Modi govt undermining scientific temper of Arthashatra, Kamasutra, sceptic Charvakas; is "promoting" mythoscience

By Our Representative
In her newly-published book, controversial US Indologist Wendy Doniger has directly attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for what she creating a climate in which "mythoscience" thrives, pointing out that the government allegiance to Hindutva and its 'eternal dharma' doesn't just have "strong anti-Muslim agendas" but is coupled with "virulent repression of other versions of Hinduism and its history, particularly those that contradict the skewed construction of Hindu history proclaimed by Hindutva."
The veteran historian, whose earlier book, "The Hindus: An Alternative History", was withdrawn from India by its publishers Penguins after pro-Modi campaigner Dina Nath Batra blamed it for denigrating Hinduism by focussing on sex, has now accused the regime under Modi for encouraging "the by now entrenched bad habit of seeking scientific authenticity in religious rather than scientific texts from the past."
Noting how scientific temper Arthashatra and Kamasutra, as also Charvaka mythology of scepticism, "has now come up against a new incarnation of the forces of repressive dharma, now supporting pseudoscientific claims", Doniger says, the effort now is to find roots of modern science in religious texts like Ramayana and Mahabharata, and Vedas, with claims about "Vedic quantum mechanics and general relativity".
Referring to the Modi government setting up ministries of yoga and Ayurveda, Doniger says, this has been done "to peddle their versions of ancient Hindu sciences", underlining, to achieve this "Modi has commissioned a number of revisions of textbooks (the modern heirs to the ancient shastras) mandated as supplementary reading for all government primary and secondary schools".
She recalls, "Many of these books, including the widely assigned 125-page book 'Tejomay Bharat' (Brilliant India), had originally been published in 1999 in Gujarat; Modi had written the forewords to Batra’s books when he was chief minister in Gujarat and now reissued the books and wrote new forewords for them."

"These revised textbooks include outlandish claims about the history of science in India, often producing weird anachronisms", her new book, "Beyond Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics", says, adding, "One maintained not only that ancient India had the nuclear bomb, it even practised non-proliferation by carefully restricting the number of people who had access to it” (presumably to Brahmins)."
Noting that there are now books about Vedic physics and Vedic string theory, Doniger gives the example of how in 2015, the incumbent minister at the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Earth Sciences publicly announced, “We all know we knew ‘beej ganit’ (seed-counting), the Indian word for algebra, much before the Arabs, but very selflessly allowed it to be called algebra” (a Latin word based on the Arabic al-jabr)."
Doniger says, the root of all this could be found in "Hindu nationalists", seeking to "expel the British from India", advancing a series of "two-pronged arguments, not just 'You are scientific, but we are spiritual' (though this was often said, too), but, better, 'Our religion is wiser than your science – and our religious texts contain science much older than yours'.”
However, she believes, the "complex relationship between science and religion in India" took a "sharp turn to the right under the impetus of a nationalist movement known as Hindutva, 'Hinduness'. This term was invented by the nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 pamphlet entitled 'Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?'" What came up was a new variety of sanatana dharma "heavily laced with anti-Muslim and anti-woman sentiments."
Suggesting the thst this has affcted devrlopmental agenda, too, Doniger says, the protagonists of Hindutva have gone so far as to justify blocking of major government project to build a much-needed shipping canal between India and Sri Lanka in 2007 citing the mythical causeway in the Ramayana, built by "talking monkeys" for Rama to cross over from India to the island of Lanka to rescue his wife Sita from the ten-headed demon Ravana.