Vinay Lal

A remarkable but little commented on feature of the various discourses on India circulating today is the near total absence of its metaphysical heritage as a source of illumination into our contemporary condition. On the few occasions that this heritage is explicitly invoked, it is either as a subsidiary aspect of some purportedly larger concept such as religion, civilization, history, tradition etc., or as a set of quaint speculations fit for study as a tertiary branch of history of philosophy or religion but with little claim to political relevance. But is this neglect as innocent as it appears? Or might it be that the metaphysical heritage confronts us with the disavowed -- indeed the unthinkable that lurks behind our current obsessions: progress and development; modernity and tradition; faith and secularism; history and myth; fundamentalism and tolerance? The central claim of this book is that the metaphysical heritage has an autonomy and dignity of its own not subsumable under any other concept whatsoever; and that furthermore, our national self-understanding and its place in the current system of global knowledge are founded on a wholesale effacing of this heritage. The collective contention of the papers in this volume is that a full and proper understanding of our ever lengthening catalogue of social afflictions and pathologies demands that we squarely confront the consequences of this fateful evasion, no matter how unsettling it might be to our vaunted notions about ourselves. Only in and out of such a self-encounter can we hope to break out of our thralldom to the currently hegemonic vision of humanitys future -- a vision that is already bankrupt in every respect, but which nonetheless seems able to reproduce itself without end.

India and Civilizational Futures consists of the deliberations of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics, a group comprised largely of Indian scholars, academics, and writers. The authors probe how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indic civilization might be deployed to introduce greater plurality into the world of modern knowledge systems. They offer perspectives on the country's intellectual traditions that suggest how we might liberate ourselves from the straightjackets of history, normal politics, the nation-state, and other verities of a global 'common sense'.

Although recognized as one of the principal sources of inspiration for the Indian environmental movement, Gandhi would have been profoundly uneasy with many of the most radical strands of ecology in the West, such as social ecology, ecofeminism, and even deep ecology. He was in every respect an ecological thinker, indeed an ecological being: the brevity of his enormous writings, his everyday bodily practices, his observance of silence, his abhorrence of waste, and his cultivation of the small as much as the big all equally point to an extraordinarily expansive notion of ecological awareness

Though the resurgence of Hindu nationalism as a political phenomenon is well-understood, Meera Nanda is correct in suggesting that the ascendancy of Hindutva has other dimensions, such as the avent placed by cultural nationalist on 'Vedic science'. However, apart from this rudimentary insight, Nanda's contribution, far from being a resounding demonstration of potmodernism's complicity in the projects of Hindu nationalism, is a striking testament to her own commitment to a rigidly positivist, ferociously intolerant, and intellectually sterile conception of modern science and the Enlightenment rationality which she views as the pinnacle of human achievement. Nanda displays an impoverished understanding of the scholarly contributions of the last three decades and is unable to countenance the idea of a plurality of sciences; at the same time, in veiw of her deliberate conflation of Hindutva with Hinduism, and her attempts to equate Hinduism as such with Nazism, it is clear that Hinduism itself stands condemned, and not merely resurgent Hindu nationalism. Nanda's book is an indiscriminate and uninteresting assault upon the innumerable enemies of reason, and it is, ironically, likely to have the result of further eroding confidence in self-proclaimed champions of rationality such as herself and the modern science of which she claims herself to be a true and peerless inheritor.

Although recognized as one of the principal sources of inspiration for the Indian environmental movement, Gandhi would have been profoundly uneasy with many of the most radical strands of ecology in the West, such as social ecology, ecofeminism, and even deep ecology. He was in every respect an ecological thinker, indeed an ecological being: the brevity of his enormous writings, his everyday bodily practices, his observance of silence, his abhorrence of waste, and his cultivation of the small as much as the big all equally point to an extraordinarily expansive notion of ecological awareness.