Description
Meera Nanda’s book is an impassioned plea for secularization of mentalities. She compares the secular polities of India and America to argue that, faced with the current right wing assault, secular constitutions alone cannot guarantee secularism. She examines how India’s major ecological movements have been reframed by Brahminical Hinduism with some unintended but crucial help from those within these movements. Her work shows the interconnections between the Hindutva scientism and national chauvinism, a factor crucial for its middle class support and its ‘reactionary modernism’.
CONTENTS
- Secularism without Secularization: Reflections on the Religious Right in America and India
- Hindu Ecology in the Age of Hindutva: The Dangers of Religious Environmentalism
- Making Science Sacred: How Postmodernism Aids Vedic Science.
Cover: Kanak Chanpa Chakma, Vibrations of Bell, Oil on canvas, 1998
Meera Nanda
Meera Nanda is an independent scholar based in the United States. Her education has been in both science and philosophy, and her research interests include the history of science, Hindu nationalism and the subversion of scientific temper, postmodernism and right wing environmentalism, apart from the philosophy of science.
