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Hindutva propaganda since the 1980s has produced various fringe literature in the fields of pseudoscience, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology, associated with the religious fundamentalism or ethnic nationalism, and is a product of Indian politics.[1][2][3] Some of the criticized authors have described this characterization as being anti-Indian.[4]

History

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Claims regarding "Vedic Science" originate from Hindu reform movements in the late 19th century. Of notable influence were the writings of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati and Swami Vivekananda. Dayananda rejected the older commentaries of the Vedas by Sayana, Mahidhara and Uvata as medieval corruptions "opposed to the real meaning of the Vedas".[5] He summarily renounced the academic philological work of western scholars as being misinformed by such corrupted Indian commentators. For example, the first volume of the Sacred Books of the East series, containing editions of some Upanishads, had appeared in 1879. Dayananda's writings are recognized as having an element of religious fundamentalism.[6]

Dayananda's Arya Samaj experienced a gradual renaissance in the 1980s in conjunction with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, culminating in the 1998 to 2004 BJP control of the Government of India. It has been said that pseudoscience was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like those of Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science".[7] According to Nanda:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honorific of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.[7]

Vedic Science

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In 1900, Vivekananda said that "the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter."[8] In one lecture he claimed that: "Today we find wonderful discoveries of modern science coming upon us like bolts from the blue, opening our eyes to marvels we never dreamt of. But many of these are only re-discoveries of what had been found ages ago. It was only the other day that modern science discovered that what it calls heat, magnetism, electricity, and so forth, are all convertible into one unit force. But this has been done even in the Samhita."[9] identifying concepts from physics like gravitation, electricity, magnetism and other forces with the mystical Vedantic notion of Prana.

Some of the authors "seeking to modernize India by recovering the supposedly pristine Vedic-Hindu roots of Indian culture" revived these notions.[7]:

"By postulating interconnections and similarities across Nature, they [the Vedic thinkers] were able to use logic to reach extremely subtle conclusions about diverse aspects of reality."[10]

In response to criticism to the effect that this is essentially the magic worldview prevalent in pre-Reformation Europe overcome by the scientific revolution of the 18th century (Nanda 2003:116), Hindutva authors answer that the distinction of science and pseudoscience (or proto-science) is Eurocentric and unapplicable to Vedic Science:

"Western scientic thought draws on the traditions of Greek rationalist thinking according to which only what is within the purview of the five senses is taken cognisance of. Scientific methods follow some kind of closed scientific reasoning which insulates itself against facts that its methods cannot account for. How else can they [scientists] dare dismiss Jyotisha [astrology] which sees a level of existence beyond the purview of the five senses?" (Vasudev 2001)[11]

Or even that in India, science and religion are fundamentally identical:

"The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since 'Modern Science' arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion." (Mukhyananda 1997:94)

"Indigenous Aryans"

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Main article: Indigenous Aryans

Witzel (2006:204) traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always be "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism outlined above, most of the revisionist literature being published by Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakashan.

In modern India, the discussion of Indo-Aryan migration is charged politically and religiously. The debate has produced a lot of polemics on both sides.[12] It should however be noted that many scholars who have written for or against the Aryan Invasion Theory are not politically motivated.[13]

The Belgian Indologist K. Elst noted that "in the intervening years, the atmosphere in this debate has calmed down a little, but in the final years of the second Christian millennium, scolding and shouting and smearing were the done thing on internet forum discussions of the Aryan invasion question. Ironically, most Western AIT champions have managed to come away with the impression that all the foul language was only their Indian opponents' doing, but the record shows that they too have given their best; Witzel's misrepresentation of my position is but a case in point.“ [14]

Influence on education

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Further information: Saffronization

On February 23, 2001, the then BJP-controlled University Grants Commission (UGC) announced that

"there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the science of Vedic Astrology in India, to allow this scientic knowledge to reach to the society at large and to provide opportunities to get this important science even exported to the world [...] the Commission decided to approve in principle [the] setting up of a few departments of Vedic Astrology in Indian universities leading to certicate diploma, under-graduate, post-graduate and Ph.D. degrees."

This plan provoked a storm of protest from Indian scientists and rationalist intellectuals (Sokal 2006:34). Controversies with a similar background include the 2002 NCERT controversy and the 2006 Hindu textbook case fought before Californian courts. Following the 2004 defeat of the National Democratic Alliance, the new UPA government pledged to "de-saffronize" textbooks and curricula nationwide and restore the secular character of education. In March, the UPA Government released new NCERT textbooks, based on the texts used prior to the controversial 2002 updates. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversaw this project, stated that it had made only minor modifications to the books that predated the "saffronized" era.[15]

References

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  1. ^ Nanda 2005
  2. ^ Sokal 2006
  3. ^ Witzel 2006
  4. ^ Frawley, David (2002-08-20). "[[Michael E. J. Witzel|Witzel]]'s philology". Retrieved 2007-03-31. {{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)
  5. ^ Saraswati, Dayananda. Introduction to the commentary on the Vedas. p. 443.
  6. ^ Ruthven (2007:108)
  7. ^ a b c Nanda (2003) Cite error: The named reference "nanda03" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  8. ^ 1970, vol. 3, p. 185, cited after Sokal (2006), chapter 3.2 "Hindu nationalism and 'Vedic science'")
  9. ^ lecture on The Vedanta delivered at Lahore on 12 November 1897; 1970, vol. 3, pp. 398f.
  10. ^ Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley in their 1995 In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (p. 197)
  11. ^ Vasudev, Gayatri Devi. 2001. Vedic astrology and pseudo-scientic criticism, The Organiser (an English-language publication of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), reprinted in The Astrological Magazine, cited after Sokal (2006:38)
  12. ^ "But times have changed, and today the civility with which these things used to be debated... has gone out the window, unfortunately." Trautmann, Thomas 2005:xiv.
  13. ^ Trautmann 2005:xix
  14. ^ (Elst 2005)
  15. ^ India: International Religious Freedom Report 2005

Literature

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See also

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