Thus, one can safely conclude that the optimist vision of the classical modernization theories of inevitable and

universal disenchantment is simplistic and false. The point I want to make is that disenchantment requires an active and intentional translation by scientists, humanists, philosophers, and teachers, of scientific discoveries into a language of everyday life for ordinary people. Without this active work, science will remain merely an enclave, sepa- rated from the rest of the society. In such a situation, the dangers of reactionary modernism will always remain with us, where ancient superstitions and preju- dices will hitch the instrumentalities of science to their own survival. This active work of translation of the facts of science into a worldview is the work of the Enlightenment. Like the pre-Socratic Io- nians who replaced the Homeric and Egyptian gods with elements of nature, Indian materialist schools called Lokayata or Charvaka declared that not Brahman or consciousness, but the four material elements of water, earth, air, and fire were the basis of the whole universe, including intelligent beings like humans. These materialists declared, to quote from Svasanved Upanishad, 'There is no incarnation, no God, no heaven, no hell. All traditional religious lit- erature is the work of conceited fools. Nature, the originator, and Time, the de- stroyer, are the rulers of things and take no account of the virtue or vice in award- ing happiness or misery to men. People deluded by flowery speeches cling to god's temples and priests when, in reality, there is no difference between Vishnu and a dog" (quoted here from Damodaran 1967, But materialism was clearly the road not taken: passages like this one are not considered the main message of the Upanishads. Far from it. Materialists were ridiculed and caricatured as simpleminded, working-class hedonists, out to destroy the very basis of civilized life. None of the original materialist texts has survived. The only references exist in critical commentaries by Vedantists determined to discredit the materialists. Yet, the fact that so many orthodox Brahmins spent so much energy in criticizing and ridiculing the materialists shows that these ideas were not entirely marginal. Materialism was considered threatening enough to require constant vigilance. The mainstream of Hinduism chose the road of idealism and that has left a distinctive stamp on Indian intellectual history, including its sciences. The cen- tral question the Upanishadic thinkers set out to answer was: "what is the stuff nature and the entire phenomenal world is made up of " The answer they came up with was: "This whole world is Brahman. Brahman is the hidden mover within all that moves, breaths and winks" (MNNdaka UPanishad), Brahman, Taittriya Upanishad teaches, is "that from which [all] beings are born, that by which they live, that into which when departing they enter. That is Brahman" (quoted here from ibid., Holism is practically a trademark of Hinduism and Vedic science. When pro- ponents of Vedic science claim their science to be holistic, they mean that it is concerned with the study of the system or entity as a whole in which "each entity is inseparably connected with the whole universe" (Jitatmananda 1993, viii). In this view, as described succinctly by Pratima Bowes (1977, 2), "nothing is totally distinct and separate from other things... relationships between things belong to the inner dynamics of their nature. The laws that define relationships between things define the nature of

things themselves." Causality and explanation, in other words, flow form the top to the bottom, from the system to the elements Vivekananda's "proof" of the irrationality of a monotheistic God has grown into a veritable cottage industry devoted to showing the superior rationality of all things Hindu. Some of the contemporary "proofs" verge on the ridiculous. There is a quantum mechanical proof of the irrationality of revealed religions making the rounds. The argument is that only a completely determined Newtonian worldview allows for prophets like Jesus or Mohammad who, as messengers of God, "can claim to possess infallible knowledge of the future obtained through revela- tion." Quantum physics, in this view, has overthrown the Newtonian model, "tak- ing with it the prophets [of revealed religions], and their revelations" (Rajaram 1998, 58 59). Because quantum physics is supposedly an affirmation of Hinduism, this move clears the way for crowning Hinduism as the religion of the future In a striking resemblance to post- modernist critics, knowledge that can challenge and falsify other claims is seen only as a source of intolerance, but never as a source of clarification and growth of knowledge. The law book of Manu and the ethos it prescribed had already become an es- tablished source of authority by the early centuries of the Common Era. Theories were rejected or accepted depending upon their agreement with tradition. The heterodox schools which did not accept the authority of the Vedas were either re- duced to a caricature (especially the materialist schools of Charvaka and Loka- yata), or absorbed into the Vedic tradition (as with the originally materialistic school of Sankhya which was assimilated into the Upanishadic teachings in the Bhagavad Gita, and as with the Brahminization of the teachings of Buddha). Those who sing praises of Hindu hospitability to reason and innovation turn a blind eye to the contrary historical evidence described famously by Alberuni (973 1048 cE, the renowned Islamic mathematician, astronomer, and political philosopher who has left behind a vivid record of his sojourn in India in the early years of the eleventh century. Alberuni describes how the most eminent Indian astronomers like Varahamihira (sixth century cE) and Brahmagupta (seventh or eighth century cE), knowing fully well the cause of lunar and solar eclipses, bowed to tradition and accepted the myth of a demon's head swallowing the sun or the moon. These are well-known facts of Indian intellectual history. The myth of critical thinking in the dominant Hindu tradition can only be maintained by ignoring these facts. Unless the nationalist and postcolonial apologists want to claim (as some have) that the best-known, most cited and commented upon, most-revered texts the Manusrnriti itself, the central themes of which are also present in other revered texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana had no effect whatsoever on practical life before the British colonialists "discovered" them, they have an obligation to examine the full record with an unblinking eye. White- washing the irrationalities or excusing them as colonial constructions will only aid and abet the forces of Hindu chauvinism. When it comes to the cultural significance of science, the often-heard assertion is that the "Christian West needed secularization as an antidote to the Church tyranny in Europe... but there was never any Church tyranny in Hindu India. Thus [secularization of culture] is totally irrelevant to India with its history of tol- erance and pluralism" (Rajaram 1998, 184). This in a country where, for almost all of its history, a majority of human beings were not considered pure enough, for religious and ritual reasons, to be worthy of basic human dignity.

The Vedic science project assumes that all cultures, like individuals, have their own natures (their svabhava, or chitti) which are innate and unchanging, but which change everything else. A culture's chitti, in a manner described by Spengler, leaves its stamp on everything, including all norms of reasoning, all dis- coveries, and all innovations. A nation has an obligation to protect and cultivate its chitti. It must therefore cultivate sciences which express its cultural essence. If it has to borrow from others, it must borrow only those ideas which do not go against its essential nature. This is how a case is made for cultural essences in the Hindutva literature. Vivekananda, the pioneer of "spiritual science," put it across in a lecture he gave in Lahore in 1897: "Just as there is individuality in every man, so there is a na- tional individuality. Just as it is the mission of every man to fulfill a certain purpose in the economy of nature, just as there is a particular line set out for him by his own past Karma, so is it with nations. Each nation has a destiny to fulfill... a message to deliver... a mission to accomplish" (1968, Here is another influential voice, that of Deendayal Upadhyaya, the author of Integral Humanism talking of Hindu India's inborn, innate nature, or chitti: "Every group of persons has an innate nature, or chitti. Similarly every society has a soul or chitti which is inborn and is not the result of historical circum- stances. [Like the soul in human body], the nation's chitti is unaffected by his- tory. Chitti is fundamental and is central to the nation from its very beginning. Chitti determines the direction in which the nation is to advance culturally" (Upadhyaya 1965, The science of nature is distinct and opposed to the experience of the spirit only in the West. In India, spirituality has always been and is a science. This basic claim is constantly reaffirmed by selectively interpreting quantum physics and biology to show that physical matter is sentient and that consciousness is an active force in nature. Hindutva literature is replete with many formulations of this denial of bound- aries between the science of nature and the experience of the spirit. The con- temporary statements, however, are variations of the original formulation by Vivekananda who almost single-handedly began this trend of reading modern science into mysticism. This erosion of any dividing line between mysticism and science was picked up by the followers of Vivekananda, who have established an international net- work of monasteries and ashrams named after Vivekananda's guru, Rama- krishna. The Ramakrishna Missions in India and around the world propagate this scientistic idea of spirituality, and invariably end up teaching modern science as only a fulfillment of the spiritual truths of Vedanta. They present yoga as the em- pirical method of Hindu science which enables the practitioners to directly "see" the interconnectedness between the life force that is in them and the life force that permeates the universe. In that state, there is no subject and no object everything becomes "omnijective," a term sometimes used in this literature (see Jitatmananda 1993) to describe the fusion of the inner spirits of the knower and that of the object under study. This holistic conception of matter and spirit, this ability to see interconnections between nature and consciousness, is claimed to be innate to the Hindu culture Vedic science proponents believe that this holistic thinking has been unfairly looked down upon as anthropomorphic, magical, and irrational. It is only when the fundamentally Christian monotheistic assumptions are held as universally valid that Indian ways of knowing appear irrational. Decolonization of the Hindu mind requires understanding Indian science through Hindu categories. This ba- sically means that the disenchantment of nature brought on by the Scientific Rev- olution is irrelevant for Hindu science. Indian science can move straight to the quantum mechanical view of

the world which, on this account, affirms the pres- ence of spirit in matter (more on this in the following paragraphs). Powerful statements to this effect can be found in nearly all the publications of the Ra- makrishna Mission, and in the writings of the new crop of Hindutva ideologues who are addressing the science question, especially Elst (2001), Frawley (2001), and Rajaram Synthesizing science and religion is a risky business. Those who want to claim the glory of science for their religious traditions run the risk of tying the content of their faith to the ever-changing vicissitudes of science. That opens the door to empirical examination, and often falsification, of the beliefs about the nat- ural world that religions invoke to provide ontological grounds for their teachings. Given the potential of conflict, the standard liberal position, both among the believers and non-believers, has been one of "good fences make good The massive Forbidden Archeology by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson (1993), serves as a mani- festo as well as a research program for Vedic creationism. In defending their findings, they inevitably run into the question: How did the Vedic sages know all this physics? What was their method? Why don't we find any material evidence of observatories, or records of observations? Invariably, the answer one gets is that Vedic sages "intuited," "experientially realized," or "di- rectly perceived... in a flash" the laws of nature by altering their consciousness through yogic meditation. By knowing themselves, they came to know the world As the great scholar of magic and religion, Keith Thomas, described in his 1971 masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic, seeing the existence of cor- respondences and equivalences between different parts of creation is the very essence of magical practices like palmistry and physiognomy, for just as man was supposed to mirror the world in miniature, the hand or the face mirrored the man (1971, 223). The doctrine of correspondences is based upon the equivalence of the microcosm and the macrocosm, which was as prevalent in pre-Reformation Europe as it is in India even today. In Europe too, the micro-macro homology was used both ways, just as it is being used in Vedic science and Vedic environmen- talism today: human beings were seen as an ordered system comparable to the whole world, the world was seen as an organism endowed with vital powers, agency, and its own reason. In the West, this magical view of the world peaked around the Renaissance, and began to decline with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. It saw a brief revival in theosophy and holistic schools of biology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Germany. It is now a province of fringe oc- cult groups in the west. There is plenty in Kak and his associates' writings that indicates that they will decry the above paragraph as Eurocentric. Associative thinking is occult, they in- sist, only within the dualist logic of Semitic religions in which the knowing con- scious subject is radically different and apart from the objects in nature. But the history of Indian science has to be studied through Hindu categories; this is the battle cry of all cultural nationalists. Because in Hinduism the macrocosm is "en- folded" in the microcosm of the human mind, introspection is a perfectly rational method of seeing a connection between the two. The injunction "know thy self" takes on a whole different meaning Kak and his associates want to defend associative thinking as the basis of sci- entific reason not just in antiquity but in the contemporary world as well. De- fending the contemporary relevance of the Vedic worldview is a crucial aspect of their project, otherwise the very ground for modernization

without seculariza- tion will be lost. If they grant that associative (magical) thinking was rational within the parameters of what the people in antiquity knew about their world, but that it has been surpassed by modern science, then they will have to question such things as Ayurveda, astrology, and the rationale behind many rituals. Here they take recourse to the social constructivist critics of science. Modern scholarship, they claim, has shown that science is pretty much in the same boat as any other culture-bound way of knowing. Its hegemony around the world is based upon the imperialistic hegemony of a secularized culture in this godless age, when all magic and wonder has disappeared. But take away the false, power- imposed hegemony of the secularized world, and you find that science too is "rationalized mythology" like any other mythology. The old standbys Paul Fey- erabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Carolyn Merchant are trotted out in support of the culture-boundedness of modern science (see especially Feuerstein, et al. 1995). Science is not completely relativized, but enough space is created to argue for other, equally rational ways of knowing the associative thinking of Hinduism be- ing as good as any. All ways of knowing are declared to be simply different names for the same enterprise of science, all equally scientific within their own meta- physical assumptions, and it is assumed that associative thinking can be substi- tuted for experimentation and logic with no loss of truth. Cultural boundedness of all sciences works as a taken-for-granted assumption, a backdrop against which Vedic science is presented as an alternative epistemology in its own right, with as much claim for universal acceptance as modern Vivekananda, however, is not the inspiration behind the contemporary school of Vedic creationism, The chief inspiration is Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, the street name for the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The authors of the controversial and massive book Forbiddel Archeology (1993), Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, are the scientific talent behind the California-based Bhakti Vedanta Institute, the intellectual center of