Is There an Unholy Collusion Between Science and Religion in India? Interrogating Meera Nanda, of the Five Horse Angels

Abstract A Mahābhārata kind of textual war has been raging between science (the sciences) and religion (theology and traditional ortho-doxastic systems), for some time now, let us say since the Renaissance period, through Europe’s Enlightenment, to the present era. This war has many protagonists and antagonists on both sides. Both sides of the camp engage in quasi-philosophical and other intellectual disputations to either drive the wedge of disagreement toward, as it were, the death of one side, or attempt a rapprochement between the seemingly incommensurable claimants to the truth. The fangs and reverberations of this war have been spilling over onto the Indian subcontinent as well, since about the late nineteenth century, albeit with significant differences. In this latter fray enters Meera Nanda, a strident apologist for the eventual triumph of science or ‘objectivity’ over the ruse of religions. That in itself is not an ignoble cause. But she further champions a thesis of the wayward contemporary "collusion" of Indian science and religion, i.e., of what she calls ‘the emerging state-temple-corporate complex’. The paper offers a critique of Nanda’s claim, on the one hand, for want of convincing evidence for the overarching claim, and, on the other hand, the utter disregard on the part of the sectarian-right for the methods and intersubjective epistemé of science. The Nobel Laureate C V Raman arguably had chauvinist strains in the way he treated his female research fellows, as Abha Sur points out in a separate study which I discuss. But here too there is no direct complicitous relation between science and religion; rather the problematic relation lies with genderized caste proclivity in modern Indian science practices as in the culture broadly. The present paper is a sequel to ‘War and peace between science and religion: the divine arch after the four horsemen’, published in the Journal of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research 28/2, 2011: 3‐30).