Banu Subramaniam's book Holy Science provides a unique angle of insight into several otherwise well-known and well-researched aspects of the contemporary Hindu nationalist agenda in India. Her concern is to highlight the ways in which science and religion, tradition and modernity, meld seamlessly in an ideology of Hindu nationalism that seeks to usurp rather than refine or rethink Western forms of knowledge and knowing. Subramaniam is uniquely well placed to make such an argument: trained as a scientist, she brings this knowledge to bear on issues of gender, caste, race, and ethnicity in the field of feminist science and technology studies.
Borrowing from East Asian studies, Subramaniam specifies Hindu nationalism's melding of science and religion as a bionationalist approach to forging a singular Indian (Hindu-centric) national identity. This is encapsulated in Hindu nationalist leaders’ claims that Hindu myths demonstrate advanced scientific knowledge: for example, that the Hindu god Ganesha, who has an elephant's head sutured to a human body, demonstrates that ancient Hindus practiced plastic surgery.
Holy Science touches on a wide range of cases to illustrate this contemporary bionationalism, covered in five substantive chapters. Chapter 1 explores the melding of Vedic science and developmental nationalism through Vaastushastra—a “Vedic science of architecture” (p. 21) that has taken hold among the growing professional middle classes in something like an Indian version of feng shui. Chapter 2 delves into sexuality and queer politics, revisiting the debates over Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in September 2018. Chapter 3 focuses on postcolonial environmental politics, examining controversies over the Rama Setu bridge and ecological theories of caste as a sociological system of resource allocation.
Chapter 4 turns to the Indian Genome Variation project, Aryan migration theory, and the early 2000s debate over caste as a form of racial oppression—a debate the Indian state “won” by arguing that caste is an internal Indian issue, separate from global issues of race and racism. Chapter 5 considers reproductive politics by examining issues of surrogacy, then turns to the creation of the relatively powerful and well-funded Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy) to meld indigenous Indian medical traditions with Western medical sciences.
Each substantive chapter is bookended by (refreshingly brief) mythological stories of gods, planets, and avatars. Each story provokes a different rumination on Western forms of knowledge and the state(s) of the contemporary world. Some of these include: Why must we see everything in binary terms? What if we saw time as multidimensional and cyclical instead of linear? Why do humans take inanimate forms of being as dead, inert, or lifeless? Taken together, these interventions amount to a call to embrace diversity and cooperation in place of discourses of purity and competition.
The strength of the book lies in its encompassing reach, pulling together seemingly disparate issues and cases through the lens of bionationalism. While the book presents little new empirical research, the theoretical contributions are thought-provoking and suggest questions (though not necessarily answers) about the intractable dilemmas into which fundamentalisms put believers. Subramaniam does not “want to cede Hinduism to Hindu nationalism” (p. 216). Yet the book does not (or cannot) specify how to recoup Hinduism from Hindu nationalism. She points to the possible emancipatory futures of science and religion which lie in the interstices between them—while rejecting their violent and oppressive pasts—and ponders the possible contours of an “Indian way of thinking.” Yet the interstitial spaces between science and religion are precisely where Hindutva bionationalism resides—and the argument does not specify how they will, or can, become the spaces of emancipation. And the “Indian way of thinking” that Subramaniam's mythological stories suggests is itself deeply inflected by Hindu tenets. If, under a regime of bionationalism, “religion is no longer a private or local space” (p. 135), and science is “no longer” objective, or purely academic, or controlled by the west (p. 177), it is not at all clear that religion and science ever were any of these things. Even as Subramaniam ties bionationalism to contemporary Hindu nationalism, she notes that the history of biopolitics precedes even colonial rule in India (p. 13). Ultimately, it becomes difficult to establish clearly where bionationalism is new and unique, or where it has roots that are “timeless” and deeply historical, or how to disentangle the strands.
The book ends by calling for “impure” theories and politics for “impure times,” to counter the homogenizing and pure-origin-story impulses of modern Hindutva bionationalism. The search, then, is for ways of thinking, knowing, and being that derive neither from Western frames, nor from Hindu nationalist frames, but could be informed by Hinduism. The goal is laudatory, but it is perhaps the task of another text to map out the path to achieving it.
