SACW | 23 Feb 2006 | India's Modernity; Bangladesh: Minority rights; Communalism in Ladakh

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at mnet.fr
Thu Feb 23 02:54:28 CST 2006


South Asia Citizens Wire | 23 February, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2222


Contents:

[1] Cultural Contradictions of India's Modernity (Meera Nanda)
[2] Bangladesh: Of Joseph Crowley and rights of faith (Edit., New Age)
[3] India - Ladakh: The recent flare-up between the Buddhists and
Muslims (Balraj Puri)	
[4] India: A Tribute to Wali (March 1, 2006)

____________________________________


[1]


  Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay)
	February 11, 2006

How Modern Are We?

Cultural Contradictions of India's Modernity

This essay examines the intellectual sources of the cultural
contradictions of India's modernity. Rather than bring religion under
the limits of scientific reason, India has witnessed a steady co-option
of science into the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of "the
Vedas." The history, the logic and social consequences of this
counter-Enlightenment are examined.
Meera Nanda

Berlin, 1783. A debating club called ‘Berliner Mittwocchgesellschaft’
(the Berlin Wednesday Club) invited its members to respond to this
question: “What is enlightenment?” A strenuous debate followed. The
philosopher Immanuel Kant joined in the fray with his well known essay,
‘Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ This is how Kant
characterised what was distinctive about the ferment of ideas sweeping
18th century Europe:

     Enlightenment is man’s release from this self-incurred immaturity
[which is] his inability to make use of his understanding without
direction from another…Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own
reason!” that is the motto of the enlightenment.

I

The reader might justifiably wonder why an essay about India in the 21st
century should begin with what Immanuel Kant wrote back in the 18th
century. What possible relevance can these musty old European debates
have for India today?

I believe that the transformation of reason brought about by the
scientific revolution that so impressed Kant and other Enlightenment
thinkers holds the key to the fulfilment of the programme of
disenchantment and secularisation everywhere. Kant’s call of ‘Sapere
aude!’ was simultaneously an invocation of a new standard of reason
meant to challenge all a priori truths that we accept out of faith,
cultural conditioning or overt indoctrination. Once we understand the
transformation of reason that the scientific revolution and the
Enlightenment set in motion, we will be in a better position to
understand why modernity in India has this feel of incompleteness,
superficiality and even schizophrenia.

Modern India has embraced the end products of the scientific revolution
and the Enlightenment in the west – namely, modern technology and a
liberal-secular framework of laws encoded in the Constitution. But it
has done so without challenging the cultural authority of the
supernatural and mystical world view derived from the idealistic strands
of Hinduism. If anything, from its very beginning in the Bengal
renaissance, India’s project of modernity has evolved within a uniquely
Indian inclusive style of counter-Enlightenment. By
counter-Enlightenment I mean only this: in a stark contrast to the
Enlightenment project of bringing religion within the limits of
scientific reason, the Indian counter-Enlightenment has tended to
subsume or co-opt scientific reason within the spirit-based cosmology
and epistemology of “the Vedas.”1  Since independence, India has created
an impressive workforce of scientists and engineers, many of them doing
fairly advanced science which meets the standards of excellence in the
best laboratories in the rest of the world. But India’s science has not
evolved out of a critical engagement with the religious commonsense that
still pervades the cultural life outside – and often inside – the labs.
Modern ideas and innovations are being incorporated into a traditional
Hindu world view, without diminishing many of its starkly irrational,
occult and pseudo-scientific tendencies.

II

Let me illustrate what I mean by the superficial and schizophrenic
nature of Indian modernity. I reproduce here an excerpt from a short
essay titled ‘Is India a Science Superpower?’ I wrote for Frontline
(September 10, 2005):

     “The next century belongs to India, which will become a unique
intellectual powerhouse …capturing all its glory which it had in
millennia gone by”, Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, the director general of
India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research declared in
Science earlier this year. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist
and author of the recent bestseller, The World is Flat, agrees that
India, with its talented yet low-cost brainpower, is on its way to
becoming the “innovation hub” of the global economy. Not to be outdone,
the British weekly New Scientist, has dubbed India the world’s emerging
“knowledge superpower…
     …What does not make sense, however, is the radical disconnect
between the dreams of becoming a science superpower, and the grim
reality of the mind-numbing superstitions and life-threatening
pseudo-sciences that are thriving at all levels of the Indian society.
Indian scientists may well be the most sought-after workers in the
global economy, but many behave as if what they do inside their
laboratories has nothing do with the supernatural and/or spiritual
“truths” that pass as “scientific” explanations of natural phenomena in
the rest of the society…..
     Do I exaggerate? Here is a report on the six weeks I spent in north
India this summer:
     In early May, throughout the countryside in northern India,
thousands of children, mere girls and boys, were married off on Akshay
Tritya, a day considered astrologically auspicious for marriages and
other new ventures. The rare social worker who tried to prevent child
marriages, had her hands chopped off by those bent on defending their
hoary traditions. There are, of course, many complex social and economic
reasons why child marriages still persist in India in significant
numbers. But these secular motives come with full blessings of our
priests and astrologers who have declared the bright sun and the moon on
the third day of the month of May to be auspicious for new ventures,
including child marriages which are supposed to bring good karma to the
parents of child-brides.
     Meanwhile, astrology was getting a corporate makeover to appeal to
the “modern”, urban middle classes, who were being bombarded with
advertisements by the World Gold Council to celebrate the “auspicious”
alignment of the stars by buying some more gold jewellery.
     If you thought that scientists, especially space scientists, would
have something to say regarding the astrological logic underlying
popular traditions (old and new), well, think again. While the country
was gearing up for Akshay Tritya, India’s top space scientists were busy
seeking the blessings of Lord Balaji at the Tirupati temple for a safe
launch of the polar satellite launch vehicle. A miniature model of the
rocket was laid in the sanctum sanctorum of the temple and prayed over
by priests in the presence of 15 scientists, led by the space-agency
chief, Dr G Madhavan Nair. Scientists, who have not let go their own
security blanket of gods, can hardly be expected to question the
comforting but false illusions astrologers sell to ordinary people.
     Meanwhile, the many satellites that India’s space agency has
launched in the past were busy beaming TV programmes selling wild,
unsubstantiated health benefits of yoga and Ayurveda, delivered in a
heady brew of spiritualism and Hindu nationalism. India’s most popular
tele-yogi, Swami Ramdev, has amassed a fortune selling his Divya yoga on
the TV. Interspersed with the swami’s calls for awakening “desh kaa
svabhiman” (national self-respect) by teaching “crore saal purana
vigyan” (science dating back 10 million years), one finds totally
unsubstantiated claims about the power of yogic postures, deep breathing
and his own Ayurvedic concoctions for every ailment known to humankind
including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, glaucoma, obesity…
     What is remarkable is that all these reason and evidence – defying
traditions – come wrapped in the fancy dress of “science”. On my visit
to Chandigarh, my hometown, I heard an Arya Samaj preacher exhort the
devotees at an open-air public discourse held right outside my house
(with loudspeakers set at full blast) to “read the ancient Vedas to
learn all the sciences known to humanity”. (He was discoursing on how to
succeed in the modern world with its prized high-tech jobs!) Astrology,
yogic ideas of prana and kundalini and even the ideas of reincarnation,
karma and varna (i e, caste order) are justified in the language of
modern physics and evolutionary biology. All these ancient metaphysical
speculations are proclaimed to be “Vedic sciences” (i e, empirically
testable and logical within the metaphysics of the Vedas) and they are
supposed to have been belatedly rediscovered by modern science. What we
have here is pseudo-science in its purest form, that is, religious
dogma, lacking rigorous scientific evidence and plausibility, dressed up
as science...

Everything Vedic is “scientific” and every “science” known to human kind
only affirms the wisdom of the Vedas. Indeed, claims of the “innate”
scientific temper of the Vedas occupy a place of pride in the Hindutva
assertions of Hindu superiority over Islam and Christianity, which are
declared to be merely faith-based “creeds.” Science, “vedically”
interpreted, is feeding into Hindu chauvinism.

III

That “the Vedas” are conflated with science as we know it today will
hardly come as news to anyone who knows anything about India. This is
routine business and has been going on since the very introduction of
modern science and technology in India, dating back to the 18th century.
(Indian rationalists, in comparison, have never enjoyed the same degree
of cultural hegemony. The marginalisation of rationalism in India’s
cultural politics is a topic for another day and another essay.)

Most Indians pause to think about this streak of scientism in modern
Hinduism,2  just about as much as fish pause to reflect upon the water
they live in – which is not much at all. It has become a part of the
commonsense of modern, science-educated, English-speaking Indians to
treat the teachings of popular gurus, yogis and swamis as vaguely
“scientific,” and therefore modern. Indian scientists, for the most
part, have not challenged the religious uses of science: they tend to
keep their laboratory lives and their personal lives in separate
water-tight compartments. Our public intellectuals and social critics,
meanwhile, have been more exercised about the real and imagined
scientism of the modern Indian state, than about the scientism that
pervades modern Hinduism.

I believe that we need to pay closer attention to Hindu scientism
because it is a symptom of the deeper cultural contradictions that
afflict India’s modernity. We pride ourselves in being modern, yet we
trample upon the first principle of modernity, namely, to draw
principled distinctions between science and metaphysics, or between
verifiable knowledge of tangible material entities occupying space and
time, and the intuitive knowledge of intangible soul-stuff – god,
brahman or any form of “subtle” spiritual energy – that is not
accessible to the five senses all human beings share alike. The sapere
aude spirit that Kant was talking about meant just this: to divest
metaphysicians, theologians and priests from making existence claims
about supernatural powers, and conversely, using existence claims of
natural sciences to affirm supernatural or spiritual powers. The point
of the Enlightenment project was not to destroy religion, but to limit
what it could say about nature and how it could use the authority of
nature to defend its dogmas.

Modernity in India lacks the spirit of sapere aude, understood as
setting limits on the authority of religion, as separating the realms of
science and religion in the larger culture. If anything, India has
followed an exactly opposite path, absorbing more and more of science
into the traditional teachings of the Veda, Vedanta, Yoga Sutras and
Ayurveda. Indeed, as I will argue below, India has taken a uniquely
“inclusive” (read co-optive) route to the classic phenomenon of
counter-Enlightenment or reactionary modernism.3

IV

In order to understand India’s unique style of counter-Enlightenment, we
must first be clear what we mean by the Enlightenment. Without getting
entangled in the many nuances of the European Enlightenment, we can keep
three general propositions in mind.

To being with, the Enlightenment refers to a historical epoch which
began with the English Revolution in 1688 and culminated in the American
Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.
There was no one unified movement called “the Enlightenment” that swept
through all of Europe simultaneously. There were, rather, a series of
debates and critiques directed against the authority of inherited
intellectual and religious traditions. These debates took different
shapes and forms in different national contexts, affecting all of
western Europe and northern America to a lesser or greater extent. In
all cases, these movements were supported by the rising class of the
industrial bourgeoisie. In Protestant England and America, the
Enlightenment took place largely in alliance with the church, while in
largely Catholic France, the church was relatively less hospitable to
new ideas. Led by a new class of intellectuals who made a living by
writing for the “grub street” (newspapers, periodicals and cheap novels)
and by giving lectures and demonstrations on current sciences in coffee
houses and pubs, Enlightenment ideas found a receptive audience among
the reading public.4

Secondly, for all the national differences, the movements included in
the rubric of the Enlightenment were marked by, to quote Alan Kors, the
editor of a new Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, “an increasingly
critical attitude toward inherited authority,…a sense that armed with
new methods and new powers, the human mind could re-examine claims upon
it…including the claims of religion. This was not a rejection of
authority per se, but of arbitrary authority whose sole claim upon one’s
mind or body was its having withstood the test of time”.5  Sapere aude –
“dare to know” – was the motivating force behind the entire movement,
and was used by British freethinkers as their rallying cry much in
advance of Kant.6

Third and finally, notwithstanding all the postmodernist attacks, it is
still possible to defend the Enlightenment as the precondition for any
kind of progressive politics. As Stephen Bronner writes in his spirited
new book, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, nearly all aspects of modern
life, especially “the ideals of personal autonomy, tolerance, secularism
and reason, developed against the backdrop of Enlightenment’s protest
against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and
ingrained prejudice [that] justified social misery”.7  On this reading,
it was the Enlightenment that made real the ideals of modernity that
were only latent in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific
revolution. Enlightenment, then, is considered by many intellectual
historians as the true beginning of modernity.

V

Against this background, let us return to Kant’s motto. Why did he make
sapere aude – “the courage to use your own reason” – the distinguishing
mark of his times? After all, the Age of Enlightenment was hardly the
first to apply the power of reason to comprehend nature and society.
Human beings in all societies and in all epochs have exercised the
powers of observation, logic, and experimentation, along with
imagination, insight, myth and magic to understand and materially
manipulate the force of nature. What was so special about reason in the
Age of Enlightenment that Kant would turn it into a rallying cry for
freedom?

While the philosophers of the Enlightenment exhorted their fellow
citizens to live by the light of reason, they were simultaneously
redefining reason by setting limits on what can legitimately be known,
given the kind of sensory apparatus and reasoning powers human beings
are endowed with. The philosophers and architects of the age of reason,
from Locke and Hume in England; to Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu in
France; Kant, Lessing and later Marx in Germany; and Jefferson, Paine
and Franklin in the US, were impressed by the success of the scientific
revolution, especially the disciplined empiricism of Newton. His famous
laws of force and universal gravitation emerged out of patient and
careful observation of comets, planets, objects in motion and
transmission of light. Newton, in other words, derived his first
principles from the empirical investigation of phenomena. This, to the
philosophers of the Enlightenment, was in refreshing contrast to the
method of theologians and metaphysicians who started with infallible,
divine revelations and proceeded to deduce the knowledge of physical
phenomena from them. They recognised full well that Newton’s
observations themselves required metaphysical grounding – that is, a
belief in the existence of order created by god. But what they found
remarkable was that Newton used this metaphysical belief as a
springboard for empirical examination, rather than as an a priori truth
to explain material phenomena.

Newton’s method became the paradigm of reason for the Age of
Enlightenment. The philosophers denied – most strenuously – that it was
possible to make any factual claims about the world based upon “pure
reason” by which they meant Gnostic intuition, mysticism, “direct
realisation” or revelation, that is, any means of knowing which cannot
be validated by sensory experience. Only those objects in the
“phenomenal world” (to use Kant’s vocabulary) that correspond to human
categories of space, time and causality can possibly become objects of
our experience, and human knowledge can only extend to these objects. We
have no possible way of knowing the objects of the “noumenal world” (to
use Kant’s vocabulary again), the things-in-themselves that lie outside
our mental categories of space, time and causality. This meant that
supra-sensible entities like god, absolute consciousness, soul, vital
spirit, etc, which lack extension in space and time forever lie outside
human abilities to know them. We can therefore make no empirical claims
about this supra-sensible or noumenal world, neither can we use our
knowledge of the noumenal reality to explain the phenomenal world.8
This world view did not exactly deny the existence of supernatural
forces or ultimate realities, but it limited them to the world of
noumena, totally beyond the reach of human experience. Such forces could
be accepted as allegories, as poetry, even as necessary fictions to
defend our moral intuitions about good and evil, but they could not
provide foundations for knowledge of the natural world.

This was a monumental change. So far human history, science, or natural
philosophy, had existed within the limits of religion. Henceforth,
religion could exist only within the limits of scientific reason. This
was the philosophical core of the Enlightenment, the rallying cry of the
“moderns” against the “ancients.”

This transformation had far-reaching consequences, not just for the
conduct of science, but for the evolution of a democratic and secular
public sphere. As the new historiography inspired by the path-breaking
work of Jurgen Habermas has established,9 the empiricist revolution in
the conception of reason was hugely important in the creation of new
ideals of publicness, open in principle (though not in practice) to all,
in which all authority was open to critical scrutiny on the basis of
evidence accessible to ordinary human faculties of sensory perception
and elementary logic. Gradually, the old taboos which derived their
force from natural law, which was supposed to express divine will, lost
their powers to persuade. Depending upon the historical balance of
forces between the church and the throne, and the allegiance and
strength of the bourgeoisie who derived their wealth from industry and
commerce, different degrees of secularisation took place in different
societies, a process which is still in progress.

VI

Just as surely as day is followed by night, the Enlightenment was
followed by the counter-Enlightenment. The proclamation of the autonomy
and authority of testable, sensory knowledge, over and against
revelations, mystical intuitions, miracles and all forms of
extra-sensory knowledge was resisted by the keepers of faith everywhere.10

There are primarily two routes the counter-Enlightenment has taken
through history: the less-travelled path of outright refusal, favoured
by the orthodox observant communities, and the more popular and
politically-correct option of co-option through indigenising or
relativising the norms of reason, favoured by religious/cultural
nationalists on the one hand, and the postmodernists and
multiculturalists, on the other.11

The great refusal can be seen in the enclaves of traditionalism and
orthodoxy in some heradim Jewish communities in Israel and the US, the
Amish and among the separatist sects of evangelical Christians in the
US. But this option of “just saying no” to the larger secular culture is
becoming rarer and harder to maintain in the world increasingly
permeated by modern technologies and new ideas.12

Cultural relativism – that is, not an outright refusal but a
reinterpretation of the norms of empirical science within one’s own
civilisational or national culture – has been the preferred mode of most
of the illiberal, counter-Enlightenment movements, notably the fascist
movements in Germany and Japan in the 20th century, down to the
religious fundamentalisms of the 21st century. Assorted fascists,
Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and our own Hindu nationalists
cannot be categorised as old-fashioned anti-modernists who want to take
their societies back to some primitive pre-modern, pre-scientific age of
faith and/or magic, insulated from global developments in science and
technology. They are more properly described as “reactionary
modernists”, a term coined by Jeffery Herf in his 1984 intellectual
history of the Weimar and Nazi Germany. Reactionary modernists, in
contrast to backward-looking golden-age pastoralists, say “yes” to
modern technology, but “no” to the Enlightenment norms of scientific
reason. They succeed in “mixing a robust modernity and an affirmative
stance toward progress with dreams of the past: a highly technological
romanticism”.13 Reactionary modernists, in other words, display a great
enthusiasm for technological modernisation, overlaid with a deep
aversion to rationalism, secularism and individualism that comes with
modernisation. They want the fruits of modernisation, without the pain –
and joys – of cultural dislocations that modernity brings.

The question before all reactionary modernists is how to use the
technological products of modern science, while rejecting its world view
and its norms of reason. The solution has been to remove scientific
reason from the world view of the Enlightenment, a world view of reason,
intellect, internationalism, materialism and redefine it in the jargon
of authenticity, community, and heritage. The claims of science and
modernity are not rejected out of hand, but “only” translated into an
ethno-scientific vocabulary. Universalism of science is not denied in
favour of anything goes kind of relativism, but modern science is deemed
to be only one of the many other equally universalisable ways knowing.
The importance of subjecting beliefs to experience and evidence is not
denied, but what constitutes evidence and experience is made relative to
the metaphysical categories of the rest of the culture. While something
called “science” is celebrated, it invariably ends up re-affirming – and
legitimising – the traditional common sense of the culture, derived
largely from the dominant religious tradition.

VII

Translating the empiricist tradition of modern science into the jargon
of mysticism derived from Patanjli’s Yoga Sutras and monistic strains of
Vedanta has been the hallmark of neo-Hindu counter-Enlightenment.
Declaring the Vedas to be based upon “direct realisation” of “higher
realities”, and therefore “another name for science”, was the work of
the thinkers of the Hindu renaissance, notable among them being the
Adyar theosophists, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Servapalli
Radhakrishnan. Contemporary descendents of these 19th-early 20th century
Vedas-as-science thinkers include the many monks of Ramakrishna missions
around the world, “Vedic creationists” of Krishna Consciousness and
well-know personalities like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Deepak Chopra and
their many clones and/or admirers in the west as well as in India. The
saffronisation of history, including the history of science, that we
experienced under the reign of the Sangh parivar was a political
expression of this long-standing conflation of the Vedas with modern
science.

Like other reactionary modernists before them, neo-Hindu philosophers
seem to accept the challenge of the Enlightenment. They accept that with
the success of the scientific revolution, as Radhakrishnan put it in his
Hindu View of Life, “the centre of gravity in religion has shifted from
authority to reason”. But – and here is the rub – they define the
non-sensory, intuitive or mystical experience, the so-called “pure
reason”, to be actually referring to real, causal entities and/or
energies which can be directly “seen”, or “heard” by altering your
consciousness through yoga: mystical insight is interpreted as an
empirical experience of natural order. They argued that what the yogis
experienced “in here” in their minds actually corresponded with
realities “out there,” and by experimenting with their inner selves,
Vedic adepts can come to know and control external reality. Indeed,
neo-Hindu and Hindutva writings are replete with references to the Vedas
as describing empirical facts and law of nature that were actually
“seen” and “heard” by the mythic authors of the Vedas through the
process of yogic meditation alone.14

In other words, while neo-Hindu philosophers accepted the Kantian
emphasis on using “one’s own reason” and not the authority of priests
and holy books, they rejected the limit the empiricists had put on the
powers of reason. The empiricist tradition that flowered during the
Enlightenment had steadfastly denied that one can make any substantive
claims about reality based upon “pure” or non-sensory reason alone.
Neo-Hindu philosophers insisted that within the holistic world view of
Vedanta, in which consciousness permeates all matter, non-sensory,
meditative knowledge of one’s inner self can give you insights about the
ultimate reality of the material world. While the Enlightenment drew a
line between sensory and non-sensory perception, neo-Hindus rejected
this line and insisted that mystical experience constituted a valid
empirical experience.

How was this interpretation of mysticism as providing valid empirical
knowledge defended? Here we find striking similarities with the
postmodern theories of all knowledge – including modern science – as
being paradigm-bound, a construct of specific metaphysical assumptions,
which serve the interests of power over nature and society. Neo-Hindu
thinkers have asserted that the Kantian restriction on sensory knowledge
as the only legitimate source of knowledge is a construct of the dualist
world view of Abrahamic or “Semitic monotheistic” religions in which
god/divine consciousness is separated from brute matter. Because the
Hindu tradition does not separate matter from spirit but considers all
matter – living and non-living – as the embodiment of “vital energy”
(‘prana’) or consciousness (‘brahman’), it is considered perfectly
legitimate within the Hindu tradition to treat mystical “realisation” of
the spirit in our own selves to correspond to the spirit, or essence, of
the rest of the universe. And, Vedic science apologists go on to insist
that because a “reductionist” materialist-empiricism is an aberration of
the Abrahamic faiths, anyone who accepts its validity suffers from
“mental colonisation” and trying to semitise Hindu dharma.15 This
defence of mystical empiricism, unfortunately, got a big boost from the
idealistic interpretations of quantum mechanics popularised by Fritjof
Capra, Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra and Amit Goswami in recent years.

So, how modern are we, really? If modernity means a differentiation and
separation between science and religion, between sensory experience and
the mystical experience of metaphysical “realities”, we in India have a
long way to go. Rather than challenge the authority of private mystical
experiences of our “holy” men and women with the evidence and logic that
is available to ordinary men and women in everyday walks of life, we
have dignified mystagogy with the name of “holistic science.” We have
been playing word games, rationalising and pretending we-know-it-all
while, in fact, we do not.

VIII

But one can sympathise with all that I have said above and still ask: So
what? What is so terribly wrong with the scientism of neo-Hindu gurus,
intellectuals and believers? By presenting ancient wisdom in scientific
terms, are they not encouraging Indians to study science and develop a
scientific temper? By refusing to separate consciousness from matter,
are they not avoiding the sterile materialism of the west? Besides, why
crusade against superstitions anyway? Isn’t it true that irrationality
can coexist with good science as, say, in America, the world’s
undisputed leader in science? Others advise that as long as you have
secular institutions and laws in place, popular superstitions are not
worth worrying about. Still others insist that rather than fight “mere”
ideas in people’s heads, we should fight for a socially just society:
secularisation, they say, will naturally follow the lead of political
and economic reforms.

I do not deny that there are specks of truth in most of these caveats.
One cannot simply reason a just and secular society into existence;
scientific temper alone can only take you some distance. A rationalist
offensive against superstition and pseudo-sciences can only be
meaningful if it is a part of a larger political movement that can meet
people’s aspirations for existential security and justice in this life,
rather than in some future birth, in some future ‘sata-yuga’. I agree
that it is not people who need to be made more rational, but that social
systems that thwart rationality and creativity need to change.

I even grant that at least initially, under colonialism, Hindu scientism
did serve a useful purpose: it gave us the much-needed confidence to
confront colonial stereotypes of irrational and mystical India, and it
made the pursuit of science sufficiently non-threatening. But over time,
Hindu scientism has morphed into a full-blown pseudo-science with
nationalistic overtones. There are relatively harmless but
self-indulgent New Age-ish aspects of the mind-matter holism that are
becoming increasingly popular among the urban sophisticates in India: a
bit of yoga here, some vastu there, with Ayurvedic potions thrown in for
good measure. But this is the same world view which also justifies the
traditional logic of innate karmic purity and hierarchy, and which
legitimates the paranormal “spiritual” powers of god-men and
soothsayers. I understand that some kind of superstitious thinking will
always be with us: that is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of the
human imperative to find explanations, right or wrong. Granted, also,
that there is no need to declare a war on every idea that does not meet
the standards of scientific justification, for human beings do not live
by reason alone. But as long as superstitions and pseudo-sciences enjoy
the kind of cultural hegemony, patronage and linkages with nationalism
as they do in contemporary India, they remain a political force to
reckon with. In view of their pervasive social influence, they cannot be
treated as matters of personal belief.

It is sometimes argued that rationalisation and secularisation of world
views will follow, pretty much on their own, in the wake of
technological and economic modernisation, and therefore no special
engagement with the content of people’s beliefs is needed. Indeed, even
well-meaning secularists are weary of criticising religious beliefs as
elitist and disrespectful of ordinary people. But there is no evidence
that modernisation of infrastructure and economic relations alone, or by
itself, can bring about a secularisation of beliefs. Beliefs, especially
those beliefs that answer our existential questions regarding death and
birth, misfortune and good fortune, right and wrong, have a life of
their own. Beliefs don’t simply lie down and die when the social context
changes: instead, they mutate, and adapt to the new social context. The
planetary configuration of Akshay Tritya, to take an example cited
above, did not cease to be auspicious for modern Indians, many of whom
have grown rich on jobs in the high-technology and scientific research
and development. Rather, it is mutating from a day that was considered
auspicious for child marriages into a day that is auspicious for
conspicuous consumption of gold jewellery. But the underlying idea that
stars can confer auspiciousness on human actions remains intact. India
today is witnessing a resurgence of many old superstitions and rituals –
couched in pseudo-scientific language to appeal to modern sensibilities.
Economic and technological modernisation, then, is no guarantee of a
secular culture. The creation of a secular culture requires active
engagement with the religious common sense of the people.

It is also true, as some scientist friends have suggested, that good
science can exist and even thrive in otherwise superstitious societies.
It is true that modern science has become relatively autonomous of the
larger culture. It has developed a naturalistic metaphysics and an
empiricist methodology of its own which is often at odds with how the
workings of nature are interpreted in the rest of the culture. It is
possible for scientists trained in the culture of their own arcane
specialisation to do great science, without ever having to engage with
the religious interpretations of nature that prevail outside the walls
of the lab. The two cultures simply don’t seem to talk the same
language, even though they, in fact, often offer competing explanations
for the same phenomena (e g, Darwin’s evolution by natural selection,
and “spiritual evolution” as propagated by “integral yoga” of Sri
Aurobindo and his followers, or the “Vedic creationism” through the
agency of karma and rebirth, as propounded by the followers of Krishna
Consciousness).

But, while science can thrive in otherwise irrational societies, there
is a huge price to pay for the gap. It is not a coincidence, in my
opinion, that a majority of Americans who believe in divine creation
over Darwinian evolution should have believed the Bush administration’s
completely bogus case linking Iraq with terrorism: in both cases, there
is a faith-based, rather than evidence-driven, reasoning at work. In
both societies, there is a need for scientists to stand up for critical
reasoning and sound evidence both inside and outside the laboratory. The
need to speak up for, defend and advocate scientific temper is far
greater in India where superstitions and pseudo-sciences have a far
deeper hold on the popular psyche and where they often make a difference
between life and death, between dignity and indignity of caste and other
hierarchies.

To conclude, Indian modernity will remain incomplete and schizophrenic
until the time it is animated by the spirit of critical reasoning.
Kant’s motto: sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”
remains as vital for India today as it was in his own time. Special
pleas to spiritualise nature and science in the name of Vedic holism may
make us feel superior over other faiths and cultures, but it will not
help us shed our own prejudices and superstitions.



Notes

[This is a much revised version of the paper that appeared in Eastern
Quarterly, Vol 3, Issue II, July-August 2005, pp 75-85.]

  1 In modern Hinduism, "the Vedas" have come to mean a loose,
miscellaneous category of texts which refer not only to the four
canonical Sanskrit Vedas, but to all kinds of post-Vedic, extra-Vedic
and even anti-Vedic texts. Neo-Hindu gurus and intellectuals have honed
the tradition of claiming Vedic origin of, or at least Vedic parallels
with, any idea that they find useful for perpetuating an essentially
spirit-based and hierarchical cosmology of the Vedas and Vedanta. For a
hilarious (but misleading and dangerous) example, see Deepak Chopra's
best-seller, Quantum Healing, Bantam Books, New York, 1989, where he
puts a spin of quantum physics on developments in neurosciences as if
they were merely re-stating the spiritual truths known to Vedic rishis.
  2 By scientism, as it appears in religious apologetics, I mean the
positivist belief that if religion is to be made respectable and
meaningful, it must be "scientific", that is, its metaphysics and
epistemology must meet the standards of empirical testability that apply
in modern science. This leads to recasting traditional metaphysics in
scientific-sounding theories. Rather than use the empirical methodology
of modern science to challenge metaphysics, and create a
non-metaphysical, non-supernatural basis for religiosity – as was the
intent of logical positivists and empiricists – scientism in the hands
of religious apologists turns modern science into a vehicle of
traditional metaphysics. Hindus are not alone: American Protestantism
also has strong strains of scientism. For a comparison, see
'Secularisation without Secularism?' in my Wrongs of the Religious
Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva, Three Essays
Collective, New Delhi, 2005.
  3 Here I continue the dialogue I began regarding the place of science
in Indian culture in my earlier work, notably, in Prophets Facing
Backward: Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism, Permanent Black,
New Delhi, 2004, and my more recent 'Response to my Critics', Social
Epistemology, Vol 19, no 1, 2005, 147-91.
  4 Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, 1995.
  5 Alan Kors, Preface, The Encycopedia of the Enlightenment, Vol 1,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2003.
  6 For a fascinating study of the Enlightenment in Britain, see Roy
Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the
British Enlightenment, WW Norton, London, 2000.
  7 Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, Columbia
University Press, New York, p 7.
  8 While Kant provided a defence of empiricism against the radical
scepticism of Hume, he also limited empirical knowledge to the
phenomenal world only and denied the possibility that we will ever know
if empirical knowledge of phenomena corresponds to the structures of the
real world, the world-in-itself. As Kant himself admitted, he had set
limits on science to make room for faith. Ernst Cassirer's classic The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ, 1951, is still one of the best explorations of the implications of
Kantian philosophy for the Enlightenment.
  9 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT
Press, Cambridge, 1989.
10 Isaiah Berlin's writings remain the best starting point for
understanding the opposition to the Enlightenment. See Isaiah Berlin,
'The Counter-Enlightenment' in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas,
Vol II, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1973.
11 I have shown the overlap between Hindu nationalist and postcolonial
views on science in my earlier writings. See note 3.
12 See Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, The Glory and the Power: The
Fudnamentalist Challenge to the Modern World, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992
for a good description of the enclaves of orthodoxy.
13 Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics
in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
14 For a classic statement of yoga as a source of knowledge and control
of the natural world, see Vivekananda's exposition of Patanjli's Yoga
Sutra in his well known lectures on raj yoga. Critical reflections on
this kind of "spiritual empiricism" are few and far between. But see
Willhelm Halbfass, 'The Concept of Experience' in India and Europe: An
Essay in Understanding, SUNY Press, Albany, 1988 and Anantanand
Rambachan, The Limits of Scripture: Vivekananda's Interpretation of the
Vedas, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1994. For a stinging
critique of treating mystic experience as having ontological references,
see Agehananda Bharati, The Light at the Centre: Context and Pretext of
Modern Mysticism, Ross Erikson Publishers, Santa Barbara, 1982.
15 I have been at the receiving end of these kinds of slurs from
Hindutva supporters.
		


____


[2]


New Age (Bangladesh)
February 23, 2006
Editorial
Of Joseph Crowley and rights of faith

US Congressman Joseph Crowley’s worries about the state of religious
minorities in Bangladesh are entirely justified, especially in light of
the fact that very large bodies of people within the country have been
feeling the same way. Indeed, the prejudice which has over the years
been demonstrated toward the religious minorities is an attitude that
has quite demeaned us before the rest of the world. No matter how much
the authorities or for that matter anyone else in the country may try to
gloss over the issue, the fact remains that such religious groups as the
Ahmadiyyas continue to live in a state of deep apprehension about their
future. When you add to that the report that in the process of voters’
enumeration by election officials large bodies of Hindus have been left
out of the listing, you cannot but be concerned about the circumstances
as they exist at present or may worsen in future. There is too the
blatant effort among many to undermine the secular nature of such
Bengali occasions as Ekushey with a view to twisting it into a shape and
form that run contrary to all the heritage we have historically upheld.
The claim by the Jamaat-e-Islami, which party’s role in the nation’s War
of Liberation remains indelibly dark and scandalous, that something of
an Islamic spirit defined the Language Movement of 1952 is a sign of the
revisionism that some individuals and groups might now undertake unless
we as a nation make ourselves prepared to resist such devious assaults
on our statehood.
    One of the seminal truths about the struggle for Bangladesh’s
freedom — and it all started back in the 1960s through the concerted
movement for autonomy — was the secular spirit that underlined its
politics. The struggle for autonomy and the war for freedom were all
events based on the secular nationhood of the Bengali-speaking people of
this region. Translated, it meant the simple truth that all groups and
classes of people, including those pursuing their various faiths, were
part of a single, indivisible democratic structure. That was the
difference we demonstrated between Bangladesh and the state Bengalis
were earlier part of. It then followed that in independent, democratic
Bangladesh, anyone raising the question of religious majorities and
minorities would be striking at the roots of the secular order.
Unfortunately, though, as the past few decades have demonstrated amply,
it is the secular order of politics that has been systematically struck
blows, per courtesy of those who have wielded power at the state level,
to a point where we now have the uncomfortable spectacle of foreign
politicians and statesmen commenting on the unhappy conditions in which
Bangladesh’s minority religious denominations happen to be conducting
life. One, of course, cannot blame these individuals, for they only
express their opinions on what they see happening around them. And what
exactly has been happening around them and us? The ferocity with which
fanatics in the guise of the so-called Khatme Nabuwat movement have gone
after the Ahmadiyya community, no doubt with powerful backing from
orthodox Islamists abroad, has not quite been checked. No political
leader in the ruling dispensation has ever felt the need to comment on
the situation. Parliament has never considered it necessary to debate
the question of why the Ahmadiyya issue should be there at all and who
are behind this sordid activity. Meanwhile, in clear contravention of
fundamental rights and the constitution, the community has been barred
from producing and disseminating its literature. In similar fashion,
police have sometimes pounced on individuals engaged in distributing
Christian religious tracts on the streets of Dhaka.
    A siege mentality, where the practice of religion is concerned, is
indicative of a state of political decline. The time has come for the
nation’s secular political groups and parties as well as broad civil
society to reassert themselves and come clearly forward in the defence
of fundamental rights and secularism (which is the foundation of a
democratic order). A nation which divides itself in terms of religious
majorities and minorities is out of step with all the values we
associate with politics and aesthetics.

____


[3]


Indian Express (India)
February 15, 2006
	 	
Ladakh: The writing was on the wall

The recent flare-up between the Buddhists and Muslims is a conclusion of
the continuing polarisation , brought about by neglect in governance issues
Balraj Puri  	

The recent communal flare-up in Ladakh is the worst of its kind in the
region known for its long history of communal harmony.

After communal incidents in Kargil and Leh—headquarters of Muslim
majority and Buddhist majority districts—the situation got out of hand
and the Army had to called in.

Advertisement
The communal trouble breaks the long record of amity in the state.

Even during the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 and the mass
killings at Wandhama and Nandipora, local Muslims were not involved. The
situation was the same in Jammu too, despite a series of militant
attacks on Hindus.

When India projected Jammu and Kashmir as a symbol of secularism and
insisted that no solution would be considered which undermined its
secular character, Ladakh was at the heart of its stand.

When representatives of Northern Areas of Pakistan (Gilgit and
Baltistan) had argued that their only link with the pre-1947 state of
J&K was Ladakh and India repeatedly proposed opening of the
Kargil-Skardu road for the divided families to meet, Pakistan resisted
for fear that a secular Ladakh may be a source of inspiration for its
discontented population.

The current developments in this strategic territory may turn to
Pakistan’s advantage. But today’s situation is not a sudden development
that should take the powers that be unawares.

Nobody took notice of the dangerous portents of the communal tension in
Leh, when Buddhists held anti-Muslim demonstrations and observed a
two-day hartal over the alleged kidnapping of two Buddhist girls by
Muslim boys and its backlash among Shias of Kargil who held
anti-Buddihist demonstrations and observed hartal in November?

The complete communal polarisation was signalled in October in the
results of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council elections,
where the Union Territory Front, demanding separation of Leh from the
state, won 25 seats with Buddhist support. The rival Congress won one, a
Muslim candidate, from a Muslim majority constituency.

Why no notice of the electoral verdict was taken?

Today’s communal clash in fact, is the culmination of trend to which the
state government and government of India have been contributing—most
probably intentionally—for years.

To start with, Ladakh does not enjoy administrative status equal to
Jammu and Kashmir. The state’s Constitution treats it as a part of the
Kashmir region.

Unlike the other two regions which are administered by separate heads of
departments and separate Divisional Commissioners and Inspectors
Generals of Police, in case of Ladakh, all departmental heads are based
in Srinagar.

Ladakh’s discontent has been simmering ever since the establishment of a
popular government. Palliatives, tried from time to time, proved
counterproductive. In 1978, it was divided into two districts.

But without a common regional identity, the Buddhist and the Muslim
majority districts of Leh and Kargil started drifting in divergent
directions.

Eventually in 1995, the Centre conceded internal autonomy to Leh. I had
asked the then Prime Minister Narsimha Rao why he rejected the demand of
autonomy for Ladakh as a whole and why he conceded it when it was made
by Ladakh Buddhist Association for Leh district only. He insisted that
his offer was for the whole region.

I called the Home Secretary, who was also the Secretary for Kashmir
Affairs on telephone, from the PM house, to clarify the position. He
confirmed that the decision applied to Leh only. Evidently the Prime
Minister was under the impression that Leh and Ladakh were synonymous.

Later, however, a similar autonomous council was formed for Kargil by
the Mufti-led government in 2002. But a common Ladakh regional council
was conspicuously missing in the arrangement.

It is also important to note that the much hyped powers of the two
councils are less than those of the Zila Parishads under Panchayati Raj
system.

As the head of the government-appointed Regional Autonomy Committee, I
had met the representatives of Leh and Kargil, who had unanimously
accepted my proposal for a common regional authority, the president of
which would rotate among the two districts. The state government
rejected my report.

The cumulative frustration of Buddhists took the form of a demand for an
Union Territory status. The Muslims, too, despite their grievances
against the state government, would not like to be ruled by a distant Delhi.

It may be recalled that Ladakh was a rare region where inter-religious
marriages were not uncommon before Independence.

After the current crisis is diffused, a high level dialogue with the
leaders of the two communities needs to be started to devise appropriate
constitutional and political measures to restore age old harmony and a
common regional personality in the context of a federal and
decentralized set-up of the state, which alone can accommodate its
diversities and ensure its unity.

The author is Director, Institute of Jammu and Kashmir affairs

____


[4]

A Tribute to Wali
   Anhad invites you to the rendering of

   Wali’s Ghazals and Sufi Kalam
   of other poets by

   Dhruv Sangari
   (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Sahib’s Disciple)

   Date: March 1, 2006

   Venue: Diamond Jublilee Hall
   Gujarat Vidyapeeth Ashram Road, Ahmedabad


   Programme:

   7:00pm :       Introducing Wali-Prof. Bombay Walla
   7:10pm :       A Short documentary on Wali
   7:30pm :       A Tribute to Wali by young students
   7:50pm :       Dhruv Sangari



   Anhad
   4,Windsor place
   New Delhi-11001
   Ph:23327366/67


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.








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