The pizza was not always home-delivered in a box, or sold at Pizza Huts that have cropped up all around theworld. The pizza, in fact, started out as the staple of the laboring classes in Sicily. It was a flatbread, aleavened version of our tandoori roti, that peasants ate with cheeses, meats, olives and other local produce.But then the Americans discovered it. The every-day fare of obscure peasants became an internationalsensation.
Herein lies the model for "Vedic science": just as the humble pizza got modernized throughrepackaging and aggressive global marketing, any and every bit of obscure and even obscurantist Hindutradition is being repackaged as "science". Given that science is the only universally valid form ofknowledge which demands our reasoned consent, anyone who disagrees with "Vedic sciences" isostensibly, against reason itself! Anyone who insists on pointing the difference between scienceas-we-know-it-today, and the idealistic, Brahman-drenched view of nature present in the Vedas and theUpanishads, is only displaying her "colonized mind," imposing Western categories on Hindu ways ofknowing. .
How is the Vedic mythos turned into the logos of science? The formula is simple, and the Sangh Parivar hasbeen honing the art for over a century since Swami Vivekananda declared the Vedas to contain all the truths ofmodern science in his famed Chicago address in 1893. Here is how it works.
Step one: take any Hindu ritual of twice-born castes, preferably of Brahmin-Vedic lineage. Content andlogic no bar. Step two: declare it to be "science" and therefore "modern" by definition.You can either proclaim that the most advanced modern sciences validate the ritual, or failing that, bring inlogic of "Swadeshi science". Step three: market the new "science." Start in America whereacademic postmodernists are always on the lookout for alternatives to the supposedly reductionist and dualist"Western" science. With the Western stamp of approval in hand, Murli Manohar Joshi can set the NCERTmachinery running, and before you know it, students all over India will be learning the new"science." Step four, proclaim to the rest of the world that while we teach "science" inour "secular" schools, those unenlightened Muslims across the border teach only the Koran in theirmadrasas.
With the blessings of the BJP, the Vedic science industry is booming. Vedic astrology is now followed by anannouncement from RSS that it is training a crop of "scientific priests." Next time, you have ahavan, your new scientific priest will be at hand to explain that by burning ghee, you are not only killingthe germs in the air, but also proofing your house against radiation. Next time you have a religious ceremony,be it namakaran, or the last rites, you will know that you are acting in accord with the laws of nature. Otherreligions follow their prophets, mere men of their times, while "the Hindus" follow nothing lessthan the eternal, rational laws of nature. Dissent from Hindu dharma is dissent against nature and reasonitself.
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The question is how did we get to this surreal world where the distinctions between science and myth haveall but disappeared? How to explain the quick and effortless victory of this dangerous doublespeak ofVedas-as-science?
The victory of Vedic science is, in no small part, a result of the nativist and anti-modernist trends amongprominent public intellectuals in India, fed in turn by the fashionable postmodernist angst against modernscience and the Enlightenment in the West. Simply put, Vedic sciences have won, not because of the merit oftheir arguments but because secular intellectuals themselves have been sitting on the fence on the sciencequestion.
On the rare occasions when Vedic science proponents do offer us philosophical arguments for treating theVedas as books of physics encoding such physico-astronomical findings as the speed of light, the distancebetween the sun and the earth, the existence of bosons and positrons etc., they end up offering a weak versionof what is called "social construction of science" - a relativist view of science popular among theavant-garde postmodern, feminist and postcolonial critics of science. Modern science, they claim, makesrational sense only within the metaphysical assumptions and social interests of the Judeo-Christian Westernsociety, which is imperialist and patriarchal to boot. When looked at through "Hindu categories,"Vedas make as much rational sense as the best of modern science. From within the Hindu conceptions of a unity(i.e. non-dualism) between spirit and nature, as opposed to the masculine, ecologically disastrous andimperialist separation (i.e., dualism) of spirit from nature in "Western" science, we can safelyassume that spiritual disciplines of the Vedas are actually rational, empirical methods of learning aboutnature.
This insistence that knowledge systems of all cultures are symmetrical with that of modern science, becausethe latter is a cultural construct of Western, white (mostly) men (mostly), has become part of the commonsenseof the new generation of postmodernist, left-wing intellectuals in the West. World-renowned publicintellectuals from India, with Gandhian, anti-modernist tendencies - Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva, Dharampal,Claude Alvarez, their numerous followers of "patriotic science" movement, and their subalternhistorian brethren readily come to mind - have added to this anti-Enlightenment mania by claiming allmodernist, secular thought to be colonial in origin and content. After all, the first defence of astrology asa "science of the masses" came not from the Vedic astrology enthusiasts, but from Ashis Nandy'stirade against Nehru's scientific temper way back in 1981. The fashionable denigration of science has weakenedall forces of resistance against the nonsense of Vedic science. A renewed respect for clear boundaries betweenscience and myth, and between modern science and local knowledge is our only weapon against the doublespeak ofVedic "science."
The author's a philosopher of science. Her forthcoming work is Prophets Facing Backward: PostmodernCritiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press and Permanent Black).
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