Banu Subramaniam's book Holy Science provides a unique angle of insight into several otherwise well-known and well-researched aspects of the contemporary Hindu nationalist agenda in India. Her concern is to highlight the ways in which science and religion, tradition and modernity, meld seamlessly in an ideology of Hindu nationalism that seeks to usurp rather than refine or rethink Western forms of knowledge and knowing. Subramaniam is uniquely well placed to make such an argument: trained as a scientist, she brings this knowledge to bear on issues of gender, caste, race, and ethnicity in the field of feminist science and technology studies.
Borrowing from East Asian studies, Subramaniam specifies Hindu nationalism's melding of science and religion as a bionationalist approach to forging a singular Indian (Hindu-centric) national identity. This is encapsulated in Hindu nationalist leaders’ claims that Hindu myths demonstrate advanced scientific knowledge: for example, that the Hindu god Ganesha, who...
