When a great tradition Hinduises: ‘The God Market’ by Meera Nanda

Meera Nanda has conducted a valiant fight over the past decade. A special part of my bookshelf is reserved for her important works, all appeared over the past decade: Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2002), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern critiques of science and Hindu nationalism in India (2004), The Wrongs of the Religious Right (2005) and now, The God Market. A trained microbiologist, Nanda first came to the attention of many  in 1997. At that time, the US academy had been rattled by a hoax played on the journal Social Text by the scientist Alan Sokal. Frustrated by the nostrums of postmodernism, which purported to dismiss the idea of verifiable 'truth', Sokal submitted a jargon-laden essay on physics that went along the grain of what he understood to be postmodernism.

That year, Nanda joined Sokal and Stephen Jay Gould at a well-attended session of the Socialist Scholars conference, and published substantially the same points in a Dissent article entitled "Science Wars in India". Nanda revolted against the tendency to substitute verifiable science with Vedic science, for the replacement of calculus by shlokas. "In the name of national pride", she wrote, "students are being deprived of conceptual tools that are crucial in solving the real-world mathematical problems they will encounter as scientists and engineers." This has been the basic point of each of Nanda's major books: to sound the alarm against the substitution of science by religion – and, in the case of India, of a Nehruvian scientific temper for blind Hindutva.