Review of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism

Abstract

Review of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism Sunhay You (bio) Banu Subramaniam’s Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019 Building on the insights of feminist, queer, postcolonial, science and technology, and religion studies, Holy Science deconstructs the binary between science and religion to reveal their entangled formations and uneven effects—the consequences of colonial legacies that privilege science over religion as a universally objective mode of knowledge production. In present-day postcolonial India, Hindu nationalism takes shape through the rhetoric of science to consolidate and integrate India’s past with its future destiny. The five case studies and chapters that make up the book present thick descriptions delineating how the rhetoric of science and religion come together to both clarify and amplify the hindutva of Hindu nationalism, an ideology that naturalizes “a great and grand Hindu past where science, technology, and philosophy thrived” (7). In this imaginary, Hinduism coheres with modern capitalism, neoliberalism, Western science, and technology to beckon a return to India’s prosperous past in the present. Offering analyses of scientific studies that undergird and extend the goals of Hindu nationalism, Subramaniam engages in an “experimental humanities,” a methodological approach that brings together the “empiricism and analytic conventions of experiments from the sciences and the rhetorical and contextual analyses from the humanities” (34). For instance, in her fourth chapter, “Biocitizenship in Neoliberal Times,” Subramaniam delineates how state investments in Indigenous medical systems (IMS) such as Ayurveda seek to establish the scientific basis of India’s ancient spiritual healing practices. Advances in Western science are to affirm what has already been discovered and intuited in India through more spiritual means of inquiry. Notably, using science to legitimize India’s cultural and historical authority has contradictory effects. While disrupting [End Page 278] colonial hierarchies of knowledge, the medicalization of Ayurveda also fortifies a vision of a unified Indian people with shared genetic origins and health concerns. Hindu nationalism ends up reinforcing the disenfranchising structures of the neoliberal and bionational governance that propounds the biological basis of nationhood and individuated citizenship. In this manner, studies in genomics and IMS can amplify essentialist politics of difference that buttress hierarchies of caste and sex in biological terms. India’s Vedic tradition, upon which Hinduism and Indigenous medical systems are based, valorizes India’s origins and serves as the basis of what Subramaniam terms “archaic modernity.” The “archaic” becomes synonymous with “modernity” as the past becomes the way of the future. The first chapter, “Home and the World: The Modern Lives of the Vedic Sciences,” reviews how the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mobilized archaic modernity to gain state control and majority support at the dawn of the new millennium. However, this revamped image of Hinduism as synonymous with scientific and technological advancement reinvests in an essentialist gender hierarchy. These competing forces collide in the revival of Vaastushastra, an ancient Indian science for harmonizing living spaces in accordance with the five elements (water, earth, fire, air, and space). Subramaniam notes that this architectural science and style, marketed toward women, has gained much traction as a status symbol. As a gendered site of neoliberal consumerism, Vaastushastra redomesticates women as the bearers of tradition within the home and nation. In chapter 2, “Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Biologies: The Queer Politics of (Un)Natural Sex,” Subramaniam delves into the Judeo-Christian roots of the biological sciences, especially those that dictate the organic basis of sexual difference and heteronormative sexual reproduction. This legacy lives on in the Indian Penal Code 377 (IPC 377), which identifies any form of “unnatural” intercourse as a criminal offense. Despite its colonial roots, the IPC 377 has garnered the support of Hindu nationalists, who align with its historical investments in eugenics and in identifying and penalizing “undesirable” citizen subjects along the lines of caste, religion, and class. Hindu nationalist lawyers have gone on to defend the code in court, describing nonheteronormative sex acts as abject markers of British and Muslim degeneracy, complicity, and anti-nationalism. While the code has changed to permit consensual gay sex and acknowledge a third gender for transgender people, it sustains the religious-scientific language of the “unnatural” as a...