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Archaic Modernities
SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN MODERN INDIA

If people become what they think they are, what they think they are is exceedingly important. Linda Fedigan, Primate Paradigms: Sex Roles and Social Bonds

Banu Subramaniam

Dreams of an Insomniac
Science has transformed the visual schemes of an insomniacthe studious 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 soporic 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 interventions, has exploded into a kaleidoscope of technological wizardry. Science 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 dreamscape? 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, uorescent version of enlightenment. Having grown up secure in the warm halo of modern science in secular India, with Charles Darwin as my hero, the tumultuous turns of science and religion have been disorienting. My growing feminism has
Social Text 64, 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 gradually eroded. It is not that I think science cannot do those things, but that science has not fullled its promise. Eugenics, Nazi science and medicine, Tuskegee syphilis experiments are part of the history of science we must reckon with. I am a committed scientist and believe in the possibility and power of a liberatory science, but I think these promises can be fullled only when we learn to create, locate, and engage with a science that is also a political, social, and progressive institution. Mainstream sciencewith its claim to the apolitical, value-neutral, and objectivecannot full 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 inuenced by social, cultural, 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 further 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 lm, 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 the cynicism of adulthood, the lmmaker contrasts a magical childhood lled with innite 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 nds 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 powerful lesson on urbanization and modernity in todays India. Later in the lm, a news reporter on television in the background announces the spread of a mysterious 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 eld of academe. Uniformed disciplinary teams battle it out. Blunt arrows crisscross the academic hallways, the din of the pompous, loud voices cry in seemingly different languages: Not scientic enough. Too scientic. Youre wrong, Im right. Science is socially constructed. Oh yeah! Try jumping off the tenth oor! The roar is deafening. 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 nd 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 rst 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 government-approved textbooks replaced standard algebra and calculus with sixteen Sanskrit verses proclaimed by the author, Jagadguru Swami Shri Barati Krishna Tirathji Maharaj, the high priest of Puri, to be of Vedic origin. Nanda notes that prominent 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 oat 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 glories of a great Hindu civilization before the appearance of the invaders who plunged the civilization into degeneracy. Initially, there is something euphoric, almost hypnotic, about it. As the dream progresses, the jingoistic national pride rooted 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 evolution from the states curriculum. Constructionism goes right 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 question 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 nd myself in my mothers living room in Madras watching television. India seems to have solved its multilingual problem rather efciently. Instead of forcing citizens of various 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 cartoons and American sitcoms like Diff rent 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 permutations of orthodoxy and technological modernity I could never have imagined. . . . The consistent undercurrent of religion and religious identity that is allpervasive 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 science of building homes with the right energy-ow 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 and es 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 observations reects the complexity of modern science and scientic 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 creating new frameworks in which to think about science and religion simultaneously within the social studies of science. Some commentators have responded by glorifying prescientic utopias and reviving our dreams of a glorious history, and nostalgia for the simple days of yesteryeara world

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bereft of scientic and technological innovations, where humanity and technology dont begin to fuse dangerously. Indeed, much of the rhetoric in the BJP is specically 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 On the other hand, science activists have invoked a defense of science, scientic 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 ght religious nationalism with the rhetoric of science and scientic 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 Statesdened as the separation of church (religion) and state has meant that the battles have been around science and religion and secularism 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 scientic literacy and the need for a scientically 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 classroom (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 biologist, 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 constructionism and the hegemonic power of science without reverting to the relativism 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 scientic and technical specialization and the removal of some activity of life from substantive inuences of traditional or organized religion were supported by Christians and non-Christians pushing traditional Christian educational concerns to the periphery.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, traditions, 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 encouragement 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 specically about science but is only implied as an extension of the grand plank of Hindutva. After its independence, India embarked on a scientic and technological 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 society. Such a public consciousness moves from one euphoria to another. In the 1950s and 1960s it was Atom for Peace, supposedly the nal 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 redened 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 nationalism 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; intolerance of and supremacy over other religions, faiths, and traditions; and hatred and bigotry toward non-Hindus mark the religious nationalist vision. Rather than characterize Hinduism as ancient, nonmodern, or traditional, the Hindu nationalists have embraced capitalism, Western science, and technology as elements of a modern, Hindu nation. Since Indias rst test of a ssion 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 deed the world to test the ultimate destructive weapon of Western science, the fusion bomb, in Pokhran soon after they came to power. However, these ideals of a modern Hindu nation exist alongside contradictory visions of a glorious precolonial Hindu pastthe scientic, 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 nationalists are not merely reverting to tradition or decolonizing India or Indian history 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 progressive 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 secularism 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 disqualied from participating in most religious ceremonies, the male bastion of religion is no solution. How then, can we work with two powerful yet potentially problematic institutions of science and religion with difcult 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 scientic 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 problems. 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 fty years of Indian independence is very hard to take. To understand

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why talk of Vedic sciences and scientic 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 dened itself as a secular democracy was a reason for great pride. Living in secular India manifested itself in several ways. Urban India was largely cosmopolitan, and I attended Catholic missionary schools. My family was not very religious except for the occasional visit to temples or attending religious 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 rampant; 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 backward 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 students 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 nal 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 rst 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 Hindu prayer in Hindu schools). As a result, most Hindus in Christian schools knew many Christian prayers, Christmas carols, and blessings. In Bombay, 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 statesanctioned text lled 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 science. 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 segregating 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 rationality 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 understanding 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 exception of C. V. Raman and J. C. Bose, there were no Indian men in my science 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 surprise 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 science in the Third World has always been dened 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 marginalizing the very people who have embraced it as a central project of development.

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 Hinduness. 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 rst time in Indias independent history that a Hindu nationalist party has been a signicant part of a national government. Marked by disagreement and discord between the coalition partners, the government fell in April 1999 by a margin of one vote during a no-condence 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 discontent into a problem about religion and the brand of secularism the Indian founders envisioned. The rise of discontent within India and the resurgence 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 fty 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 ve governments tumbling down before the end of their term is not just a frustration with corrupt politicians but has to do with profound political changes in Indias rural villages. A recent study suggests that the countrys most oppressed peoplethe 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 signicant in their increased representation at the grassroots levels in local village governments (panchayats). The Seventy-third Amendment Act of 1992 codied the reservation of 33 percent 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 powerful tool in Indian politics. Secular parties have unashamedly infused religion into national politics. In the name of secularism and supporting minority 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 religionbased politics. These have resulted in a multitude of sectarian episodes legal cases, constitutional amendments, sectarian violence and riots, desecration 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 ostentatious religious celebrations thrive and where local confrontations for the use of public space for religious events continue. Hindu groups strategically take religious processions through majority Muslim locales or interrupt Muslim celebrations and vice versa. There is a history of Muslims being seen as foreign elements and not truly Indian17 partly through the identication 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 Thackeray, 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 ofce 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 IndiaPakistan 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 of Hindutva is frightening.

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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?

Scientic 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 more reactionary 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 rst 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 BJP continues to rise to power. With respect to science, one can similarly nd 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 rst 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

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centerstated that Pokhran and all our scientic endeavors have brought glory to India.20 The section titled Our Policy on Science and Technology in the BJPs 1999 election manifesto seems to be a seamless continuation of previous governments policies. In these respects the BJPs stance on science propels the modernist scientic and technological project 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-Hinduisation 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 education 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 technological history of India.24 Two main strains of the continuation of a Hindu vision are evident. The rst strain of appropriation comes from some that argue that the discoveries and ndings 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 nd the atom, the bomb, and the airplane, the science of space and time, quantum theory, the theory of relativity, the missing 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 scientic knowledge in ancient India. In this sense, the Vedas were scientic, 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 scientic Vedas is a reimagination 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 of India, are attempts not to decolonize the Indian psyche but to reinstate Hindu culture and history as the hub in which the scientic 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 scientic 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 nding Western scientic 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 violence of the archaic past in its nostalgic form. The pastthe ancient past, the more recent past of colonialism, and the recent history of postindependent 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 science 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 fty 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 resurgent visions 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 ssures 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 religious 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 progressive institution. 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 difcult. As I attempt to begin to think about the contentious elds of science and religion simultaneously, I nd myself in the middle of numerous mineelds. 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 institution of religion? My religious friends and relatives heave a sigh of relief and hope that I am nally seeing the light. Postcolonial critics of science want to have no part of science and scientic rationalists want no part of religion. Some are delighted at the attention to the idea of decolonization 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 religious nationalists was not glorious for everyone? Others want to leave the cobwebs of the past behind and move into the light of scientic rationality. Some secularists want to minimize the role of religion in civil society, relegating 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 multiplicity of India into a seemingly coherent vision. But how do we work against this vision? How do we empower the multiple pieces into a progressive 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 challenge 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 decolonization 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 scientic visions of an evolutionary biologist have now learned to take seriously these global circulations 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 alternate 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 scientic 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 substantially 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 Klepszs 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, Dissent 44 (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 Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78. 8. See Nanda, Science Wars in India. 9. David Noble, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western 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. Longeld (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 Chief Reassures 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 Inuence, 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 (fall 1997): 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 Science 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 Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), shows that the project of identifying scientic 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 modernity. 27. Ishwarbhai Patel, ed., Science and the Vedas (Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 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 Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90. 32. Lawrence Cohen, Whodunit? Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints: Comment on Harding, Congurations 2 (spring 1994): 347. 33. Noble, A World without Women.

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