Beyond the Hoax by Sokal Alan;

Author:Sokal, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Concluding remarks

When all is said and done, the Hindutva ideologues’ claims that modern science is contained in the Vedas are about as plausible as the contention of The Bible Code, a 1997 best-seller, that future events are encoded in the Old Testament. 192 It would be the stuff of comedy, were the context — destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu mobs, repeated pogroms against Muslims and other religious minorities, the potential of nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan — not so serious. As Nanda observes wearily about the fashion for “Vedic science”: “Whatever good they might do for national pride, such claims cannot cover up the fact that Indian people remain mired in a view of the world that is deeply irrational and objectively false.”193

For lack of both space and competence, I have not dwelt on the historical and political context of Hindu nationalist ideology, but perhaps a few words are in order. Nanda makes a good case that contemporary Hindu nationalism is best viewed as an instance of “reactionary modernism”, a term that she borrows from Jeffrey Herf’s much-cited study of Nazi Germany’s modernity without liberalism, i.e.

the embrace of modern technology by German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason.… Before and after the Nazi seizure of power, an important current within conservative and subsequently Nazi ideology was a reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means-ends rationality, that is, modern technology. Reactionary modernism is an ideal typical construct.… [I]t incorporated modern technology into the cultural system of modern German nationalism, without diminishing the latter’s romantic and antirational aspects. 194

In a similar way, Nanda explains, Hindu nationalists seek “dharma and the bomb… an era when India will have nuclear bombs in its silos and the Vedas in schools.”195 She further argues that

the social conditions that led to this phenomenon in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich — namely, “capitalist industrialization without a successful bourgeois revolution [and] weak traditions of political liberalism and the Enlightenment” — obtain [today] in many parts of the developing world, including India. In these conditions, the dangers of fascistic nightmares cannot be ignored. 196

The “postcolonial” intellectuals do not, of course, support the chauvinist and intolerant aspects of Hindu nationalism, and they cannot be held responsible for its rise. But, as Nanda has shown, their denunciations of modern science and defenses of “local knowledges” played directly into the hands of the ideologues of Hindutva, by undermining any principled ground for opposition to Vedic pseudoscience and, more generally, to the Vedic world-view. “What reasons can they give against the supposed scientificity of Vedic astrology? Can they hold on[to] their relativist view of all sciences as social constructs and yet challenge the scientisation of the Vedas that is going on in the theories of Vedic physics or Vedic creationism?”197

The bottom line is that abstract philosophical debates can have real-life consequences. Nanda tells the following story about the recent craze for vastu shastra, the ancient Vedic rules governing the construction of buildings in alignment with the cosmic “life-force”:

N.

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