From: grendhal-AT-raggedclaws.com
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 13:49:32 -0600
Subject: Re: BHA: Social Science, doing science & CR


I had to "clean up" the following essay, posted today by vvmurthy, so I could 
read it, and I thought others might appreciate a "cleaned-up" copy as well, 
so here it is:

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ESSAY
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.

Copyright: 1995 - 2002 The Hindu Republication or redissemination of the 
contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the consent of The 
Hindu 

----------

p.s. Here's another article list members might find interesting:

Groff, Ruth. "The Truth of the Matter: Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realism and the
Concept of Alethic Truth." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30.3 (September
2000): 407-436.

Abstract: Presents a study on the theory of truth by Roy Bhaskar. Ontology of
alethic truth; Epistemology of alethic truth; Politics of alethic truth;
Analysis of the truth tetrapolity; Correspondence theory.

Full text: http://tinyurl.com/2hhn5



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