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.
This new work is Nanda's first major 'mainstream' attempt. It repeats many of the formulations from Prophets Facing Backward, but now in a much more approachable way. There is still the warning about the demotion of the scientific temper, but here the argument shifts. In Prophets Facing Backward, Nanda explored her view that the increased "technological modernization is serving to further an equally aggressive cultural re-traditionalization, visible in the growing influence of religious nationalist ideas on the institutions of civil society and the state." Globalisation has made Hindutva acceptable. In the new book, she warms to the theme, and puts it at the centre of things.
In The God Market, however, the problem is not simply Hindutva. Rather, it is the social ground that has enabled Hindutva, namely neo-Hinduism. Neo-Hinduism, for Nanda, is the brand of soft spirituality pervaded by Deepak Chopra, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and their ilk. And it is not so much merely the growth of neo-Hinduism, but rather the symbiotic relationship between this neo-Hinduism, Hindutva and globalisation, that is the issue here. The problem of causality is essential, as Nanda, being a devout scientist, would recognise. At a few points, she makes the rigid claim that globalisation produces neo-Hinduism, upon which grows Hindutva (this is evident in the subtitle of the book). At other times, Nanda points out that the social processes of globalisation and neo-Hinduism/Hindutva feed off each other. The second is more believable, although not particularly startling.