Indian
origin, many of them living and working in the West, have
played a
lead role in development of postmodernist critiques of modern
science as a source of colonial "violence" against non-Western
ways
of knowing.

In this two-part essay, I will examine how this postmodernist
left
has provided philosophical arguments for Hindutva's claim that
Vedas are "just another name" for modern science. As we will
see,
postmodernist attacks on objective and universal knowledge have

played straight into Hindu nationalist slogan of all
perspectives
being equally true - within their own context and at their own
level. The result is the loud - but false - claims of finding a

tradition of empirical science in the spiritual teachings of
the
Vedas and Vedanta. Such scientisation of the Vedas does nothing
to
actually promote an empirical and rational tradition in India,
while it does an incalculable harm to the spiritual message of
Hinduism's sacred books. The mixing up of the mythos of the
Vedas
with the logos of science must be of great concern not just to
the
scientific community, but also to the religious people, for it
is a
distortion of both science and spirituality.

In order to understand how postmodern critiques of science
converge
with Hindutva's celebration of Vedas-as-science, let us follow
the
logic behind VHP's Guide for Teachers.

This Guide claims that the ancient Hindu scriptures contain
"many
true scientific facts" and therefore "can be treated as
scientific
texts". Let us see what these "true scientific facts" are. The
prime exhibit is the "scientific affirmation" of the theory of
guna
(Sanskrit for qualities or attributes). Following the essential

Vedantic idea that matter and spirit are not separate and
distinct
entities, but rather the spiritual principle constitutes the
very
fabric of the material world, the theory of gunas teaches that
matter exhibits spiritual/moral qualities. There are three such

qualities or gunas which are shared by all matter, living or
non-living: the quality or guna of purity and calmness seeking
higher knowledge (sattvic), the quality or guna of impurity,
darkness, ignorance and inactivity (tamsic) and the quality or
guna
of activity, curiosity, worldly gain (rajasic). Modern atomic
physics, the VHP's Guide claims, has confirmed the presence of
these qualities in nature. The evidence? Physics shows that
there
are three atomic particles bearing positive, negative and
neutral
charges, which correspond to the three gunas! From this
"scientific
proof" of the existence of essentially spiritual/moral gunas in

atoms, the Guide goes on to triumphantly deduce the
"scientific"
confirmation of the truths of all those Vedic sciences which
use
the concept of gunas (for example, Ayurveda). Having
"demonstrated"
the scientific credentials of Hinduism, the Guide boldly
advises
British school teachers to instruct their students that there
is
"no conflict" between the eternal laws of dharma and the laws
discovered by modern science.

PARTH SANYAL
In Kolkata, astrologers demonstrating against the West Bengal

government's decision not to introduce astrology as a subject in
the
State's universities. A file picture.

One of the most ludicrous mantras of Hindutva propaganda is
that
there is "no conflict" between modern science and Hinduism. In
reality, everything we know about the workings of nature
through
the methods of modern science radically disconfirms the
presence of
any morally significant gunas, or shakti, or any other form of
consciousness in nature, as taught by the Vedic cosmology which

treats nature as a manifestation of divine consciousness. Far
from
there being "no conflict" between science and Hinduism, a
scientific understanding of nature completely and radically
negates
the "eternal laws" of Hindu dharma which teach an identity
between
spirit and matter. That is precisely why the Hindutva
apologists
are so keen to tame modern science by reducing it to "simply
another name for the One Truth" - the "one truth" of Absolute
Consciousness contained in Hinduism's own classical texts.

If Hindu propagandists can go this far in U.K., imagine their
power
in India, where they control the Central government and its
agencies for media, education and research. This obsession for
finding all kinds of science in all kinds of obscure Hindu
doctrines has been dictating the official educational policy of
the
Bharatiya Janata Party ever since it came to power nearly half
a
decade ago.

Indeed the BJP government can teach a thing or two to the
creation
scientists in the U.S. Creationists, old and new, are trying to

smuggle in Christian dogma into secular schools in the U.S. by
redefining science in a way that allows God to be brought in as
a
cause of natural phenomena. This "theistic science" is meant to

serve as the thin-edge of the wedge that will pry open the
secular
establishment. Unlike the creationists who have to contend with
the
courts and the legislatures in the U.S., the Indian government
itself wields the wedge of Vedic science intended to dismantle
the
(admittedly half-hearted) secularist education policies. By
teaching Vedic Hinduism as "science", the Indian state and
elites
can portray India as "secular" and "modern", a model of
sobriety
and responsibility in contrast with those obscurantist Islamic
fundamentalists across the border who insist on keeping science
out
of their madrassas. How useful is this appellation of
"science",
for it dresses up so much religious indoctrination as "secular
education".

Under the kindly patronage of the state, Hindutva's wedge
strategy
is working wonders. Astrology is flourishing as an academic
subject
in public and private colleges and universities, and is being
put
to use in predicting future earthquakes and other natural
disasters. Such "sciences" as Vastu Shastra and Vedic
mathematics
are attracting governmental grants for research and education.
While the Ministry of Defence is sponsoring research and
development of weapons and devices with magical powers
mentioned in
the ancient epics, the Health Ministry is investing in
research,
development and sale of cow urine, sold as a cure for all
ailments
from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to
tuberculosis
(TB). Faith-healing and priest-craft are other "sciences"
receiving
public and private funding. In the rest of the culture,
miracles
and superstitions of all kinds have the blessings of
influential
public figures, including elected Members of Parliament.

THERE are two kinds of claims that feed the notion that the
"Vedas
are books of science". The first kind declared the entire Vedic

corpus as converging with modern science, while the second
concentrates on defending such esoteric practices as astrology,

vastu, Ayurveda, transcendental meditation and so on as
scientific
within the Vedic paradigm. The first stream seeks to establish
likeness, connections and convergences between radically
opposed
ideas (guna theory and atomic particles, for example). This
stream
does not relativise science: it simply grabs whatever theory of

physics or biology may be popular with Western scientists at
any
given time, and claims that Hindu ideas are "like that", or
"mean
the same" and "therefore" are perfectly modern and rational.
The
second stream is far more radical, as it defends this "method"
of
drawing likenesses and correspondences between unlike entities
as
perfectly rational and "scientific" within the non-dualistic
Vedic
worldview. The second stream, in other words, relativises
scientific method to dominant religious worldviews: it holds
that
the Hindu style of thinking by analogies and correspondences
"directly revealed to the mind's eye" is as scientific within
the
"holistic" worldview of Vedic Hinduism, as the analytical and
experimental methodology of modern science is to the
"reductionist"
worldview of Semitic religions. The relativist defence of
eclecticism as a legitimate scientific method not only provides
a
cover for the first stream, it also provides a generic defence
of
such emerging "alternative sciences" as "Vedic physics" and
"Vedic
creationism", as well as defending such pseudo-sciences as
Vedic
astrology, palmistry, TM (transcendental meditation) and
new-age
Ayurveda (Deepak Chopra style).

In what follows, I will examine how postmodernist and social
constructivist critiques of science have lent support to both
streams of Vedas-as-science literature.

But first, I must clarify what I mean by postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a mood, a disposition. The chief
characteristic of
the postmodernist disposition is that it is opposed to the
Enlightenment, which is taken to be the core of modernism. Of
course, there is no simple characterisation of the
Enlightenment
any more than there is of postmodernism. A rough and ready
portrayal might go like this: Enlightenment is a general
attitude
fostered in the 17th and 18th centuries on the heels of the
Scientific Revolution; it aims to replace superstition and
authority of traditions and established religions with critical

reason represented, above all, by the growth of modern science.
The
Enlightenment project was based upon a hope that improvement in

secular scientific knowledge will lead to an improvement of the

human condition, not just materially but also ethically and
culturally. While the Enlightenment spirit flourished primarily
in
Europe and North America, intellectual movements in India,
China,
Japan, Latin America, Egypt and other parts of West Asia were
also
influenced by it. However, the combined weight of colonialism
and
cultural nationalism thwarted the Enlightenment spirit in
non-Western societies.

Postmodernists are disillusioned with this triumphalist view of

science dispelling ignorance and making the world a better
place.
Their despair leads them to question the possibility of
progress
toward some universal truth that everyone, everywhere must
accept.
Against the Enlightenment's faith in such universal
"meta-narratives" advancing to truth, postmodernists prefer
local
traditions which are not entirely led by rational and
instrumental
criteria but make room for the sacred, the non-instrumental and

even the irrational. Social constructivist theories of science
nicely complement postmodernists' angst against science. There
are
many schools of social constructivism, including the "strong
programme" of the Edinburgh (Scotland) school, and the "actor
network" programme associated with a school in Paris, France.
The
many convoluted and abstruse arguments of these programmes do
not
concern us here. Basically, these programmes assert that modern

science, which we take to be moving closer to objective truth
about
nature, is actually just one culture-bound way to look at
nature:
no better or worse than all other sciences of other cultures.
Not
just the agenda, but the content of all knowledge is socially
constructed: the supposed "facts" of modern science are
"Western"
constructions, reflecting dominant interests and cultural
biases of
Western societies.

Following this logic, Indian critics of science, especially
those
led by the neo-Gandhians such as Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva,

have argued for developing local science which is grounded in
the
civilisational ethos of India. Other well-known public
intellectuals, including such stalwarts as Rajni Kothari, Veena

Das, Claude Alvares and Shiv Vishwanathan, have thrown their
considerable weight behind this civilisational view of
knowledge.
This perspective also has numerous sympathisers among
"patriotic
science" and the environmentalist and feminist movements. A
defence
of local knowledges against rationalisation and secularisation
also
underlies the fashionable theories of post-colonialism and
subaltern studies, which have found a worldwide following
through
the writings of Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha,

Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. All these intellectuals and
movements mentioned here have their roots in movements for
social
justice, environmental protection and women's rights - all
traditional left-wing causes.

Social constructivist and postmodernist attacks on science have

proven to be a blessing for all religious zealots, in all major

faiths, as they no longer feel compelled to revise their
metaphysics in the light of progress in our understanding of
nature
in relevant fields. But Hinduism displays a special resonance
with
the relativistic and holistic thought that finds favour among
postmodernists. In the rest of this two-part paper, I will
examine
the general overlap between Hindu apologetics and postmodernist

view of hybridity (part I) and alternative sciences (part II).

Postmodern "hybridity" and Hindu eclecticism

THE contemporary Hindu propagandists are inheritors of the 19th

century neo-Hindu nationalists who started the tradition of
dressing up the spirit-centered metaphysics of orthodox
Hinduism in
modern scientific clothes. The neo-Hindu intellectuals, in
turn,
were (consciously or unconsciously) displaying the well-known
penchant of generations of Sanskrit pundits for drawing
resemblances and correspondences between religious rituals,
forces
of nature and human destiny.

Postmodernist theories of knowledge have rehabilitated this
"method" of drawing equivalences between different and
contradictory worldviews and allowing them to "hybridise"
across
traditions. The postmodernist consensus is that since truth
about
the real world as-it-is cannot be known, all knowledge systems
are
equivalent to each other in being social constructions. Because

they are all equally arbitrary, and none any more objective
than
other, they can be mixed and matched in order to serve the
needs of
human beings to live well in their own cultural universes. From
the
postmodern perspective, the VHP justification of the guna
theory in
terms of atomic physics is not anything to worry about: it is
merely an example of "hybridity" between two different
culturally
constructed ways of seeing, a fusion between East and West,
tradition and modernity. Indeed, by postmodernist standards, it
is
not this hybridity that we should worry about, but rather we
should
oppose the "positivist" and "modernist" hubris that demands
that
non-Western cultures should give up, or alter, elements of
their
inherited cosmologies in the light of the growth of knowledge
in
natural sciences. Let us see how this view of hybridity meshes
in
with the Hindutva construction of Vedic science.

It is a well-known fact that Hinduism uses its eclectic mantra
-
"Truth is one, the wise call it by different names" - as an
instrument for self-aggrandisement. Abrahamic religions go
about
converting the Other through persuasion and through the use of
physical force. Hinduism, in contrast, absorbs the alien Other
by
proclaiming its doctrines to be only "different names for the
One
Truth" contained in Hinduism's own Perennial Wisdom. The
teachings
of the outsider, the dissenter or the innovator are simply
declared
to be merely nominally different, a minor and inferior
variation of
the Absolute and Universal Truth known to Vedic Hindus from
time
immemorial. Christianity and Islam at least acknowledge the
radical
otherness and difference of other faiths, even as they attempt
to
convert them, even at the cost of great violence and mayhem.
Hinduism refuses to grant other faiths their distinctiveness
and
difference, even as it proclaims its great "tolerance".
Hinduism's
"tolerance" is a mere disguise for its narcissistic obsession
with
its own greatness.

Whereas classical Hinduism limited this passive-aggressive form
of
conquest to matters of religious doctrine, neo-Hindu
intellectuals
have extended this mode of conquest to secular knowledge of
modern
science as well. The tradition of claiming modern science as
"just
another name" for the spiritual truths of the Vedas started
with
the Bengal Renaissance. The contemporary Hindutva follows in
the
footsteps of this tradition.

The Vedic science movement began in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda

(1863-1902) addressed the World Parliament of Religions in
Chicago.
In that famous address, he sought to present Hinduism not just
as a
fulfilment of all other religions, but also as a fulfilment of
all
of science. Vivekananda claimed that only the spiritual monism
of
Advaita Vedanta could fulfil the ultimate goal of natural
science,
which he saw as the search for the ultimate source of the
energy
that creates and sustains the world.

Vivekananda was followed by another Bengali
nationalist-turned-spiritualist, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950).
Aurobindo proposed a divine theory of evolution that treats
evolution as the adventures of the World-Spirit finding its own

fulfilment through progressively higher levels of
consciousness,
from matter to man to the yet-to-come harmonious "supermind" of
a
socialistic collective. Newer theories of Vedic creationism,
which
propose to replace Darwinian evolution with "devolution" from
the
original one-ness with Brahman, are now being proposed with
utmost
seriousness by the Hare Krishnas who, for all their scandals
and
idiosyncrasies, remain faithful to the spirit of Vaishnava
Hinduism.

Vivekananda and Aurobindo lit the spark that has continued to
fire
the nationalist imagination, right to the present time. The
Neo-Hindu literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries,
especially the writings of Dayanand Saraswati, S. Radhakrishnan
and
the many followers of Vivekananda, is replete with celebration
of
Hinduism as a "scientific" religion. Even secularists like
Jawaharlal Nehru remained captive of this idea that the
original
teachings of Vedic Hinduism were consonant with modern science,
but
only corrupted later by the gradual deposits of superstition.
Countless gurus and swamis began to teach that the Vedas are
simply
"another name for science" and that all of science only affirms

what the Vedas have taught. This scientistic version of
Hinduism
has found its way to the West through the numerous ashrams and
yoga
retreats set up, most prominently, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and
his
many clones.

ALL these numerous celebrations of "Vedas as science" follow a
similar intellectual strategy of finding analogies and
equivalences. All invoke extremely speculative theories from
modern
cosmology, quantum mechanics, vitalistic theories of biology
and
parapsychology, and other fringe sciences. They read back these

sciences into Sanskrit texts chosen at will, and their meaning
decided by the whim of the interpreter, and claim that the
entities
and processes mentioned in Sanskrit texts are "like", "the same

thing as", or "another word for" the ideas expressed in modern
cosmology, quantum physics or biology. Thus there is a bit of a

Brahman here and a bit of quantum mechanics there, the two
treated
as interchangeable; there are references to "energy", a
scientific
term with a definite mathematical formulation in physics, which

gets to mean "consciousness"; references to Newton's laws of
action
and reaction are made to stand for the laws of karma and
reincarnation; completely discredited "evidence" from
parapsychology and "secret life of plants" are upheld as proofs
of
the presence of different degrees of soul in all matter;
"evolution" is taught as the self-manifestation of Brahman and
so
on. The terms are scientific, but the content is religious.
There
is no regard for consistency either of scientific concepts, or
of
religious ideas. Both wholes are broken apart, random
connections
and correspondences are established and with great smugness,
the
two modes of knowing are declared to be equivalent, and even
inter-changeable. The only driving force, the only idea that
gives
this whole mish-mash any coherence, is the great anxiety to
preserve and protect Hinduism from a rational critique and
demystification. Vedic science is motivated by cultural
chauvinism,
pure and simple.

What does all this have to do with postmodernism, one may
legitimately ask. Neo-Hinduism, after all, has a history dating

back at least two centuries, and the analogical logic on which
claims of Vedic science are based goes back to times
immemorial.

Neo-Hinduism did not start with postmodernism, obviously. And
neither does Hindutva share the postmodernist urgency to
"overcome"
and "go beyond" the modernist fascination with progress and
development. Far from it. Neo-Hinduism and Hindutva are
reactionary
modernist movements, intent on harnessing a mindless and even
dangerous technological modernisation for the advancement of a
traditionalist, deeply anti-secular and illiberal social
agenda.
Nevertheless, they share a postmodernist philosophy of science
that
celebrates the kind of contradictory mish-mash of science,
spirituality, mysticism and pure superstition that that passes
as
"Vedic science".

For those modernists who share the Enlightenment's hope for
overcoming ignorance and superstition, the value of modern
science
lies in its objectivity and universality. Modernists see modern

science as having developed a critical tradition that insists
upon
subjecting our hypotheses about nature to the strictest, most
demanding empirical tests and rigorously rejecting those
hypotheses
whose predictions fail to be verified. For the modernist, the
success of science in explaining the workings of nature mean
that
sciences in other cultures have a rational obligation to revise

their standards of what kind of evidence is admissible as
science,
what kind of logic is reasonable, and how to distinguish
justified
knowledge from mere beliefs. For the modernists, furthermore,
modern science has provided a way to explain the workings of
nature
without any need to bring in supernatural and untestable causes

such as a creator God, or an immanent Spirit.

For a postmodernist, however, this modernist faith in science
is
only a sign of Eurocentrism and cultural imperialism. For a
postmodernist, other cultures are under no rational obligation
to
revise their cosmologies, or adopt new procedures for
ascertaining
facts to bring them in accord with modern science. Far from
producing a uniquely objective and universally valid account of

nature, the "facts" of modern science are only one among many
other
ways of constructing other "facts" about nature, which are
equally
valid for other cultures. Nature-in-itself cannot be known
without
imposing classifications and meaning on it which are derived
from
cultural metaphors and models. All ways of seeing nature are at
par
because all are equally culture-bound. Modern science has no
special claims to truth and to our convictions, for it is as
much
of a cultural construct of the West as other sciences are of
their
own cultures.

This view of science is derived from a variety of American and
European philosophies of science, associated mostly with such
well-known philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, W.O
Quine,
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. This view of science
has
been gaining popularity among Indian scholars of science since
the
infamous "scientific temper" debates in early 1980s when Ashis
Nandy, Vandana Shiva and their sympathisers came out in defence
of
local knowledges and traditions, including astrology, goddess
worship as cure for small-pox, taboos against menstruation and
(later on) even sati. Over the next two decades, it became a
general practice in Indian scholarly writing to treat modern
science as just one way to adjudicate belief, no different from
any
other tradition of sorting out truth from mere group belief.
Rationalism became a dirty word and Enlightenment became a
stand-in
for "epistemic violence" of colonialism.

According to those who subscribe to this relativist philosophy,
the
cross-cultural encounter between modern science and traditional

sciences is not a confrontation between more and less objective

knowledge, respectively. Rather it is a confrontation between
two
different cultural ways of seeing the world, neither of which
can
claim to represent reality-in-itself. Indeed, many radical
feminists and post-colonial critics go even further: they see
modern science as having lost its way and turned into a power
of
oppression and exploitation. They want non-Western people not
just
to resist science but to reform it by confronting it with their

holistic traditional sciences.

What happens when traditional cultures do need to adopt at
least
some elements of modern knowledge? In such cases,
postmodernists
recommend exactly the kind of "hybridity" as we have seen in
the
case of Vedic sciences in which, for example, sub-atomic
particles
are interpreted as referring to gunas, or where quantum energy
is
interpreted to be the "same as" shakti, or where karma is
interpreted to be a determinant of biology in a "similar
manner" as
the genetic code and so on. On the postmodern account, there is

nothing irrational or unscientific about this "method" of
drawing
equivalences and correspondences between entirely unlike
entities
and ideas, even when there may be serious contradictions
between
the two. On this account, all science is based upon metaphors
and
analogies that reinforce dominant cultures and social power,
and
all "facts" of nature are really interpretations of nature
through
the lens of dominant culture. It is perfectly rational, on this

account, for Hindu nationalists to want to reinterpret the
"facts"
of modern science by drawing analogies with the dominant
cultural
models supplied by Hinduism. Because no system of knowledge can

claim to know reality as it really is, because our best
confirmed
science is ultimately a cultural construct, all cultures are
free
to pick and choose and mix various "facts", as long as they do
not
disrupt their own time-honoured worldviews.

This view of reinterpretation of "Western" science to fit into
the
tradition-sanctioned, local knowledges of "the people" has been

advocated by theories of "critical traditionalism" propounded
by
Ashis Nandy and Bhiku Parekh in India and by the numerous
admirers
of Homi Bhabha's obscure writings on "hybridity" abroad. In the

West, this view has found great favour among feminists, notably

Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and among anthropologists of
science including Bruno Latour, David Hess and their followers.

To conclude, one finds a convergence between the fashionable
left's
position with the religious right's position on the science
question. The extreme scepticism of postmodern intellectuals
toward
modern science has landed them in a position where they cannot,
if
they are to remain true to their beliefs, criticise Hindutva's
eclectic take-over of modern science for the glory of the Vedic

tradition.

Meera Nanda is the author of Prophets Facing Backward:
Postmodern
Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism (Rutgers University
Press, 2003). An Indian edition of the book will be published
by
Permanent Black in early 2004.