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If people become what they think they are, what they think they are is exceed-
ingly important.
Linda Fedigan, Primate Paradigms: Sex Roles and Social Bonds
Dreams of an Insomniac
Science has transformed the visual schemes of an insomniacthe stu-
dious invocation of sheep, the procession of zoological icons hypnotically
jumping a white picket fence on a soft green lawn.1 Thanks to the cloning
feat of Dr. Ian Wilmut,2 all I see today is a stream of Dollys, identical in
every manner, deftly clearing the barricade in quick succession. There is
no comfort anymore, no soporific presence. A genetically engineered
sheep is no longer innocent, naive. These icons that inhabited my nightly
imagination, the last refuge of an insomniac, are suddenly pregnant with
meaning, rich with symbolism. Life is not the same anymore.
The realm of the natural, a world untainted by human interven-
tions, has exploded into a kaleidoscope of technological wizardry. Sci-
ence has taken over that last bastion of the personal and private, the world
of ones dreams. And yet, just as science in all its quests for rationality has
conquered another realm of the supposedly irrational, religion seems to be
(re)appearing systematically and unmistakably. Religion has often been
cast as the demon in the nightmares of modern science. What do we make
of the appearance of these two supposed opposites in the same dream-
scape? For some, it is just another chapter in an ongoing story in which
the light of reason banishes the darkness of superstition. The appearance
of superstition is seen as regression, signaling the need to remind the
dreamer of the superiority of rationality. For others, the morality play,
while also long-running, moves in the opposite direction. For them, the
reappearance of religion may be a sign of return, but not of regression
a return to the time of beauty and light, the time before the outsiders and
their degenerate, fluorescent version of enlightenment.
Having grown up secure in the warm halo of modern science in sec-
ular India, with Charles Darwin as my hero, the tumultuous turns of sci-
ence and religion have been disorienting. My growing feminism has
Banu
Subramaniam
Archaic Modernities
SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND REL IG ION IN MODERN INDIA
Social Text64, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2000. Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press.
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forced me to interrogate the world around me, slowly pushing me away
from the center of the very institutions I put my trust in. My naive faith
and belief in the liberatory power of sciencethe science that was going to
eradicate poverty, and class, caste, and gender discriminationhas grad-
ually eroded. It is not that I think science cannotdo those things, but that
science has not fulfilled its promise. Eugenics, Nazi science and medi-
cine, Tuskegee syphilis experiments are part of the history of science wemust reckon with. I am a committed scientist and believe in the possibil-
ity and power of a liberatory science, but I think these promises can be
fulfilled only when we learn to create, locate, and engage with a science
that is also a political, social, and progressive institution. Mainstream sci-
encewith its claim to the apolitical, value-neutral, and objectivecannot
fulfil this mission. Indeed, the social and feminist studies of science have
demonstrated that sciences claim to aperspectival objectivity is far from
that view from nowhere.3 Instead it is a view from the pristine white
castles of power and privilege. How should we imagine this progressive
project for science? If science is an institution influenced by social, cul-
tural, and economic factors as the social and feminist studies of science
suggest, surely we must elaborate the relationship of science to another
powerful cultural force, namely religion. What does this look like?
The always unsteady science of the interpretation of dreams is fur-
ther complicated when the dreamscape and the dreamer inhabit the
worlds between these two stories, sleeping, dreaming frantically between
the binary oppositions of science and religion and religion and secularism.
What can this yield but a jumble of dream fragments?
. . . I dream of the lush landscape of the hills of Assam. I can almost smell the
fresh air and the morning dew. Memories of Budhadev Dasguptas recent film,
Lal Darja (The red door). Through dreams of his magical childhood among the
red beetles in the hills of Assam, the protagonist, a dentist, escapes his oppressive
urban life of modern day India. Juxtaposing the innocence of childhood and thecynicism of adulthood, the filmmaker contrasts a magical childhood filled with
infinite possibilities with an adult life of listless sterility. The joyous, imaginative
child, now an adult, is struck with a mysterious ailment. He feels his hands and
legs slowly turning to lead. His medical doctor finds nothing physically wrong
with his patient and can only prescribe rest, relaxation, and Valium. As the story
weaves the contrasting images of childhood and adulthood, we are given a power-
ful lesson on urbanization and modernity in todays India. Later in the film, a
news reporter on television in the background announces the spread of a mysteri-
ous illness originating in the West now sweeping Indian cities, the symptoms
matching those of our protagonist.
. . . The serenity and humor of the lush landscape is interrupted by the
cacophony of modern American academic life. Academic life as a scholar in the
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sciences and the social studies of science has meant an immersion in the infamous
science wars. Disciplines speaking from fragmented locations, in the field of acad-
eme. Uniformed disciplinary teams battle it out. Blunt arrows crisscross the aca-
demic hallways, the din of the pompous, loud voices cry in seemingly different lan-
guages: Not scientific enough. Too scientific. Youre wrong, Im right. Science is
socially constructed. Oh yeah! Try jumping off the tenth floor! The roar is deafen-
ing. Talking at and not to each other. Debate without dialogue. I feel I am in the
midst of a Jerry Springer show. The voice coming out of me cannot rise above the
din. I find myself in the midst of it all helpless.
. . . The cacophony gives way to a scene of religious fervor. Memories of my
recent trip to India and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the
arbiters of power. A Hindu nationalist government at the helm. I never thought I
would see the day. Their foray into nationalism and fundamentalism includes a
return to a Hindu science. I hear Meera Nanda reminding us that one of BJPs
first acts after coming to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992 was to make
the study of Vedic mathematics compulsory for high-school students. Explicitly
stating an interest in awakening national pride among students, the govern-
ment-approved textbooks replaced standard algebra and calculus with sixteen
Sanskrit verses proclaimed by the author, Jagadguru Swami Shri Barati Krishna
Tirathji Maharaj, the high pr iest of Puri, to be of Vedic origin. Nanda notes thatprominent Indian mathematicians and historians believe that there is nothing
Vedic about these verses. They charge that the Jagadguru is passing off a set of
clever formulas for quick computation as a piece of ancient wisdom. However, the
BJP and other revivalist cultural movements in India have begun building a new
hagiography of Indian knowledge systems by equating the author of these verses
with Srinivasa Ramanujan.4
. . . I float entranced in the rhetoric of the wonders and wisdom of ancient
India. The exultation in some mythic past that is glorious, wondrous, wise, and
brilliant. It is all around me. Priests rhythmically chanting the Vedas, scholars
extolling the virtues of the upanishads and the wonders of ancient India, the glo-
ries of a great Hindu civilization before the appearance of the invaders who
plunged the civilization into degeneracy. Initial ly, there is something euphoric,
almost hypnotic, about it. As the dream progresses, the jingoistic national priderooted in a great Hindu religious past is suffocating. While I ponder the Vedas, the
invention of the number zero, and what it means to talk about a return to a Vedic
science and mathematics, I hear a big explosion in the corner of my eye. And the
big mushroom cloud comes clearly into focus. Pokhran. India tests its nuclear
weapons.
. . . Kansas, 1999. The board of education votes to delete the teaching of evo-
lution from the states curriculum. Constructionism goes r ight wing. There are no
real truths; science is only theory, and if evolution is a theory, so is creationism.5
Presidential candidates enter the dreamscape extolling the virtues of local
choice. Gore favors teaching evolution, adding that localities should be free to
teach creationism as well. Bush agrees that both are valid educational subjects
and that it is a quest ion for state and local school boards. Dole and McCain
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emphasize the local, and Gary Bauer says he does not teach his children that
they have descended from apes.6 Epistemologies and truth claims come center
stage yet again, and ideas of a democratic science emergewe can all vote on what
we will accept as truth, theory, and thought!
. . . I find myself in my mothers living room in Madras watching television.
India seems to have solved its multilingual problem rather efficiently. Instead of
forcing citizens of var ious states to watch programs in English or Hindi that they
most likely will not understand, programs are dubbed in regional languages. In
Tamil Nadu, all the Hindi soap operas are dubbed in Tamil, as are Disney car-
toons and American sitcoms like Diffrent Strokes. For those into the surreal,
watching Gary Coleman say Whatcha talkin about? in Tamil is a must see.
The cover of a prominent business magazine sports a man in traditional Tamilian
garb, veshti and angavastram, the religious markings, the shaved head, the sacred
thread across the body, wearing chic dark glasses, cowboy boots, a Coke can in one
hand, and a boom box in the other. What delicious oxymoronic imagery! New per-
mutations of orthodoxy and technological modernity I could never have imagined.
. . . The consistent undercurrent of religion and religious identity that is all-
pervasive troubles me. Religious fanaticism from corners I would never have
anticipated. The violence and strength of it takes me aback. Friends and neighbors
begin appearing, all spouting the importance of vaastushastrathe renewed sci-ence of building homes with the right energy-flow patterns. Friends and relatives I
know renovate homes at great expense. Bathrooms become kitchens, sometimes
prayer rooms, and bedrooms become living rooms! Peoples names suddenly grow
or lose lettersas andes mysteriously appear and disappear in the hope that it
will be numerologically auspicious.
The Making of Archaic Modernities
If the above vignettes appear contradictory, jumbled, messy, perhaps even
incoherent, that is my intention. The juxtaposition of contradictory obser-
vations reflects the complexity of modern science and scientific modernity.
It is meant to displace neat categories of modernity, premodernity, and
postmodernity, of progressive and conservative politics, of democracy,
secularisms, and nationalisms. I present these images not to add to the
contemporary panic about the instability in South Asia. I do not wish to
feed the racist imagery of South Asians gone nuclear as children playing
with a dangerous gun.
The challenge of these developments in contemporary India is in cre-
ating new frameworks in which to think about science and religion simul-
taneously within the social studies of science. Some commentators have
responded by glorifying prescientific utopias and reviving our dreams of a
glorious history, and nostalgia for the simple days of yesteryeara world
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bereft of scientific and technological innovations, where humanity and
technology dont begin to fuse dangerously. Indeed, much of the rhetoric
in the BJP is specifically about the exaltation and preservation of Hindu
culture against the decadence of the West. In addition, some postcolonial
critics of science have equated science with the West and science as a
hegemonic force that is inherently violent. In their eyes, Western science
must be eradicated in its entirety as a colonizing, violent intrusion.7 Onthe other hand, science activists have invoked a defense of science, scien-
tific objectivity, and rationality. They ask how we can tolerate the growing
violence against minorities, how we can support the continued oppression
of women and people of lower castes, in the name of religion. How can
we not educate in the face of rampant ignorance and injustice? These
critics have historically fought and continue to fight religious nationalism
with the rhetoric of science and scientific rationality. For them science is
our only savior from the superstition and irrationality of religion.8 At the
heart of many of these critiques is the construction of science and religion
as oppositional and mutually exclusive practices. One must save science
by attacking religion or save religion by attacking science.
How can we work with these contradictory ideologies of science and
religion without demonizing one with the other? I want to argue that these
debates within the social, feminist, and postcolonial studies of science
have largely been constructed within Western conceptions of secularism as
a separation of church and state. Despite the Christian clerical roots of
science,9 science and religion have become inseparably distinct today.
Western secularism has co-opted science in its vision for the modern state.
As a result, we have the distinct zones of religion (church) and science
(state). The social studies of science, while demonstrating the hegemonic
power of science in the West, have not taken up the interdependence of
science and religion historically. In this essay, I argue that we must engage
with religion, a powerful cultural force in much of the world. Perhaps
science and religion are not simply antagonists where one will eventually
banish the other completely from its domain. Perhaps the question is not
whether the two are related or whether they share the same space, but
rather how. How do they interact? How do they depend on each other?
At the heart of the debate is the fact that science has been inextricably
connected to modernity, secularism, and the state. Secularism in the
United Statesdefined as the separation of church (religion) and state
has meant that the battles have been around science and religion and sec-
ularism and religion but not science and secularism. Science is central to
the dreams and visions of the state and crucial in any imagination of
progress and the future. We repeatedly hear about the need for scientific
literacy and the need for a scientifically educated population if the
What does one
do when
confronted with
an archaic
modernity? What
do you do or
think when
neither of the
dominant
narrativesthe
archaic or the
modernallows
for the
interpretation or
realization of your
dreams? Where
and in what
locations can one
dream and
envision
progressive
feminist politics?
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United States is to remain a dominant force in world politics. Secularism
has successfully separated science and religion and the state and religion.
The separation of church (religion) and state (science) is most evident in
the repeated contentious attempts to introduce creationism or to abolish
evolution in schools. It has successfully kept creationism out of the class-
room (although the recent Kansas ruling has managed to keep evolution
out as well).The recurrent debate about the teaching of creation and evolution in
the schools in the United States is a powerful testament to how deep this
chasm is in our cultural psyche. As an atheist and an evolutionary biolo-
gist, I am frightened by the prospect of evolution being removed from the
biology curriculum and the teaching of creation as an equivalent theory. It
seems impossible to begin to broach the subject of religion without being
afraid of creation in the classroom. How can we talk about construction-
ism and the hegemonic power of science without reverting to the rela-
tivism where anything goes, where all ideas, beliefs, and ideologies are
equivalent?
The secularization of the United States is a long and complex process.
Scholars suggest that increased scientific and technical specialization and
the removal of some activity of life from substantive influences of tradi-
tional or organized religion were supported by Christians and non-Chris-
tians pushing traditional Christian educational concerns to the periph-
ery.10 What is so interesting to me about India and Indian secularism is
that there has been no equivalent debate until the present. The birth of
secularism in India is a very different story than the birth of secularism in
the United States. India, as we know it today, was created in 1947. Before
colonialism, the Indian subcontinent was home to a heterogeneous and
diverse collection of rulers and kingdoms, with no common religions, tra-
ditions, cultures, languages, or ideologies. Through various invasions,
many religions entered India, and yet others emerged on Indian soil. As
opposed to an American model of secularism marked by the separation of
church and state, Indian secularism in these early stages of independence
has been practiced as pluralismincluding the active support and encour-
agement of all religions. For example, Indian law accepts the religious
codes of individual religions that govern inheritance, marriage, divorce,
and so on. This has by no means been even or easy, but it is the vision of
the founders of independent India. The state has supported both science
and religion without similar contestations until now. And even at present,
the debate is not specifically about science but is only implied as an exten-
sion of the grand plank ofHindutva.
After its independence, India embarked on a scientific and techno-
logical expansion path in its quest for industrialization. Like in the United
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States, science has been adopted as the reason of the state. As Nandy
explains,
This expectation partly explains why science is advertised and sold in India
the way consumer products are sold in any market economy, and why it is
sought to be sold by the Indian lites as a cure-all for the ills of Indian soci-
ety. Such a public consciousness moves from one euphoria to another. In the
1950s and 1960s it was Atom for Peace, supposedly the final solution of all
energy problems of India; in the 60s and 70s it was the Green Revolution,
reportedly the patented cure for food shortage in the country; in the 70s
and 80s it is Operation Flood, the talisman for malnutrition through the
easy availability of milk for every poor household in the country. 11
The current rise of religious nationalism in India has brought two sets
of oppositional spaces, science and religion, together within the landscape
of contemporary Indian politics. The religious nationalists have challenged
the visions of the founders of India. Rather than disavow secularism or
democracy, the Hindu nationalists today have redefined bothsecularism
as tolerance and democracy as majoritarianism.12 The Indian case involves
a curious mix of science and religion, very different than in the West. The
form of pluralist secularism imagined by the founders of India allows us in
theory to imagine future relationships of science and religionnot in the
current regressive alliance between Western science and religious nation-
alism but in the progressive possibilities for differently conceived social
institutions of science and religion.
Religious nationalists in contemporary India have selectively, and
strategically, used rhetoric from both science and Hinduism, modernity
and orthodoxy, Western and Eastern thought to build a powerful but
potentially dangerous vision for a Hindu nation. Hindu dominance; intol-
erance of and supremacy over other religions, faiths, and traditions; and
hatred and bigotry toward non-Hindus mark the religious nationalistvision. Rather than characterize Hinduism as ancient, nonmodern, or tra-
ditional, the Hindu nationalists have embraced capitalism, Western sci-
ence, and technology as elements of a modern, Hindu nation. Since
Indias first test of a fission bomb by Indira Gandhi in 1974, subsequent
secular governments abstained from further tests. Indeed, it is ironic that
despite Indias nuclear capabilities, it was the Hindu nationalists who
defied the world to test the ultimate destructive weapon of Western sci-
ence, the fusion bomb, in Pokhran soon after they came to power.
However, these ideals of a modern Hindu nation exist alongside con-
tradictory visions of a glorious precolonial Hindu pastthe scientific,
technological, and philosophical scriptures of ancient Hinduism. Hindu
nationalists celebrate the revival of ancient Vedic sciences and mathemat-
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ics, at times replacing Western science, mathematics, and algebra in some
schools. Religious nationalists thus bring together a modern vision with an
archaic vision, that is, an archaic modernity. By strategically employing
elements of science and religion, orthodoxy and modernity, the Hindu
Right is attempting to create a modern Hinduism for a Hindu India.
They suggest that we need to return to Hindu values while incorporating
Western and Vedic sciences. Contrary to their claims, religious nationalistsare not merely reverting to tradition or decolonizing India or Indian his-
tory but appropriating modernity and Western science into a Hindu
agenda.
What does one do when confronted with an archaic modernity? What
do you do or think when neither of the dominant narrativesthe archaic
or the modernallows for the interpretation or realization of your
dreams? Where and in what locations can one dream and envision pro-
gressive feminist politics? Science and secularism have been tied to visions
of equality and the end of discrimination. On the other hand, as a Third
World woman in the halls of Western science, science has not been very
hospitable to me. Some of the most important critics of science and secu-
larism are those who have been marginalized and discriminated against by
science. While religion is the answer of change for some, religion is no
easy partner for feminists and postcolonial critics of science. To women
disqualified from participating in most religious ceremonies, the male bas-
tion of religion is no solution. How then, can we work with two powerful
yet potentially problematic institutions of science and religion with diffi-
cult pasts and contentious histories, and how can we build progressive
visions of new intellectual, political, and social institutions?
Growing Up in Secular India
The applications of science are inevitable and unavoidable for all countries
and peoples to-day. But something more than its application is necessary. It is
the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the
search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without
testing and trial . . . the reliance on observed fact, and not on pre-conceived
theory, the hard discipline of the mindall this is necessary, not merely for
the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many prob-
lems.
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
Having grown up with the promise of modern science in secular India, the
shift from the rhetoric of secular science to one of Vedic science within
fifty years of Indian independence is very hard to take. To understand
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why talk of Vedic sciences and scientific Vedas feels so disorienting, I
must give you some background on growing up in postindependent India.
I was born into a middle-class Hindu family, about two decades after
Indian independence. I grew up in postcolonial/independent, secular, and
urban India, all very important markers. We learned a great deal about the
Indian freedom struggle in our history classes. The fact that India defined
itself as a secular democracy was a reason for great pride. Living in secu-lar India manifested itself in several ways. Urban India was largely cos-
mopolitan, and I attended Catholic missionary schools. My family was not
very religious except for the occasional visit to temples or attending reli-
gious functions. There was no formal religious education of any kind,
and the little I know about Hindu mythology comes from memories as a
little girl of listening to stories from grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Full
of action, wars, love, hate, and duty, these dramatic stories were quite
enthralling. Most of us in urban India have but a smattering of such
knowledge and virtually no training in Hindu philosophy or history.
Growing up as one of the majority, Hinduness was never threatened and
therefore never in need of protection or revival. It was clear that there was
a great deal of discrimination around. Anti-Muslim sentiments were ram-
pant; class and caste lines were clearly visible. Visits to the small town
where my grandparents lived further enforced how deep-seated, indeed
almost feudal, these inequities were. Growing up in urban India, we
always felt a sense of superiority that we were not so orthodox or back-
ward as the villages in discriminating against members of other groups.
Urban India was the location of progress and modernity, where the future
of India lay, while the villages would have to develop and catch up with
the modern India of the cities. While this liberal discourse allowed us to
visit each others homes across religious and caste lines (mostly colleagues
from work or friends from school, or neighbors we lived with, and almost
never across class lines), and to greet and wish each other well on religious
holidays, there were clear limits. Communities largely celebrated religious
functions exclusively and married within. Cross-community marriages
were and still are moments of shame and scandal.
Education in secular India meant that students were diverse although
largely middle class, except for some poorer Catholic and Christian stu-
dents our missionary school admitted. Both religious and nonreligious
schools are accredited by the state and often subsidized (in some states) as
well. Schools are places to be educated and trained for the final statewide
exams during the tenth and twelfth grades. Education was secular in that
students were not forced into religious education of a religion that was not
theirs. In our classes, we could not sit with anyone we wanted, but instead
were seated strictly by height. On the first day of class we were organized
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in an ascending order of height and seated with the shorter students in
front. Important holidays of the major religions were observed as national
holidays. There were optional holidays allocated that individuals could
take around other religious holidays important to their communities.
Every morning before the start of school, all the students assembled in our
uniforms in the school courtyard for morning assembly. This always
included prayer (often Christian prayer in Christian schools and Hinduprayer in Hindu schools). As a result, most Hindus in Christian schools
knew many Christian prayers, Christmas carols, and blessings. In Bom-
bay, where I did my elementary schooling in a Catholic girls school, once
a week, we split up along religious lines for an hour. Catholic students
were sent to a class on Catholic doctrine taught by a senior nun, other
Christian students were sent for catechism often taught by a teacher who
was Christian but not Catholic, and the rest of usHindus, Muslims,
Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and children from other religious groups
spent an hour learning moral science. This involved following a state-
sanctioned text filled with short stories and parables, each of which ended
with a moral. We were tested on our morals at the end of the year, and
a day before the exam we would all be hard at work on improving our
morals! This continued well into my undergraduate years in Madras,
where we had an hour called ethics.
Science was central to my image of modernity. Science, as it was
taught to me in school, as it was represented in the books I read and the
popular culture I watched, was Western science. Indigenous forms of
science and medicine have never been integrated under the rubric of sci-
ence. Religious orthodoxy was in my eyes associated with discrimination,
backward thinking, superstition, and blind faith in what seemed like
ridiculous custom. When my family would consult the astrological charts
to look for auspicious times for a move, or tell me that I should not sleep
with my head facing the north, I scoffed at them. When I saw families seg-
regating girls and women during their menstrual days, I was outraged. I
ridiculed silly superstition, laughed at irrational tradition, and became
enraged when I saw discriminatory or hateful practices against any man or
woman. I was outraged that Brahmin priests were exclusively men and
that women could not perform most ceremonies. I wanted no part of a
religion in which I could not participate as an equal. My feminism and
politics were very linked to modernity, and modernity was linked with
claims of reason, and reason was linked with the objectivity and rational-
ity of science.
Very early in life, the sciences became a passion of mine. I was drawn
to their call for logic, reason, rationality, and objectivity. I bought into the
mythology of a progressive teleology, that is, that science self-corrects
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when it is wrong and therefore we move closer to a more complete under-
standing of the world. To me, it shone as a meritocratic world where my
identity as a woman, Indian, Third-Worlder was irrelevant. The white men
(dead and alive!) who inhabited my textbooks were my role models, and I
was quite oblivious of my brown skin or my sex. A large poster of Charles
Darwin hung above my desk. It did not occur to me that, with the excep-
tion of C. V. Raman and J. C. Bose, there were no Indian men in my sci-ence textbooks and certainly no Indian women. The future of the world,
the eradication of blind superstition, discrimination, hunger, and poverty
lay in my young mind squarely in the world of science. It comes as no sur-
prise that after an undergraduate education in biology in India, I should
cross the oceans and come to the United States for a graduate degree in
evolutionary biology full of visions and dreams of being a model scientist.
Throughout postcolonial India, Western science was the science
that the Indian state supported; alternate forms of science and medicine
have remained in the periphery. As Susantha Goonatilake suggests in
Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World,13 modern sci-
ence in the Third World has always been defined by the center, that is, the
West, and any creativity that has emerged has come from indigenous and
peripheral practices. Western science had been transplanted into India
and subsequently embraced as a central force in Indian politics. It has
retained its Western roots and practices, further colonizing and marginal-
izing the very people who have embraced it as a central project of devel-
opment.
The Rise of Religious Nationalism in India
Before I am accused of using Hindu and India interchangeably, I must
state that when we speak of Indias ancient native genius, we mean its rich
Hindu heritage, and we cannot, and need not, shy away from this fact. Hindus
are the natural community of India, and by the fact of being the majority
community, they will determine its structure and ethos. This is the natural
order all over the world, and there is nothing intrinsically anti-minority about
it. Unfortunately, Jawaharlal Nehrus cruel and unfair hounding of the Hindu
ethos from the public square has de-legitimized it so thoroughly that even
today, intellectuals are unable to accept the fact that the Hindu spirit will no
longer be denied its rightful space.
Sandhya Jain, Free Press Journal, 13 September 1999
In 1998, the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, came to power in India. The
political success of the BJP draws on two other Hindu nationalist move-
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mentsthe Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organization of religious
leaders, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant youth
organization. The Hindu nationalist program stresses Hindutva, or Hin-
duness. In the 1998 elections, neither the BJP nor any other party won a
majority of seats in the lower house of the Indian Parliament. What
resulted was a coalition government led by the BJP. This is the first time in
Indias independent history that a Hindu nationalist party has been a sig-nificant part of a national government. Marked by disagreement and dis-
cord between the coalition partners, the government fell in April 1999 by
a margin of one vote during a no-confidence motion. The secular parties
that brought on this fall were not able to form an alternate government.
The BJP returned to power in September 1999 as part of the National
Democratic Alliance, a coalition party of twenty-six national and regional
parties.
While the future of the BJP and the recent turbulent Indian politics
will continue to unfold, some things are clear. Hindu nationalists have
tapped into the discontent of Indians and have transformed this discon-
tent into a problem about religion and the brand of secularism the Indian
founders envisioned. The rise of discontent within India and the resur-
gence of Hindu religious nationalism are complex phenomena with no
easy answers. India remains a poor country with high illiteracy, poverty,
unemployment, and a growing population. There has been no substantial
investment in education or health care, and while numbers for literacy and
infant and adult mortality have improved a little, the lives of the majority
of Indians are marked by abject poverty. After fifty years of independence
and the development of the third-largest technical workforce in the world,
the primary economic indicators do not look promising.
The political turmoil with the last five governments tumbling down
before the end of their term is not just a frustration with corrupt politi-
cians but has to do with profound political changes in Indias rural vil-
lages. A recent study suggests that the countrys most oppressed peo-
plethe lower castes, the poor, the illiterate, and womenhave been
voting and joining political parties in growing proportions.14 The presence
of lower castes and women is significant in their increased representa-
tion at the grassroots levels in local village governments (panchayats). The
Seventy-third Amendment Act of 1992 codified the reservation of 33 per-
cent of seats at the panchayat level for women and schedule castes and
schedule tribes. The emerging non-Brahmin, non-upper-caste regional
parties have become powerful in the increasingly fragmented coalition
national governments. The leaders of these parties are no longer willing
to accept crumbs from the tables of the two major national parties. They
want to be at the table themselves.15
Some argue that these voting trends
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and the rise of regional parties of non-upper-castes are hopeful signs that
people are fed up with the empty promises of secular parties and are
increasingly suspicious of the upper-caste politics of the BJP.
The rise of religious nationalism is a more complicated story. Over
the last two decades of secular governments, religion has become a pow-
erful tool in Indian politics. Secular parties have unashamedly infused
religion into national politics. In the name of secularism and supportingminority communities, they have pitted religious communities against
each other, courting minority groups while failing them once in power.
Religious and secular parties have used casteism, sexism, and classism in
their efforts to secure power. This has led to a rise in caste- and religion-
based politics. These have resulted in a multitude of sectarian episodes
legal cases, constitutional amendments, sectarian violence and riots, des-
ecration and demolition of sacred places such as mosques and churches,
and the killing of members of minority groups. Religion has become a
powerful and central tool of Indian politics today. As Peter van der Veer
suggests, religious discourses and practice are not merely an ideological
smoke screen but indeed constitutive of changing social identities. 16
The rise of Hindu nationalism by the majority in a context where
minority groups are already disenfranchised economically and politically
is disturbing and dangerous. India has always been a country where osten-
tatious religious celebrations thrive and where local confrontations for the
use of public space for religious events continue. Hindu groups strategi-
cally take religious processions through majority Muslim locales or inter-
rupt Muslim celebrations and vice versa. There is a history of Muslims
being seen as foreign elements and not truly Indian17 partly through the
identification of all things Muslim with Pakistan, an archenemy with
whom India has fought three wars since 1947. Anti-Muslim sentiment
stirred up during the partition of India and Pakistan has never died. This
spills over into daily life, for example, into the world of cricket. Bal Thack-
eray, the infamous Shiv Sena head, threatened to disrupt the Pakistan
cricket tour to India, and members of the party attacked cricket pitches in
Mumbai and Delhi and the office of the Board of Control for Cricket in
India early this year. The isolated clash of religions in parts of India, the
rise of religious superstition, and the perennial hype surrounding India-
Pakistan cricket matches have always been a part of India. But the
increased violence aimed at religious minorities in the last few years has
been alarming. Beginning with the demolition of the mosque Babri Masjid
in 1992 by Hindu nationalists, there have been numerous attacks on
mosques, on churches, and on minority groups. The lack of any overt
action by the national government headed by the BJP and the continuing
rhetoric ofHindutva is frightening.
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Scientific Vedas, and Vedic Sciences
The reconstruction of the past implies a clash of stories deeply enmeshed in
the discursive construction of present identities. That is why history is so
important, because it is part of what we think we are; it is part of our culture.
Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
While religion, tradition, and religious superstition have always been an
important part of the Indian psyche, I want to argue that science has
also been inscribed deeply within the same psyche. I want to further argue
that this merging of traditional and modern by religious nationalists is
uneven and often strategic.18 As the BJP has come to power, there have
developed moderate and extremist forces within the party. The image the
party has projected has varied and is often contradictory. Whether the
moderate face the party has projected in its election manifesto will remain
when it is in power is up for debate. Historically, the BJP has been closely
linked to the extremist groups, the VHP and the RSS. Some members in
power (notably the prime minister, Vajpayee) have taken on a moderate
stance and have tried to distance themselves from the rhetoric of the morereactionary members. So, for example, an important election issue during
the rise of the BJP two years ago was the building of a temple at the site of
the desecrated mosque, Babri Masjid (because some religious nationalists
claim it is the birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram). The election manifesto
of the BJP coalition in 1999 did not include the building of a temple, and
prominent members have explicitly stated that it is not part of the election
campaign. However, on the eve of the first round of voting in Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar, the RSS chief Rajendra Singh publicly stated that the
temple issue was not forgotten, encouraging the cadre to go all out and
vote for the BJP.19 The multiplicity of narratives coming from different
branches of the BJP, the VHP, and the RSS seems strategic, making one
suspicious of what the future will hold if the supposedly moderate BJPcontinues to rise to power.
With respect to science, one can similarly find a variety of narratives
within the rhetoric of the religious nationalists. On the one hand, the BJP
has embraced Western science and technology like all previous secular
governments. In fact, while secular governments resisted the testing of
nuclear weapons, the BJP has gone further in using the power of science
and technology to reawaken the pride of Indians by the nuclear tests in
Pokhran. The one-year anniversary of the nuclear tests in Pokhran was
declared Indias first Technology Day in honor of its nuclear and
defense scientists. The human resources and development minister, Murli
Manohar Joshiwhile laying the foundation for a technology forecasting
Is it possible by
uncovering the
complications of
the past to
imagine a
different future?
One in which
one doesnt have
to choose
between the
defense of
science and the
defense of India,
between two
different, but
perhaps equally
discriminatory
versions of
society?
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centerstated that Pokhran and all our scientific endeavors have brought
glory to India.20 The section titled Our Policy on Science and Technol-
ogy in the BJPs 1999 election manifesto seems to be a seamless contin-
uation of previous governments policies. In these respects the BJPs
stance on science propels the modernist scientific and technological pro-
ject of development.
However, alongside this modern vision are glimpses of the archaic.For example, in late 1998, the VHP demanded the scrapping of the
Macaulian system of education in India and the introduction of the
Vedas, Upanishads, and Indian heritage in school curricula. The working
president of the VHP said that it is important to counter the de-Hindui-
sation programme of Christian schools and protect our own culture and
heritage.21 In October 1998, the BJP introduced a Hindutva plank for the
national education conference. This included the singing of the saraswati
vandana (a Hindu prayer) at the beginning of the meeting. The educa-
tion plank included making Sanskrit compulsory until Class XII (i.e.,
twelfth grade) and introducing patriarchal gender roles by making a
course on housekeeping mandatory for girls. The conference ended with
a walkout by education ministers of twelve states over the singing of the
religious prayer as well as the Hindutva plank of the BJP.22 The prime
minister lashed out at them for insulting the Hindu goddess of learning
by staging a walkout.23 Further, as mentioned earlier, the BJP-led state
government of Uttar Pradesh was responsible for the inclusion of Hindu
science and mathematics in school curricula.
While some of the rhetoric seeks to displace Western science with a
Hindu science, others reclaim the modernist project of science as really
nothing but an Indian science, anticipated in the ancient science and tech-
nological history of India.24 Two main strains of the continuation of a
Hindu vision are evident. The first strain of appropriation comes from
some that argue that the discoveries and findings of modern science were
already discovered or anticipated in ancient India25 and that they can be
found in the Vedas and Upanishads.26 They suggest that readings of the
ancient literary texts find the atom, the bomb, and the airplane, the sci-
ence of space and time, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, the miss-
ing link, the Pythagorean theorem, and various technologies.27 In this
sense, the Vedas were the Vedic sciences. In the second strain, religious
nationalists use the ancient scriptures as a source of pride in the ancient
development of literatures, philosophies, and scientific knowledge in
ancient India. In this sense, the Vedas were scientific, embedded within a
rich philosophy of knowledge. Thus, when religious nationalists invoke the
Vedas or other ancient scriptures in the name of Hindu pride, their vision
does not supplant Western science, but instead it melds with Western sci-
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ence, appropriating Western science within the rubric of Vedic sciences.
Within these visions of Vedic sciences and the scientific Vedas is a reimag-
ination of contemporary India as ancient and modern.
Recent events in India are a strong reminder of the colonized Indian
psyche, and the primacy of colonialism within postcolonial, independent
India. The legacy of Western science lives on as the reason of the state.
The revival of the ancient scriptures, the Vedas of the rich history ofIndia, are attempts not to decolonize the Indian psyche but to reinstate
Hindu culture and history as the hub in which the scientific progress of
the future is anticipated. There is no epistemological critique of Western
science but indeed an embracing of itwhereby an exaltation of Western
science is simultaneously an exaltation of the scientific Vedas and the
Vedic sciences. It is frightening to see this Hindu science emerging from
nationalism. This science purports to be anticolonial, a culturally situated
science, decolonizing India by unearthing old cultural practices eroded by
colonialism.28 Yet in reality, the nationalists are creating an India that is a
Hindu nation. By finding Western scientific innovations anticipated in
the Vedic sciences, the nationalists give Indias past an aura of Hindu
supremacy. Therefore, in order to look to future progress, we must delve
into Indias glorious Hindu past.
Archaic modernity works in part through a disavowala disavowal
that history is messythat the embrace of a violently imposed science
cannot be redeemed simply by discovering its roots in an authentic past,
and a disavowal that this same science provides vantage points from which
to criticize the exclusionary boundaries of that archaic past. Strangely,
even as it supposedly focuses on recovery from the violence of colonialism
by recovering the past, archaic modernity disavows both the violence of
modernity and the science and technology that it embraces, and the vio-
lence of the archaic past in its nostalgic form. The pastthe ancient past,
the more recent past of colonialism, and the recent history of postinde-
pendent Indiaare all literally recoveredcovered over in a secular story.
Is it possible by uncovering the complications of the past to imagine a
different future? One in which one doesnt have to choose between the
defense of science and the defense of India, between two different, but
perhaps equally discriminatory versions of society? Or have to choose
between science and religion as incompatible opposites; between sci-
ence and the social sciences and humanities; and between feminism and
science? Neither science nor religion after all has much of a place to offer
women.
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Surviving an Archaic Modernity
A major contradiction in our understanding of the entire Indian past is that
this understanding derives largely from interpretations of Indian history made
in the last two hundred years.
Romila Thapar, The Past and Prejudice
In his wonderfully evocative and insightful recent book, Another World:
Science and the Imagination of Modern India,29 Gyan Prakash suggests that
contemporary debates about the past and the present, tradition and
modernity, science and religion, Indian and Western, colonization and
decolonization are not new. In fact, these debates were important in the
Indian national struggle and Indias subsequent quest for modernity. Why
then, after fifty years of independence, have these debates returned center
stage? Why do the nationalists imagine Indias resources and past to be a
Hindu past? How have Hindu nationalists taken the problematic visions
of the archaic and the modern and yet brought them together for such a
powerful vision of an archaic modernity? Ultimately, this project of
archaic modernity proves quite facile and familiar in its resurgentvisions of the old and familiar terrain of patriarchy, hierarchies of caste
and class, and religion. Indias past is imagined not in its heterogeneity
and complexity but instead in the Orientalist visions of a grand Hindu
past.
I cannot say I have any answers. I feel I have come a long way from
my naive childhood dreams. I am used to living between the fissures of
academic disciplines as someone who works across the sciences, the
humanities, and the social sciences. But I am struck by reactions to my
recent interest in religion as I have watched with horror the rise of reli-
gious nationalism in India. I am a researcher in the sciences and the social
studies of science. While I may critique the institution of science and its
practices, I am committed to science and the possibility of a progressiveinstitution. My work seeks to develop and work toward such a vision. As
an atheist witnessing the rise of religious nationalism, my initial reaction
was to want to do away with religion. As always, leaving ones home
brings new insights about that very home. I realize now that Indian
dreams of the nation always take religion as one of the main aspects of
national identity.30 My adulation for science is now more tempered. I
have to ask, If I could recover a progressive agenda for science in all its
oppressive and imperialist history, surely I must do the same for religion?
And yet this has been so very difficult. As I attempt to begin to think
about the contentious fields of science and religion simultaneously, I find
myself in the middle of numerous minefields. How can I gingerly tip-toe
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across the clearly demarcated zones? My scientist friends joke that Im
turning religious and ask whether I will be off to the temple to pray. Why
can an atheist not believe in the progressive possibilities for a social insti-
tution of religion? My religious friends and relatives heave a sigh of relief
and hope that I am finally seeing the light. Postcolonial critics of science
want to have no part of science and scientific rationalists want no part of
religion. Some are delighted at the attention to the idea of decoloniza-tion but immediately slide unproblematically into the glories of Indias
ancient heritage, ironically a discourse created by colonialism. When will
we acknowledge that the glorious Hindu past revered by upper-class reli-
gious nationalists was not glorious for everyone? Others want to leave the
cobwebs of the past behind and move into the light of scientific rationality.
Some secularists want to minimize the role of religion in civil society, rel-
egating religion to the personal, while others want to put religion center
stage of a new moral order. The ideological positions are dizzying. And
here perhaps is the power of an archaic modernity: it reduces the multi-
plicity of India into a seemingly coherent vision. But how do we work
against this vision? How do we empower the multiple pieces into a pro-
gressive vision of science and religion?
When I think back on my own education, I think it a pity that my only
dreams were those of a Western science, uncontexualized, unsituated,
unproblemetized within my own culture or reality. I was the intended
product of Macaulays famous pronouncement, Indian in blood and
colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect!31 I
dream of a world where the project of building a progressive, antiracist,
feminist politics within the social institutions of science and religion
becomes possible. The challenge to me is in creating a practice of science
that is informed by its history, sociology, and philosophy. It is the chal-
lenge of resisting the binaries of past and present, secular and religious,
progressive science and regressive religion, modern science and ancient
religion, oppressive West and free East. It is in taking the project of decol-
onization seriously, in attempting Lawrence Cohens vision of creating
an archaeology of the subjugated knowledges within European science
and not just in postcolonial contexts.32 My naive scientific visions of an
evolutionary biologist have now learned to take seriously these global cir-
culations of science. I must learn to take seriously indigenous practices
and systems of knowledge of the colonized worlds without the impulse to
extend the hegemony of Western science to call them sciences or alter-
nate sciences, but to understand them as legitimate knowledge systems
with their own philosophy, history, culture, and tradition. I must reconcile
Western sciences own origin within the Christian clerical tradition.33 I
have to practice science locating it as an institution embedded in a social,
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cultural, and economic world of which religion is an important part. Why
has it been easier for religious nationalists to successfully develop an
archaic modernity, while those in the secular Left have failed to articulate
and create an alternate future? My journeys to the West have now taken
me back to the East. It is in these global scientific circulations that I have
begun to imagine new worlds, ones that are neither archaic nor modern.
Notes
This essay represents a new direction in my work. My interest and engagement
with religion was possible because of the encouragement and support of Janet
Jakobsen and with India because of S. Hariharan. Both have helped substantial ly
with the arguments and the development of this essay. I am also grateful for the
advice of Kamakshi Murti and Rosemary Kalapurakal.
1. The dreamscape was inspired by the title, Dreams of an Insomniac,
which in turn was inspired by a 1996 movie by Tiffanie DeBartolo, Dream for
an Insomniac. Recently, I also discovered Irena Klepfiszs book of the same title,
Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes (Portland,
Ore.: Eighth Mountain, 1990).2. I. Wilmut, A. E. Schnieke, J. McWhir, A. J. Kind, and K. H. S. Campbell,
Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells, Nature, 27
February 1997, 81013.
3. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986).
4. Meera Nanda, The Science Wars in India, Dissent44 (winter 1997): 81.
5. Gary Demar of the group American Vision on CNN Report, Kansas
School Boards Evolution Ruling Angers Science Community, 12 August 1999.
6. Bruce Norton, Presidential Candidates Weigh In on Evolution Debate,
CNN, 27 August 1999.
7. See Ashis Nandy, Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Moder-
nity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78.
8. See Nanda, Science Wars in India.
9. David Noble, A World without Women: The Chris tian Clerical Culture ofWestern Science (New York: Knopf, 1992).
10. George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: An Historical
Overview, in The Secularization of the Academy, ed. George M. Marsden and
Bradley J. Longfield (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1992), 33.
11. Nandy, Science, Hegemony, and Violence, 78.
12. Achin Vinaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity,
and Secularization (New York: Verso, 1997).
13. Susantha Goonatilake, Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the
Third World(London: Zed, 1984).
14. Celia W. Dugger, Indias Poorest Are Becoming Its Loudest, New York
Times, 25 April 1999. These conclusions were reached by the Center for the
Study of Developing Societies.
15. Ibid. Dugger is referring to the leaders Mayavati and Mulayam Singh
Yadav. Indeed, Mayawati, a Dalit woman and a leader of the Bahujan Samaj
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Party, built on the votes of Dalits, was instrumental in bringing down the BJP, a
party predominantly run by the upper caste.
16. Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ix.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. See ibid. for an argument for the merging of the discourses of modern
and traditional in the rise of religious nationalism in India today.
19. Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, By Raking the Temple Issue, the RSS ChiefReassures the Cadre That Nothing Is Forgotten, India Today, 27 September
1999.
20. A Year on, Indians Leaders Cheer Its Nuclear Tests, CNN, 11 May
1999.
21. VHP Demands Vedic Education to Save India from Christian Influ-
ence, Rediff on the Net, 23 October 1998, http://www.rediff.com.
22. Joshi Forced to Drop Saffron Agenda, Indian Express, 22 October
1998.
23. Vajpayee Kicks-Off BJP Poll Drive, Indiatimes, 27 October 1998.
24. Omar Kutty argues that Hindu nationalist discourse depends on the
modern notions of self and nation and hence is rooted in the same discourse
as Indian secular nationalism and Western culturetwo forces the party claims to
oppose. See Omar Kutty, Sources of Intolerance: The Modern Discourse of the
Bharatiya Janata Party, South Asia Graduate Research Journal (SAGAR) 4 (fall1997): 214.
25. Zaheer Baber argues that this position goes all the way back to colonial
times and was part of the argument by some Indian nationalists. Baber, The Sci-
ence of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
26. Gyan Prakash in his recent book, Another Reason: Science and the Imagi-
nation of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), shows
that the project of identifying scientific knowledge in Indian texts and traditions
came into view in late-nineteenth-century British India to advance universal
claims for a people stigmatized as metaphysical and out of touch with moder-
nity.
27. Ishwarbhai Patel, ed., Science and the Vedas (Bombay: Somaiya Publica-
tions, 1984).
28. Nanda, Science Wars in India, 7883.29. Prakash,Another Reason.
30. Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, 23.
31. Quoted in Gauri Viswanathan, Religious Conversion and the Politics of
Dissent, in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Chr istianity, ed. Peter
van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90.
32. Lawrence Cohen, Whodunit? Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints:
Comment on Harding, Configurations 2 (spring 1994): 347.
33. Noble,A World without Women.
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