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vedicfriends, "vrnparker" <vrnparker>

wrote:

THIS IS AN ACADEMIC CRITIQUE OF THE VEDIC CULTURAL REVIVAL

"Hindutva ideologues such as Murli Manohar Joshi, Konrad Elst,

Girilal Jain, David Frawley, N.S. Rajaram..."

 

"That the verses of the Rig Veda are actually coded formulas of

advanced theories of physics has been recently claimed by Subhash

Kak, an engineer working in the United States. And a Vedic

alternative to Darwinian evolution by natural selection is being

pushed by Michael Cremo and his fellow Hare Krishnas in the U.S."

 

Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science'

 

MEERA NANDA

http://www.flonnet.com/fl2101/stories/20040116001408700.htm

The second and concluding part of the two-part article.

IN the first part of this essay I examined how Hindutva ideologues

constructed the myth of "Vedas as books of science" (Frontline,

January 2). I argued that the anti-science rhetoric of postmodern

intellectuals has given philosophical respectability to the eclectic

patchwork of science and Hindu metaphysics that goes under the name

of Vedic science. In this part, I will examine the philosophical

arguments for "alternative sciences" favoured by prominent feminists,

environmentalists and postcolonial intellectuals and show how they

converge with the right-wing's claims of superiority of "holistic"

and "authentic" sciences of Hindus. I want to start by placing these

debates in the historical context of Hindu "renaissance".

 

Postcolonialism and the myth of Hindu "renaissance"

 

The roots of "Vedic science" can be traced to the so-called Bengal

Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist

constructions of Vedic antiquity as the "Golden Age" of Hinduism.

Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism,

important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and

Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in

the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta

tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and

idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta,

key Hindu nationalist reformers - from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim

Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda - began to find in it all the

elements of modernity. Vivekananda took the lead in propagating the

view that the monism of Advaita Vedanta presaged the future

culmination of all of modern science. Since modern science denied the

role of any supernatural force outside nature, Vivekananda claimed

that only Vedantic monism was truly scientific for it treated God as

an aspect of nature and did not invoke any force external to nature.

 

 

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at Rajghat. Hiding behind their

great mascot does not help postmodern scholars, for Hindutva also

claims Gandhi to be its own mascot.

 

A slight digression on the subject of Indian "renaissance" might be

appropriate here. Through constant and loud repetition, neo-Hindu

thinkers have created a myth that Brahminical traditions of learning

represent the golden age of science and reason in early India. The

Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to

Hindu "renaissance", which they claim to be similar to the European

Renaissance that ushered in the modern age in the West. What they

forget is that the Renaissance in the West re-discovered the

humanistic and naturalistic sources of the Greek tradition that had

been overshadowed by the Catholic Church - the Renaissance humanists

rediscovered this-worldly philosophy of Aristotle and critical-

realist Socrates over the other-worldly philosophy of Plato. The neo-

Hindu "renaissance", in contrast, re-discovered the most mystical and

anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic inheritance - Advaita Vedanta -

that had always overshadowed and silenced the naturalistic and

scientific traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. Neo-Hinduism is no

renaissance, but a revival.

 

There is no denying that the neo-Hindu "discovery" of modern science

in ancient teachings of Vedas and Upanishads had a limited

usefulness. Since they had convinced themselves that their religion

was the mother of all sciences, conservative Hindus did not feel

threatened by scientific education. As long as science could be

treated as "just another name" for Vedic truths, they were even

enthusiastic to learn it. The Brahminical traditions of learning and

speculative thought served the upper castes well, as they took to

modern English education, which included instruction in scientific

subjects. Those who would explicitly use scientific learning to

challenge the traditional outlook were either lower down on the caste

hierarchy or "godless Communists" anyway, and could be safely

ignored. The great neo-Hindu "renaissance" succeeded in turning

empirical sciences into the handmaiden of the Vedic tradition - the

role reason has performed throughout India's history. This is the

tradition that the Sangh Parivar is institutionalising in our

schools, universities and the public sphere.

 

Let us see what India's best-known contemporary public intellectuals

have to say on this matter. As it happens, the emergence of neo-

Hinduism in 19th century Bengal has perhaps been the most written

about episode in modern India's intellectual history. All our best-

known intellectuals whose names are practically synonymous with

postcolonial theory around the world - Ashis Nandy, Partha

Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Subaltern

Studies historians - have cut their scholarly teeth on the emergence

of neo-Hindu thought in the Bengali bhadralok circles. These

intellectuals stand out because they work with a post-structuralist

rejection of the very possibility of the idea of dispassionate and

objective knowledge of the real world in any domain, natural or

social. Following the political writing of French philosopher Michel

Foucault, made popular among the historians of colonialism by the

writings of Edward Said, these scholars see Western sciences as

serving colonial interests in defining the non-West as inferior,

irrational and unscientific. Indian intellectuals have both

contributed to the development of this critique of colonial knowledge

and applied it to the Indian condition.

 

 

By and large, these postcolonial scholars have criticised the neo-

Hindu penchant for scienticising the Vedas, but for reasons that

actually open the door to an even more radical defence of Vedic

science that is now emerging in Hindutva literature. Ashis Nandy and

Partha Chatterjee, both writers of international best-sellers on the

emergence of modern thought in India, condemned the emerging Hindu

modernists all across the political spectrum - from the apologists

for Hinduism such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee to the liberal, secular-humanist Nehru - not for so

falsely and so self-servingly appropriating modern science in the

service of propagating religious orthodoxy and not for confusing myth

and science in order to defend their mythology. No, that kind of

critique of nativism that would defend the distinctiveness of science

and insist upon its potential for demystification of religious reason

was considered too passé, too "positivist" by our avant-garde

theorists. Rather, Nandy, Chatterjee and their followers condemned

Indian nationalists for even daring to apply alien, colonial

categories of thought to India's own traditions and ways of knowing.

 

For these postmarked intellectuals, the cardinal sin of Hindu

nationalists was not their defence of the high-Hindu tradition - a

tradition which has for centuries contributed to the worst kind of

ignorance and social inequality. Their cardinal sin was their

capitulation to modern scientific thought itself, which they tried to

appropriate for Hinduism (as in the case of Vivekananda, Bankim

Chandra and even Nehru), or which they tried to use for secular

Enlightenment (as in the case of Marxist and socialist humanists like

Nehru). Incidentally, these two positions seem to exhaust the entire

range of nationalism. The valiant attempts of Dalit and non-Brahmin

intellectuals such as B.R. Ambedkar, E.V. Ramaswamy Periyar, Jyotiba

Phule and Iyothee Thass to use the new knowledge to liberate

themselves from the shackles of tradition are simply invisible in the

postmodernist literature which is keen on showing modern science as

an agent of oppression and mental colonialism. As long as Indian

thought was being measured in modern scientific terms, whether to

praise it, or to demystify it, the Indian mind was being "colonised"

and it was denied the "agency" to define its own agenda and its own

solutions. Both the Hindu right and the Nehruvian left, as long as

they remained prisoners of modern scientific ways of thinking, were

equally "derivatives" of their colonial masters.

 

Authentic national liberation, on this account, can only come with

the rediscovery of authentic traditions of India which, apparently,

were only understood by Mahatma Gandhi. For all their nods to the

anti-essentialism of postmodernism, Indian critics of modernity

practise a sly form of "strategic essentialism" (Gayatri Spivak's

term) that treats Indian traditions as unique to India which cannot

be understood by outsiders. True national liberation will mean a

rediscovery of India's unique gestalt, which, in the postcolonial

narrative, lies in its holism, monism or non-dualism, as compared to

the tendency of the Western science towards separation of objects

from their context. Indian thought is not to be seen either as a copy

of modern science, or somehow lacking in empirical sciences, but as

encoding a wholly different kind of science altogether, which is the

duty of post-secular, postmodern intellectuals to discover and

cultivate. Coming from the traditions of the Gandhian and populist

left, the postmodernists tend to find these alternative traditions

among the non-modern habits of the heart of the humble, folk

traditions of women, peasants, village folk and assorted subaltern

groups. Gandhi became their patron saint of this uniquely Indian, non-

modern way of life. "Real India" equals Gandhi equals "innocent

traditions" of non-modern "communities". Anyone challenging any of

the factors in the equation was declared to have a "colonised mind".

 

This critique of modernist nationalism-as-mental-colonialism has come

to serve as the fig leaf for the postmodernists as they scramble to

dissociate themselves from the contemporary Hindutva movement, which

has also nailed its colours to "decolonisation of the Indian mind".

Nandy and his many admirers are trying to distance themselves from it

by continuing with their critique of the Hindu nationalism as being

wedded to modernism. They point to the modernist, scientistic

rhetoric of Hindutva propagandists and proclaim Hindutva to be just

one more symptom of modernity. The problem is that using modernist

rhetoric does not make one modern. On the contrary, by framing the

traditional Hindu worldview in a modernist vocabulary, Hindutva is co-

opting modern ideas, giving traditions a modern gloss to make them

palatable to the educated middle classes. Hindutva is a reactionary

modernist movement that accepts the instrumental uses of science

(that is, technology) but resists the secular enlightenment that is a

necessary precondition of modernity. Hiding behind the great mascot

of postmodern scholars, Gandhi - supposedly the guardian angel of

the "innocent" folk traditions - does not work either, for Hindutva

also claims Gandhi to be its own mascot. Hindu nationalists have no

problem with Gandhi's deeply anti-secular and anti-modern world-view;

they "only" dislike and disown his pacifism.

 

Postmodernism and "alternative sciences"

 

Yet, one could argue that just because postmodernist intellectuals

have taken a position against the Enlightenment-style use of science

as a cultural weapon against the authority of the traditions does not

automatically make them an ally of the religious right. One could,

after all, justly criticise the role of science and technology in

furthering Western exploitation of the colonies and perpetuating

patronising attitudes toward the natives. Science is not beyond

criticism, and critics of science do not automatically deserve

condemnation.

 

 

The problem is that postmodernist intellectuals do not stop at

criticising any specific political abuse of scientific knowledge.

Instead, they attack the very idea of objective knowledge as a myth

of the powerful who want to claim the status of truth for their own

self-serving social constructions of reality. Likewise, postmodernist

attack on the "Western-ness" of science goes beyond pointing out any

specific linkages between science and Western/imperialist interests.

Instead they attack the claim of universalism of science as a cover

for Western dominance.

 

Once they decry the very idea of objectivity and universalism, the

critics open the gates wide to the idea of "alternative sciences".

The idea is that modern science offers only one way to classify,

observe and understand the regularities of nature: there is nothing

inherently objective and scientific about it. Other cultures, the

argument goes, if they want to really "decolonise their minds", must

develop their own scientific methods which are in keeping with their

own religion and culture - "different cultures, different sciences",

is the postmodern slogan. Since all knowledge rests on the shifting

sands of myths, models and analogies (or "paradigms", as the more

technical name goes), which scientists just pick up through their

textbooks, there is no reason why sciences of non-Western cultures

cannot constitute new "alternative universals" that can be taught in

textbooks and laboratories around the world.

 

These radical critiques of objectivity and universalism have become

so popular that they have acquired a ring of truth among social

critics. But all these arguments denigrating the rationality of

science are based upon a flawed understanding of science that has

been rejected many times by working scientists and prominent

philosophers of science. A complete debunking of post-modern

misunderstanding of how science actually works and why objectivity is

possible despite the deeply social nature of science will require a

different set of articles. Suffice it to say, the radical denigration

of science has very little following among the mainstream of

scientific community and in the mainstream of philosophy and history

of science.

 

I now examine three distinct arguments that have emerged in the

Indian postmodernist literature which converge almost exactly with

the Hindutva's defence of the superiority of Vedic sciences. These

three are the decolonisation argument, the anti-dualism argument and

the symmetry argument.

 

The decolonisation of science argument

 

Hindutva ideologues see themselves as part and parcel of postcolonial

studies. Decolonisation of the Hindu mind, the Hindu Right claims,

requires understanding science through Hindu categories. Echoing the

postcolonial critiques of epistemic violence, Hindutva ideologues

such as Murli Manohar Joshi, Konrad Elst, Girilal Jain, David

Frawley, N.S. Rajaram and others see any scientific assessment of the

empirical claims made by the Vedic texts as a sign of mental

colonialism and Western imperialism. Many of these Hindutva

ideologues cite the work of postcolonial scholars such as Edward

Said, Roland Inden, Ashis Nandy, Claude Alvares, Gayatri Spivak and

subaltern studies historians with great respect.

 

The Hindu Right combines this demand for authenticity with an

essentialist understanding of culture borrowed straight from Oswald

Spengler's Decline of the West, which holds that each culture has an

innate nature, a temper, which must guide all its cultural products

from mathematics and physics to painting and poetry. This view of the

innate nature of nation - the nation's svabhava or chitti - is

propounded by Deen Dayal Upadhyaya's theory of "Integral Humanism",

which constitutes the official philosophy of the Bharatiya Janata

Party. In fact, it is part of the BJP's official manifesto that it

will use India's innate Hinduness as a "touchstone" to decide what

sciences will be promoted and how they will be taught. Using this

touchstone of an innate, timeless Hindu svabhava, Hindutva literature

still holds on to the defunct theories of vitalism as valid science.

(Vitalism in biology holds that living beings require a special vital

force, variously termed prana or shakti in the Indian literature,

over and above "mere" atoms and molecules. In India, Jagdish Chandra

Bose first claimed to find evidence of consciousness in plants.

Bose's work was falsified and rejected by mainstream biology in his

own life-time. It is still touted as India's contribution to world

science in Hindutva literature.) Again, it is against the touchstone

of Vedanta that Hindu apologists feel justified in interpreting the

paradoxes of quantum physics in a mystical manner. There are

perfectly realistic explanations of quantum mechanics, which are

sidelined in Vedic science literature, to claim that modern

physics "proves" the presence of mind in nature, just as claimed by

Vedanta.

 

Reductionist science vs holistic science

 

The gist of this argument, as it appears in Hindu nationalist

writings on Vedic science, is simple - all that is dangerous and

false in modern science comes from the Semitic monotheistic habit of

dualistic and "reductionist" thinking, which separates the object

from the subject, nature from consciousness, the known from the

knower. All that is truly universal and true in modern science comes

from the Hindu habit of "holistic" thinking, which has always seen

the objects in nature and the human subjects not as separate entities

but as different manifestations of the same universal consciousness.

For the non-logocentric Hinduism, reality is not objective,

but "omnijective", a co-construct of mind and matter together. While

Western science treats nature as dead matter, Hindu sciences treat

nature as a sacred abode of gods. Thus Hindutva scholars claim that

traditions of yoga, transcendental meditation and Ayurveda are

sciences of the future, for they bring matter in alignment with

the "cosmic energy" that permeates all matter. Moreover, Hindu

approaches to nature are seen as ecological by definition as they do

not treat nature as mere matter to be exploited for private use.

 

 

This view of superiority of Hinduism's "holism" rests upon the

strange and totally mistaken assumption that Hindu chauvinists share

with left-wing critics of science - that the fundamental methodology

of modern science, what is called "reductionism", is not just

mistaken but politically oppressive. Reductionism in science simply

means a bottom-up approach to understanding complex natural phenomena

by first isolating the lower-level constituents and studying their

interactions under controlled conditions. Reductionism seeks the

explanation of the whole by eliminating the need for postulating any

extra forces ( that is, consciousness, vital force and so on) over

and above the relationships between the building blocks that can be

experimentally tested. Far from being simple-minded or sinister, as

critics assume, nearly every advance in understanding complex

systems - from the DNA replication at the cellular level to

ecological systems - owes its success to a reductionist approach to

the fundamental building blocks of nature.

 

Owing to a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually

works, coupled with a great deal of cynicism, many left-wing critics

among feminist, environmental and anti-imperialist movements have

developed a knee-jerk condemnation of reductionism. Reductionist

science is considered bad science with politically oppressive

implications. Feminists, including such world-renowned feminist icons

as Carolyn Merchant, Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, see it as a

masculine way of breaking the unity between the object and the

subject. Environmentalists, including India's own Vandana Shiva and

like-mined eco-feminists, see reductionism as opening the way to

ruthless exploitation of nature by divesting it of all sacred

meanings. (Eco-romantics ignore all counter-examples where sacredness

of nature serves to control access over sacred groves, rivers and

other resources of the commons.) Postcolonial critics, in their turn,

see reductionism as a result of Western and capitalist habit of

thinking in terms of opposed classes of `us and them'.

 

These kinds of ill-understood and politically motivated challenges to

a fundamental methodological norm of modern science have prepared the

ground for Hindutva's claims that Hinduism provides a

more "holistic", more complete, more ecological and even more

feminist way of relating with nature. Most of the claims of

superiority of "holism" are unsubstantiated. On closer examination,

they end up affirming pseudo-sciences involving disembodied spirit

acting on matter through entirely unspecified mechanisms. Most of the

claims of greater ecological and feminist sensitivity in the Hindu

practice of treating all nature as a sacred and interconnected whole

turn out to be empirically false. In fact, quite often the faith in

the divine powers of some rivers and plants serves as an excuse not

to care for them adequately, precisely because they are considered to

share God's miraculous powers to recover and stay pure. For all the

falsehoods and obscurantisms, the claims of Hindu (or Eastern, more

broadly) holism thrive in the academia because of the radical

academics' own mistaken and overblown critique of the reductionist

methodology of science.

 

The symmetry argument

 

The symmetry argument claims that all local sciences are

equally "scientific" (that is, rational, coherent and able to explain

observed phenomena) within their own cultural contexts. Modern

science, the argument goes, ought to be treated "symmetrically" with

all other ways of knowing. As we have seen, this is the crux of the

social constructivist and postmodern attacks on modern science.

 

This argument lies at the heart of the theories of "Vedic physics"

and "Vedic creationism". That the verses of the Rig Veda are actually

coded formulas of advanced theories of physics has been recently

claimed by Subhash Kak, an engineer working in the United States. And

a Vedic alternative to Darwinian evolution by natural selection is

being pushed by Michael Cremo and his fellow Hare Krishnas in the

U.S. What sets these newer theories is their unabashed and bold

defence of Vedic mysticism as a legitimate scientific method within

the Vedic-Hindu metaphysical assumptions, as rational and empirically

adequate as the best of modern science, and as deserving of the

status of universal objective knowledge as the conventionally

accepted theories of matter and biological evolution.

 

In a barrage of books and essays, most recently summarised in the

1995 publication, In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation, Subhash

Kak has claimed to find, in a coded form, advanced knowledge of

astronomy and computing in the Rig Veda. According to Kak, the design

of the fire altars prescribed in the Rig Veda - how many bricks to

put where and surrounded by how many pebbles - actually code such

findings of modern 20th century astronomy as the distance between the

sun and the earth, the length of solar and lunar years and the speed

of light. All the Vedic values match exactly with the values we know

through modern 19th and 20th century physics. The number of bricks

and pebbles, moreover, corresponds with the number of syllables in

the Vedic verses. The conclusion: "the Vedas are books of physics."

 

 

 

 

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar

 

Finding relatively advanced abstract physics in the Rig Veda, the

earliest of the four Vedas, is of crucial importance to Hindutva.

There is a concerted attempt to prove that the Rig Veda was composed

at least around three millennia B.C., and not around 1500 B.C as

previously thought. There is also a massive effort afoot in Hindutva

circles that the Aryans who wrote the Rig Veda presumably in 3000

B.C. were indigenous to the landmass of India. Under these

circumstances, finding advanced physics in Rig Veda will "prove" that

India was truly the mother of all civilisations and produced all

science known to the Greeks and other ancient cultures.

 

But anyone making such dramatic claims has to answer the question:

How did our Vedic ancestors know all this physics? What was their

method?

 

Kak and associates (including David Frawley and George Feuerstein, co-

authors with Kak of In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation) answer,

incredibly, that the Vedic scientists found out the laws of physics

through deep introspection. Yogic meditation allowed Vedic sages to

see in their minds' eyes, the likenesses, homologies and equivalences

between the cosmic, the terrestrial and the spiritual. This method of

seeing analogies and equivalences may be considered magical in the

West, they argue, but it is perfectly scientific within India's non-

dualist, monist metaphysics which allows no distinctions between

matter and spirit, between physical and the psychic, between animate

and the inanimate - all are united by the same spiritual energy that

is in all. Within these assumptions, yogic introspection is a method

of science. Because all science is paradigm-bound, Kak et al insist,

citing the authority of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, the much-

misunderstood gurus of postmodernists, Vedic science is perfectly

scientific within the paradigm of Vedic assumptions.

 

In fact, Kak et al are not alone in defending the scientificity of

yogic meditation as a valid scientific method. Maharishi Mahesh

Yogi's "unified science" is based upon this logic. This kind of

cultural defence is routinely invoked by those defending such

esoteric pseudo-sciences as Vedic astrology and paranormal beliefs

(past-birth memories, out-of-body experiences and reincarnation).

 

A similar defence of the method of bhakti yoga as a legitimate source

of holistic knowledge lies at the basis of the enormous mass of

writings coming out of the Bhakti Vedanta Institute in the U.S., the

headquarters of the Hare Krishnas. In a new book, Human Devolution,

Michael Cremo, a devout Hare Krishna, has boldly proposed a Vedic

alternative to Darwinian evolution. Cremo claims that human beings

have not evolved up from lower animals, but rather fallen, or

devolved, from their original unity with pure consciousness of

Brahman. (In a previous book, Forbidden Archaeology, Cremo and his

associates tried to prove that the fossil record actually supports

the Vedic time scale of literally millions of years of life on earth,

including human life.) As evidence, Cremo cites every possible

research in paranormal ever conducted anywhere to "prove" the truth

of holist Vedic cosmology which proposes the presence of a spiritual

element in all matter (which takes different forms, thereby

explaining the theory of "devolution").

 

 

 

 

 

 

This remarkable compendium of pseudo-science is premised upon the

assumption that modern science is a prisoner of Western cultural and

religious biases and, as a result, Western scientists have created

a "knowledge filter" which keeps out the evidence that supports the

Vedic cosmology. Their point is that once you remove the Western

assumptions, the method of yoga can be treated as a legitimate source

of scientific hypotheses. These Vedic knowledge-claims can be

verified by the community of other yogic knowers who have "purified"

their sense through meditation to such an extent that they

can "directly realise" those signs from the spirit-world that are

looked down upon by Western-trained scientists as "paranormal".

 

Utterly incredible though they are, and utterly devoid of any

empirical support, Vedic physics and Vedic creationism are being

touted as serious scholarship based upon the assumption that

different cultural assumptions sanction alternative methods as

rational and scientific.

 

POSTMODERN intellectuals have taken their disillusionment with the

many shortcomings of the modern world into a radical denunciation of

modern science itself. They have denounced the status of modern

science as a source of universally valid and objective knowledge as a

sign of Western imperialism, patriarchal biases and Christian dualist

thinking. Many prominent public intellectuals in India, sympathetic

to populist, indigenist currents in left-inclined social movements,

have embraced the postmodernist suspicion of science, and called

for "alternative sciences" which reflect the cultural preferences of

India's non-modern masses.

 

The question before the defenders of "alternative sciences" is this:

What do they have to say to the defenders of "Vedic sciences"? For

example, what reasons can they give against the supposed

scientificity of Vedic astrology? Can they hold on their relativist

view of all sciences as social constructs and yet challenge the

scientisation of the Vedas that is going on in the theories of Vedic

physics or Vedic creationism?

 

Any erosion of the dividing line between science and myth, between

reasoned, evidence-based public knowledge and the spiritual knowledge

accessible to yogic adepts, is bound to lead to a growth of

obscurantism dressed up as science. It is time secular and self-

proclaimed leftist intellectuals called off their romance with

irrationalism and romanticism. It is time to draw clear boundaries

between science and myth, and between the Left and the Right.

 

Meera Nanda is the author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern

Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism (Rutgers University Press,

2003). An Indian edition of the book will be published by Permanent

Black in early 2004. She is also the author of Breaking the Spell of

Dharma and Other Essays (Three Essays Collective; 2002).

--- End forwarded message ---

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