Examines the claims of religion
as a magisterium in the domain of knowledge
and in public sphere
The collapse of the Republican
ascendancy earlier this month would seem to
have brought the evangelical-expansionist juggernaut
of Right-wing America to a halt, just as the
electoral defeat of the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) government may appear to have
checked the march of Hindutva. But neither the
United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) triumph
in India nor that of the Democrats in the U.S.
should blind us to the fact that both societies
must continue to cope with the deep, indwelling
and unstemmed current of reactionary intolerance
flowing beneath the edifices of their modernity.
This intolerance bases itself on the infallibility
of judgments made in the name of religious belief;
on the unquestionability of claims asserted
by religiosity; and on the absolute primacy
of a politicised religiosity.
Meera Nanda, who is currently
a John Templeton Foundation Fellow in Religion
and Science, has confronted this phenomenon
courageously in her writings, especially in
the excellent Prophets Facing Backward (2004).
She has examined the claims of religion as a
magisterium, both in the domain of knowledge
and in the public sphere
where the dramas of social change and political
action are enacted. Nanda is particularly concerned
with the manner in which the universally admired
scientific knowledge is sought to be coopted
by idioms of contemporary religiosity; and with
the emergence of mystical populisms that threaten
to coopt even legitimate popular mobilisations
of resistance into the schema of reactionary
politics.
The malaise
In the three passionate and
closely argued essays - `Secularism without
Secularisation?', `Hindu Ecology in the Age
of Hindutva', and `Making Science Sacred' -
that constitute The Wrongs of the Religious
Right, Nanda offers a compelling diagnosis of
this malaise, both in India and in the West.
Her accounts remind us of the extent to which
we, as postcolonial Indians, are held hostage
by the hobbled, half-hearted attempt at modernisation
that lies at the foundation of our nation-state.
Ours is the tragedy of a society that was redeemed
from imperial colonialism, but not from its
own demons: we gave ourselves the lineaments
of a democratic polity, but never purged our
society and culture of their feudal contents,
their capacity to sustain regressive attitudes,
their structurally sanctioned oppression and
violence.
Nanda states her central thesis
succinctly: "Secularism, whatever the model,
is only as strong as cultural secularisation
is deep; no secularism without secularisation
of the civil society... and unless the cultural
habit of
accepting authority based upon faith and/or
non-sensory, mystical experiences gives way
to a cultural habit of demanding good, falsifiable
evidence, secularism will forever remain threatened
by those who invoke metaphysical verities backed
by God, sacred books and traditions."
Critique
She emphasises the salutary
insight that reactionary attitudes are not the
monopoly of formerly colonised nations, and
that the apparent hypermodernity achieved by
economic change does not automatically guarantee
the dissolution of revanchist, anti-modernist
dogmata. In her thoroughgoing critique of eco-spiritualities,
Nanda draws attention to the dark side of the
`alternative', whether at home or abroad: the
New
Age farrago of pagan revivalism, racialist doctrine,
nature mysticism and the occult that passes
for a philosophy of life in the absence of well-directed
secular efforts, especially after the collapse
of the orthodox Left internationally and the
self-compromising of India's Centrist parties
by their `soft Hindutva' gestures.
In such a situation, even well-
meaning and compassionate religious approaches
can be poisoned by the company they keep. As
a key example, Nanda invites us to consider
the cooption of an environmentalism premised
on local conceptions of the sacred by the ideology
of monolithic Hindu nationalism. Eventually,
she points out, environmental movements must
be seen as class-based political movements aimed
towards securing their participants a better
life, rather than as a defence of some mystical
ideal of Nature. Movements that adopt mystical
populism must eventually fail, or turn into
monsters.
Nanda's is a sane and cautionary
voice. She has no time for the muffling devices
of tact; nor can we afford these at the present
time. And yet, close engagement with extremists
can leave one with an unrelenting extremism
of one's own. Perhaps Nanda must exercise some
vigilance against this tendency. For instance,
she does Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha
an injustice: in her critique of their ecological
history, which emphasises sacred groves as traditional
means of pursuing forest conservation and promoting
bio-diversity, she manages to suggest that they
are defenders of the caste system. This is to
mistake description for prescription; she also
dismisses the evidence that sacred groves were
not confined to the upper castes, but were maintained
by a wide variety of social actors, not all
Hindu.
Also, institutions that may
have guaranteed ecological stability and social
consensus at one time could, in changed socio-political
circumstances, have become ossified. Surely
this should not prevent us from retrieving the
best features of viable historical models, in
what I would describe as an attitude of optimistic
retrievalism?
`Optimistic retrievalism'
After all, Nanda has her own
moments of optimistic retrievalism: she proposes
Buddhism as a possible religion of reason that
could serve the interests of a truly progressive
India. In this, she pursues Dr. Ambedkar's approach
towards the retrieval of Buddhism; and her understanding
of Buddhism, like his, is a highly selective
one. Following Dr. Ambedkar, Nanda extracts
the more down-to-earth and practical Theravada
strand from the Buddhist corpus and recasts
it in a `practical ethics' mould - while ignoring
such highly influential idioms as the Yogachara,
Madhyamika and Mahasanghika, which are idealistic,
even mystical, and resistant to rationalist
revisionism.
I say this, not to diminish Nanda's admirable
and indeed crucial engagement with Buddhism,
but to indicate that the tendency towards optimistic
retrievalism can never be wished away or abandoned,
merely because it is so often eclipsed by its
sinister twin, reactionary revivalism. Besides,
the tendency to reify positivist science as
the only guarantee of a life worth living can
lead us into another pitfall: the espousing
of an insatiable criticality that leaves little
space for experiences of grace, doubt and wonderment,
because it refuses to distinguish between the
promotion of dangerous mass delusions and the
necessary re-enchantment with the world.
