How
Modern are We? The Cultural Contradictions of India's
Modernity
By Meera Nanda
Developing countries like India while having enjoyed
the end products of modernity, claims to have alternative
modernity more profound than the one provided by the
Enlightenment. Such claim searches for basis on mysticism
and superstition of India's cultural tradition, something
which modernity has all along fought against.
I
In 1783, a debating
society called Berliner Mittwocchgesellschaft (The
Berlin Wednesday Club), asked the question 'What is
enlightenment?' Strenuous debate followed. Immanuel
Kant joined in the debate with his well-known essay,
'Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' This
is how he characterized what was distinctive about
the ferment of ideas sweeping the 18th century Europe:
Enlightenment
is man's release from this self-incurred immaturity
[which is] his inability to make use of his understanding
without direction from another … Sapere aude! "Have
courage to use your own reason!" that is the motto
of the enlightenment.
II
The reader might justifiably
wonder why an essay on India in the 21st century should
begin with Immanuel Kant. What possible relevance
can these musty old European debates have for India
today?
I believe that the
transformation of reason brought about by the scientific
revolution that impressed Kant and other Enlightenment
thinkers holds the key to the fulfillment of the programme
of disenchantment and secularization everywhere. Kant's
call of Sapere aude was simultaneously an invocation
of a new standard of reason meant to challenge all
a priori truths that we accept out of faith, cultural
conditioning or overt indoctrination. Once we understand
the process of secularization of the norms of reason
that the Enlightenment set in motion, we will be in
a better position to understand why modernity in India
has this feel of incompleteness, superficiality and
even schizophrenia.
Modern India, I
will argue in this essay, has embraced the end products
of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment
in the West-viz. modern technology and a liberal-secular
framework of laws encoded in the Constitution. But
it has done so without challenging the cultural authority
of the supernatural and mystical worldview derived
from the idealistic strands of Hinduism. From its
very beginnings in the 19th century Hindu 'renaissance',
India's project of modernity has evolved within a
uniquely Indian style of counter-enlightenment. In
a stark contrast to the Enlightenment project of bringing
religion within the limits of scientific reason, the
Indian counter-Enlightenment has tended to subsume
scientific reason within the spirit-based cosmology
and epistemology of 'the Vedas'. Since independence,
India has created an impressive workforce of scientists
and engineers reaching excellence in their respective
fields all over the globe. But India's science has
not evolved out of a critical engagement with the
religious commonsense that still pervades the cultural
life outside-and often inside-the labs. Modern ideas
and innovations are being incorporated into a traditional
Hindu worldview, without diminishing many of its starkly
irrational and pseudo-scientific tendencies.
Let me explain what
I mean by the 'superficial and schizophrenic' nature
of Indian modernity. I reproduce here an excerpt from
a short opinion piece titled 'India: The Pseudo-science
Superpower' I wrote for The Hindu shortly after a
visit to India earlier this year:
'The next century
belongs to India, which will become a unique intellectual
powerhouse… capturing all its glory which it had in
millennia gone by,' Dr. Raghunath A. Mashelkar, the
Director General of the CSIR declared in the March
issue of Science magazine earlier this year. Thomas
Friedman, the New York Times columnist… agrees that
India, with its talented yet low-cost brainpower,
is on its way to becoming the 'innovation hub' of
the global economy, the 'laboratory of the world'.
India is the world's emerging 'science superpower'.
… And why not?
IT and BT (information and bio technologies respectively)
are the twin engines pulling India's economy… this
talk about India as the emerging 'science superpower'
make sense. What does not make sense, however, is
the radical disconnect between the dreams of becoming
a 'science superpower', and the reality of living
with most appalling pseudo-sciences in everyday lives.
Big science may well be shining bright, but it is
not shedding any light on the darkness of superstition
and quackery so widespread in India. Indian scientists
may well be the most sought-after commodities in the
global economy, but many behave as if what they do
inside their laboratories has nothing to do with superstitions
that pass as 'scientific' explanations of natural
phenomena in the rest of the society.
Do I exaggerate?
Here is a report. 'In early May, thousands of children,
mere girls and boys, were married off on Akshay Tritya
in parts of Northern India. The rare social worker
who tried to prevent child marriages had her hands
chopped off by an irate villager bent on observing
what is seen as a time-honoured tradition. Meanwhile,
their 'modern' urban counterparts, egged on by the
World Gold Council, celebrated the 'auspicious day'
by buying some more gold jewelry. All this because
astrologers have declared the bright sun and the moon
on the third day of Vishaka to bring good luck in
new ventures!'
If you thought
that scientists, especially space scientists, would
have something to say regarding such astrological
absurdities, think again. While the country was gearing
up for Akshay Tritya, our top space scientists were
busy seeking the blessings of Lord Balaji at the Tirupati
temple for a safe launch of the polar satellite launch
vehicle. A miniature model of the rocket was brought
to the sanctum sanctorum of the temple and prayed
over by priests in the presence of 15 scientists,
led by the space agency chief, Dr. G.. Madhavan Nair.
Meanwhile, the
many satellites that India's space programme has so
proudly launched in the past were busy beaming TV
programmes selling wild, unsubstantiated health benefits
of yoga and ayurveda, delivered in a heady brew of
spiritualism and Hindu nationalism. Swami Ramdev,
selling his brand of Divya yoga has been fixture on
the TV for some time. Interspersed with his calls
for awakening 'desh kaa svabhiman' (national self-respect)
by teaching 'crore saal purana vigyan' (science dating
back ten million years), Ramdev makes totally unsubstantiated
claims about the power of yogic posture, deep breathing
and his own un-regulated Ayurvedic concoctions to
cure every ailment known to humankind, including cancer,
heart disease, diabetes, glaucoma, obesity ... the
list is endless. What is Ramdev's standard of evidence?
A headcount of those attending his mammoth yoga camps
who think they are feeling better! What is his view
of human physiology? The ancient notion of prana,
or vital energy, which modern biology completely discarded
more than a century ago.
What is remarkable
is that all these reason and evidence-defying superstitions
come wrapped in clothes of 'science'… an Arya Samaj
preacher exhort his listeners at an open-air public
discourse held right outside my house (with loudspeakers
set at full blast!) to 'read the ancient Vedas to
learn all the sciences known to humanity.' (He was
discoursing on how to succeed in the modern world
with its prized high-tech jobs!) Astrology, yogic
ideas of prana, kundalini shakti and charkas, and
even the ideas of reincarnation, karma and varna come
wrapped in the language of science. All these ancient
traditions are proclaimed to be sciences in their
own right (i.e. empirically testable and logical within
the metaphysical assumptions of the Vedas), and they
are supposed to have been belatedly 'rediscovered'
and affirmed by modern science. What we have here
is pseudo-science in its purest form, that is, religious
dogma, lacking rigorous scientific evidence and plausibility,
dressed up as science.
Everything 'Vedic'
is 'scientific', and every 'science' known to human
kind is 'Vedic', proving yet again the superiority
of Hinduism over all other 'superstitious' religions
that accept their sacred books on mere faith! We pride
ourselves in our modernity, yet we trample upon the
first principle of modernity, namely, to think for
yourself, to be able to draw principled distinctions
between science and pseudo-science, between verifiable
knowledge and metaphysics. Our modernity, in other
words, lacks the sprit of Sapere aude, the spirit
of the Enlightenment. Indeed, as I will argue below,
India has followed the classic path of counter-Enlightenment
or reactionary modernism wherein scientific reason
is relativized to the dominant cultural-religious
worldview. I have argued at length in my previous
work,1 that the experience of colonialism and imperialism
made Indian intellectuals exceptionally receptive
to anti-Enlightenment ideas that developed in the
West. In the name of 'decolonizing the mind', Indian
intellectuals have taken on the cause of cultural
relativism and 'ethno-sciences' with great enthusiasm
and sympathy. There have been two distinct waves of
enthusiasm for creating a science that derives its
logic from indigenous cultural traditions: first,
during the 19th and early 20th century under the influence
of the European romantics seeking Oriental wisdom,
and the second in our times under the influence of
postmodernist and social constructivist critiques
of modern science. This relativist tendency has blinded
Indian intellectuals to the crucial importance of
the secularization of knowledge that began with the
Enlightenment. This essay is intended to clarify this
essential connection between the Enlightenment and
modernity, which is as relevant for India, as it was
(and still is) to the West.
III
If, as I've suggested,
the contradictions of Indian modernity stem from the
neglect of the Enlightenment, we must first be clear
what we mean by the Enlightenment. We need not get
too involved in the many nuances of the European Enlightenment.
For our purpose, it is sufficient to keep in mind
a few general propositions about the motivations and
achievements of this movement.
The Enlightenment refers to a historical epoch, which
began with the English Revolution in 1688 and culminated
in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776
and the French Revolution in 1789. There was no 'one
unified' Enlightenment that swept through all of Europe
simultaneously. There were, rather, a series of debates
and critiques directed against authority of inherited
intellectual and religious traditions. These debates
took different shapes and forms in different national
contexts, affecting all of Europe, and northern America
to lesser or greater extent. In all cases, the rising
class of industrial bourgeoisie supported these movements.
In Protestant England and America, the Enlightenment
took place largely in alliance with the Church, while
in the largely Catholic France, the church was relatively
less hospitable to new ideas. Led by a new class of
intellectuals who made a living by writing for the
'grub street' (newspapers, periodicals, and cheap
novels) and by giving lectures and demonstrations
on current sciences in coffee houses and pubs, Enlightenment
ideas found a receptive audience among the reading
public.2
For all the national differences, the movements included
in the rubric of the Enlightenment were marked by,
to quote Alan Kors,3 'an increasingly critical attitude
toward inherited authority, … a sense that armed with
new methods and new powers, the human mind could reexamine
claims upon it…including the claims of religion. This
was not a rejection of authority per se, but of arbitrary
authority whose sole claim upon one's mind or body
was its having withstood the test of time.' Kant's
motto 'Sapere aude'-Latin for 'dare to know'-was the
motivating force behind the entire movement and was
used by British freethinkers as their rallying cry
much in advance of Kant.4
Finally, after a thorough engagement with the critics
of the Enlighten-ment, it is still possible to defend
the Enlightenment as the precondition for any kind
of progressive politics. As Stephen Bronner writes
in his spirited plea for reclaiming the Enlightenment,
nearly all aspects of modern life, especially 'the
ideals of personal autonomy, tolerance, secularism
and reason, developed against the backdrop of Enlightenment's
protest against he exercise of arbitrary power, the
force of custom and ingrained prejudice [that] justified
social misery'.5 On this reading, it was the Enlightenment
that made real the ideals of modernity that were only
latent in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the
scientific revolution. Enlightenment, then, is considered
by many intellectual historians as the true beginning
of modernity.
Against this background, let us return to Kant's motto:
Why did he make sapere aude-'the courage to use your
own reason'-as the distinguishing mark of his times?
After all, the Age of Enlightenment was hardly the
first to apply the power of reason to comprehend nature
and society. Human beings in all societies and in
all epochs have exercised the powers of observation,
logic, and experimentation, along with imagination,
insight, myth and magic to understand and materially
manipulate the force of nature. What was so special
about reason in the Age of Enlightenment that Kant
would turn it into a rallying cry for freedom?
While the philosophers of the enlightenment exhorted
their fellow citizens to live by the light of reason,
they were simultaneously re-defining reason by setting
limits on what can legitimately be known, given the
kind of sensory apparatus and reasoning powers human
beings are endowed with. The philosophers and architects
of the age of reason, from Locke and Hume in England,
to Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant,
Lessing and later Marx in Germany; and Jefferson,
Paine and Franklin in the United States, were impressed
by the success of the scientific revolution, especially
the disciplined empiricism of Newton. His famous laws
of force and universal gravitation emerged out of
patient and careful observation of comets, planets,
objects in motion and transmission of light. Newton,
in other words, derived his first principles from
empirical investigation of phenomena. This, to the
philosophers of the Enlightenment, was in refreshing
contrast to the method of theologians and metaphysicians
who started with infallible, divine revelations and
proceeded to deduce the knowledge of physical phenomena
from them. They recognized full well that Newton's
observations themselves required metaphysical grounding-that
is, a belief in the existence of order created by
God. But what they found remarkable was that Newton
used this metaphysical belief as a springboard for
empirical examination, rather than as an a priori
truth to explain material phenomena.
Newton's method became the paradigm of reason for
the Age of Enlightenment. More specifically, the philosophers
denied-most strenuously-that it was possible to make
any factual claims about the world based upon 'pure
reason' by which they meant Gnostic intuition, mysticism,
'direct realization' or revelation, that is, any means
of knowing which cannot be validated by sensory experience.
Only those objects in the 'phenomenal world' (to use
Kant's vocabulary) that correspond to human categories
of space, time and causality can possibly become objects
of our experience, and human knowledge can only extend
to these objects. We have no possible way of knowing
the objects of the 'noumenal world' (to use Kant's
vocabulary again), the things-in-themselves that lie
outside the categories of our minds, including the
supra-sensible entities like God, Absolute Consciousness,
soul, vital spirit etc. which lack extension in space
and time. We can make no empirical claims about this
supra-sensible or noumenal world, neither can we use
our knowledge of the noumenal reality to explain the
phenomenal world.6 This worldview did not exactly
deny the existence of supernatural forces, but it
limited them to the world of noumena, totally beyond
the reach of human experience. Such forces could be
accepted as allegories, as poetry, even as a necessary
hypotheses to defend our moral intuitions about good
and evil, but could not provide foundations for knowledge
of the natural world.
This was a monumental change. So far in human history,
science, or natural philosophy, had existed within
the limits of religion. Henceforth, religion could
exist only within the limits of scientific reason.
This was the philosophical core of the Enlightenment,
the rallying cry of the 'moderns' against the 'ancients'.
This transformation had far-reaching consequences,
not just for the conduct of science, but for the evolution
of a democratic and secular public sphere. As the
new historiography inspired by the path-breaking work
of Jurgen Habermas has established,7 the empiricist
revolution in the conception of reason was hugely
important in creation of new ideals of publicness,
open in principle (though not in practice) to all,
in which all authority was open to critical scrutiny
on the basis of evidence accessible to ordinary human
faculties of senses and logic. Gradually, the old
taboos that derived their force from the nature of
the cosmos, which was supposed to express divine,
will lose their powers to persuade. Depending upon
the historical balance of forces between the church
and the throne, and the allegiance and strength of
the bourgeoisie who derived their wealth from industry
and commerce, different degree of secularization took
place in different societies, a process which is still
in progress.
IV
Just as surely as action
begets reaction, the Enlightenment was followed by
the counter-Enlightenment. The proclamation of the
autonomy of reason and the methods of natural sciences
based upon observation as the sole reliable method
of knowledge and the consequent rejection of authority
of revelation, sacred writings and every other form
of transcendent, non-testable knowledge was naturally
opposed by churches and religious authorities.8
There are primarily two routes the counter-Enlightenment
has taken: the less traveled path of refusal, favoured
by the orthodox observant communities, and the more
popular and politically correct option of relativism,
or ethno-sciences, favoured by cultural nationalists
and fundamentalists on the one hand, and the theorists
of postmodernism and multiculturalism in social theory,
on the other.
The great refusal can be seen in the enclaves of traditionalism
and orthodoxy in some heradim Jewish communities in
Israel and the United States, the Amish and among
the separatist sects of evangelical Christians in
the United States. But this option of 'just saying
no' to the larger secular culture is becoming rarer
and harder to maintain in the world increasingly permeated
by modern technologies and new ideas. Martin Marty
and Scott Appleby provide a good description of the
enclave culture of the religious orthodox.9
Cultural relativism-that is, not an outright refusal
but a reinterpretation of the norms of empirical science
within one's own civilizational or national culture-has
been the preferred mode of most of the illiberal,
counter-Enlightenment movements, notably the fascist
movements in Germany and Japan in the 20th century,
down to the religious fundamentalisms of the 21st
century. Assorted fascists, ultra-nationalists and
fundamentalists, including the Hindu nationalists,
cannot be categorized as old-fashioned reactionary
anti-modernists who want to take their societies back
to some primitive pre-modern, pre-scientific age of
faith and/or magic. They are more properly described
as 'reactionary modernists,' a term coined by Jeffery
Herf in his intellectual history of the Weimar and
Nazi Germany. Reactionary modernists, in contrast
to backward looking golden-age pastoralists, say 'yes'
to modern technology, but ' no' to the Enlightenment
norms of scientific reason. They succeed in 'mixing
a robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward
progress with dreams of the past: a highly technological
romanticism.'10
This aspiration to become technologically modern,
while remaining true to the 'essence' or 'soul' of
one's religion, culture and nation was not unique
to fascists who came to power in Germany or Japan.
Islamic fundamentalists and religious nationalists,
including the Hindu nationalists in India, display
the same mixture of enthusiasm for technological modernization,
and a deep aversion to rationalism, secularism and
individualism that comes with modernization.
The question before all reactionary modernists is
how to use the technological products of modern science,
while rejecting its worldview and norms of reason.
The solution, to borrow Herf's vocabulary,11 has been
'to remove scientific reason from the worldview of
the Enlightenment, a worldview of reason, intellect,
internationalism, materialism, and redefine it in
the jargon of authenticity, community, and heritage.'
The claims of science and modernity are not rejected,
but 'only' translated into ethno-scientific terms.
Universalism of science is not denied in favour of
anything-goes kind of relativism, but modern science
is deemed to be one of the many other equally universalizable
ways of knowing. The importance of subjecting beliefs
to experience and evidence is not denied, but what
constitutes evidence and experience is made relative
to the rest of the culture. While something called
'science' is celebrated, it ends up re-affirming and
legitimising the traditional common sense of the culture,
derived largely from the dominant religious tradition.
V
Reinterpreting the
empiricist tradition of modern science into the jargon
of mysticism derived from Patanjali's Yogasutra and
the Vedanta-creating a kind of 'spiritual empiricism'
as the methodology of a 'holistic' and more authentic
'Vedic' science-has been the hallmark of neo-Hindu
modernity. Declaring the Vedas to be based upon 'direct
realization' of 'higher realities', and therefore
'a science', was floated by thinkers of the Hindu
renaissance, like Swami Vivekananda, who inspired
a long line of thinkers including Sri Aurobindo, Servapalli
Radhakrishnan, a host of popularizers of 'Vedas-as-science'
associated with Ramakrishna Missions and later with
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra and their many
clones. The saffronization of history, including the
history of science that we experienced under Murli
Manohar Joshi was a political expression of this long-standing
conflation of the Vedas with modern science. Unfortunately,
the Indian scientific community, with a few notable
exceptions like M.N. Saha (early 20th century) and
Pushpa Bhargava, Jayant Narlikar and T. Jayaraman
among the contemporary scientists, has not challenged
the philosophy of science that informs the idea of
Vedic science. Philosophers, social scientists and
public intellectuals, who have been quite vigilant
against the science-worshipping attitude of the so-called
'Nehruvian' state, have been surprisingly silent when
it comes to the scientism of neo-Hindu philosophers
who have been contorting both science and the Vedas
to make the Vedas look like science. In recent years,
many Indian intellectuals under the influence of postmodernist
philosophies of science have been at the forefront
of a 'radical' critique of modern science as a source
of 'epistemic violence' and cultural colonization.
In their haste to condemn logical positivism, post-modern
critics of science have been all too ready to throw
out the anti-metaphysical impulse of all empiricist
philosophies that retain the possibility of universalism
and objectivism of modern science.
Like other reactionary modernists, neo-Hindu philosophers
seem to accept the challenge of the Enlightenment,
that with the success of the scientific revolution,
as Radhakrishnan writes in Hindu View of Life, 'the
centre of gravity in religion has shifted from authority
to reason.' But they defined the non-sensory, intuitive
or mystical experience, the so-called 'pure reason',
to be referring to real, causal entities and/or energies.
In other words, while neo-Hindu philosophers accepted
the Kantian emphasis on using 'one's own reason' and
not the authority of priests and holy books, they
rejected the Kantian denial of non-sensory, intuitive
knowledge of the natural world. Whereas the empiricist
tradition that flowered during the Enlightenment had
steadfastly denied that one can make any substantive
claims about reality based on 'pure' or non-sensory
reason alone, neo-Hindu philosophers interpreted the
Hindu conception of pure reason, the mystical insight
of the yogis, as if it constituted a physical, sensory
act of 'seeing' and 'hearing' the 'ultimate reality'
that supposedly underlies the physical reality. The
writings of Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan are replete
with highlights of mythic authors of the Vedas as
'seers', projecting that the Vedas contain actual
empirical facts and law of nature that were actually
seen and heard through introspection alone.12
How was this interpretation of mysticism as valid
empirical knowledge defended? Here we find striking
similarities with the post-modern theories of all
knowledge being a construct of social power and dominant
cultural meanings. In the neo-Hindu view, the Kantian
restriction on sensory knowledge as the only legitimate
source of knowledge is rejected as an artefact of
the dualist worldview of Semitic traditions, which
separate consciousness from matter. Because the Hindu
tradition does not separate matter from spirit but
considers all matter-living and non-living-as the
embodiment of 'vital energy' (prana) or consciousness
(Brahman), it is considered perfectly legitimate within
the Hindu tradition to treat mystical 'realization'
of the spirit in our own selves to correspond to the
spirit, or essence, of the rest of the universe. (This
defense of mystical empiricism got a big boost from
the idealistic interpretations of quantum mechanics
popularised by Fritjof Capra, Mahesh Yogi, Deepak
Chopra and Amit Goswami in recent years.)
VI
The common refrain about
the scientificity of the Hinduism is a product of
this intellectual history. Unfortunately, while the
idea of Vedas-as-science and all-science-as-Vedas
has found many willing and enthusiastic supporters
among countless preachers and gurus, some of whom
with advanced degrees in natural sciences, the rationalist
defenders of the distinctiveness of science and the
Enlightenment have been few and far between. Intellectuals
like Bhimrao Ambedkar, M.N. Roy and others influenced
by Nehruvian ideas of 'scientific temper' tried to
self-consciously orient their political movements
around a rationalist engagement with Hindu metaphysics.
These movements, however, failed to enlist the support
of the mainstream of the Indian intellectuals and
scientists. (The reason[s] why a rationalist engagement
with religion failed to become an essential ingredient
of the Indian left, both Marxist and Gandhian alike,
is a complicated story. It is a subject too big to
do justice to in this essay.) In conclusion, then,
how modern are we? If modernity means a differentiation
between science and religion, between sensory experience
and mysticism, we in India have a long way to go.
NOTES & REFERENCES
1. See The Wrongs of the Religious Right: Reflections
on Science, Secularism and Hindutva, (New Delhi: Three
Essays Collective), 2005. Also see Prophets Facing
Backward: Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism,
(New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2004.
2. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press), 1995.
3. Alan C. Kors, Preface to the Encyclopedia of the
Enlightenment, Vol. 1, (New York: Oxford University
Press), 2003, p. xvii.
4. Roy Porter, The
Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of
the British Enlightenment, (London: W.W. Norton),
2000.
5 Stephen E. Bronner,
Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward A Politics of
Radical Engagement, (New York: Columbia University
Press), 2004, p. 7.
6. While Kant provided
a defense of empiricism against the radical skepticism
of Hume, he also limited empirical knowledge to the
phenomenal world and denied the possibility that we
will ever know if empirical knowledge of phenomena
corresponds to the structures of the real world, the
world in itself. Kant admitted and set limits on science
to make room for faith. For further details, see G.J.
Wanock, 'Kant', D.J. O'Connor (ed.), A Critical History
of Western Philosophy, (New York: Free Press), 1964.
Also see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 1951.
7. Jurgern Habermas,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, (Cambridge:
Polity), (Original German edition in 1962), 1989.
8. Isaiah Berlin's
well-known essay, 'The Counter-Enlightenment' still
remains the best starting point for understanding
the opposition to the Enlightenment. See in his Dictionary
of the History of Ideas, Vol. II, (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons), 1973.
9 Martin Marty &
Scott Appleby, The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist
Challenge to the Modern World,(Boston: Beacon Press),
1992.
10. Jeffrey Herf,
Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture and politics
in Weimar and the Third Reich, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 1984, p. 2.
11. Ibid., p. 16.
12. Hardly any scholars
have paid any attention to the empiricist spin neo-Hindu
apologists were putting on mysticism. But see Willhelm
Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding,
(Albany: SUNY Press) 1988. Also see Anantanand Rambachan,
The Limits of Scripture: Vivekananda's Interpretation
of the Vedas, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press),
1994. For a stinging critique of treating mystic experience
as having ontological references, see Agehananda Bharati,
The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern
Mysticism, (Santa Barbara: Ross Erikson Publishers),
1982.
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