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"Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent." - George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi
In the crash of the falling World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, one could hear, loud and clear, the intimation of an old specter rising: fascism. Signs of growing state authoritarianism are everywhere, even in advanced democracies. But fascism, wearing a clerical garb, and speaking the language of religious fundamentalism, is a real possibility in those largely non-Western societies where democratic institutions are young, or not fully established. While it was a radical interpretation of Islam that animated the suicidal killers of September 11, other religions are no less immune to being hijacked by fascistic movements.
In this book we will examine the rise of Hindu nationalism, a violent and chauvinistic movement that displays all the marks of fascism, including state-encouraged violence against religious minorities, like the pogrom that is going on against the Muslims in the state of Gujarat, even as I write these words. Like all fascists, Hindu nationalists set their political compass by the vision of a mythic golden age. These are the prophets who, even as they march forward, keep their faces turned backward toward an imagined past of Hindu glory.
The "clerks" whose betrayal will concern us in this book are men and women of secular learning, intellectuals who uphold left-wing political ideals, but who have lost all confidence in the classic left-wing cultural ideals of scientific reason, modernity, and the Enlightenment. These postmodern intellectuals and activists, in other words, display a passion for radical social transformation, alongside an equally passionate rage against the Enlightenment's promise of progressive social change through a rational critique of superstition, ideologies, and flawed reasoning. They have come to see the claims of universalism and objectivity of science as so many excuses for Eurocentrism and the "mental colonialism" of non-Western people. Their vision of a socially egalitarian world calls for, above all, an epistemological egalitarianism which respects the rights of non-Western and other non-dominant social groups to develop "their own" sciences, reflecting their culturally distinctive reason.
This book will tell the story of how these intellectuals, in their despair over the world they find themselves in, have helped deliver the people they profess to love-the non-Western masses, the presumed victims of "Western science" and modernity-to the growing forces of hatred, fascism, and religious fanaticism. We will look at how the Hindu nationalist dreams of a "Hindu modernity" have found a respectable home in the theories of "alternative epistemology" and "local knowledge" popular in the social constructivist, feminist, and Third-Worldist trends in the academia. How the vanguard of radical postmodernist thought in the latter half of the twentieth century has served as a bridge to reactionary modernist movements darkening the horizons in the twenty-first century is the theme of this book.
This book has one more task: to reaffirm the historic association of science with the goals of the Enlightenment, secularism, and democracy, especially in non-Western societies. I stand with Alan Sokal, that inimitable critic of all varieties of "fashionable nonsense,"1 in affirming that "rational thought and fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating mystifications promoted by the powerful" (Sokal 1996, 64). With the threat of clerical fascism staring us in the face, it is time to recover the ground lost to the feel-good but dangerous relativism of postmodernism. In this chapter I will try to draw a map of the terrain we will be covering in the rest of the book. I also try to provide clear definitions of the terms that we will be using to read the map. My goal is to place the rise of Hindu nationalism within the context of clerical fascism on the one hand, and the postmodern/postcolonial suspicion of modernity, especially modern science, on the other.
"Alternative Modernity" as Reactionary Modernism
The attack on the World Trade Center symbolized the marriage between modern technology and religio-political passions that is becoming quite commonplace around the world. Radical Islamic groups routinely carry out their self-proclaimed jihad against the secular world using the tools-from the internet and television to bombs and other military hardware-made available by modern science, the driving force behind the secular world, whose worldview they oppose.
Or to take a potentially far more dangerous example, India and Pakistan, both increasingly riven by ethnic and religious politics internally and against each other, have armed themselves with nuclear weapons. In both countries, one finds that aggressive technological modernization is serving to further an equally aggressive cultural re-traditionalization, visible in the growing influence of religious nationalist ideas on the institutions of civil society and the state. These societies display a schizophrenia in which the modernization of the materialtechnological environment is embraced with great enthusiasm, while the mod- ernization or secularization of cultural categories through which to understand these material developments is resisted as a sign of "Westernization." To some extent, this disjunction between technological modernization and cultural conservatism is a normal part of modernization. As Daniel Bell argued in his classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, the sphere of production of goods (techno-economic) and the sphere of production of meaning (culture) "respond to different norms, have different rhythms of change, and are regulated by different, even contrary principles" (1996, 10). Industrialization of the technoeconomic sphere does carry over a more functional, instrumental rationality into other spheres of social life. But the cultural realm is not moved solely by the drive for utility, or for class interests, for that matter. On the contrary, its affective and existential dimensions actively resist the utilitarian drive. For these reasons, it is not surprising to find an overdeveloped technological infrastructure (often producing more guns than butter, alas), coexisting with underdeveloped civic cultures which, for all their other virtues, cannot adequately ground a popular commitment to a liberal and secular democracy.
But what we are witnessing today in India and many other parts of the world is not this normal lag which can be expected to narrow with time. What we are witnessing is an aggressive rejection of the values of cultural modernity as such by intellectuals and opinion makers. "Modernization without Westernization" is the rallying cry of those who reject all secular ideologies of the modern age as Western and therefore alien. Whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, intellectuals in these societies accept technological modernization as an imperative for their continued survival. But they do not see secularization as a universal cultural imperative.
The lack of legitimacy for secular ideals among intellectuals has political consequences, for the simple reason that cultural modernization requires the active work of intellectuals. Intellectuals translate the science that goes into making the tools of the modern age into a new worldview and a new common sense. It is the job of intellectuals to deploy the metaphysics and the ethos of modern science to free their intellectual heritage from outdated and indefensible accretions and to translate the vital core of their heritage into a new vocabulary that can accommodate the disenchanted, rationally understandable view of the world. In societies where the dominant religions and the alliance of dominant classes are more hospitable to science (as in early modern Britain and America, for example), the creation of the new secular culture takes place from within the hegemonic institutions, such as the churches, schools, and the instruments of the state. In societies like that of seventeenth-century France, or twentieth-century India, where dominant social interests are more conservative, the pressure to create a new liberal culture has to come from Grub Street. Since intellectuals enjoy a relative autonomy from the dominant institutions of their societies, they are expected to challenge the common sense of their times. In either case, for a liberal, democratic culture to emerge alongside industrial and economic development, there is no getting away from the active cultural work of "educating democracy," as Alexis de Tocqueville called it. "Educating democracy" involves, in de Tocqueville's words (1988, 13), ". . . putting new life into its beliefs, purifying its mores . . . changing the laws, ideas, customs and mores needed to make democratic revolution profitable."
The situation in India could not be more different. With the demise of the Nehruvian consensus, starting around the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, secular and left-inclined intellectuals, especially those associated with Gandhian initiatives in ecology, science, technology, and development-related matters, began to display a deep sense of disillusionment with the rationalist, secular, and liberal elements of modernity. Before the hegemony of deeply hierarchical religious traditions over social life could be loosened and a space for the individual could be carved out, these populist left-identified social movements began to turn to these same religious traditions to agitate for indigenous, Gemeinschaft-oriented, non-Western models of development. Unlike the old (mostly Marxist) movements which focused on redistribution of the gains of modernization, India's new social movements agitated for an alternative model of development altogether which was more in keeping with ordinary people's traditions and values.
Over the next two decades, these movements for alternative science and development began to connect with the anti-Enlightenment, postmodernist strains that had been growing in Western universities since the mid-1960s. Suspicion of all metanarratives of modernity was the distinguishing mark of postmodern intellectuals. There was a natural meeting of the minds between postmodernist and Third Worldist indigenist movements. This confluence led to new developments in postcolonial theory, feminism, and cultural theory, all united in a conception of culturally distinctive, alternative ways of being modern. (A more detailed treatment of postmodernism in science studies follows later in the chapter.)