Bionationalism Unmasked: Science as a Tool of Exclusion in Modi’s India

Part One

9 Minutes  Read

Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of commingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each other and ancient history, Banu Subramaniam demonstrates how Hindu nationalism sutures an ideal past to technologies of the present to make bold claims about the Vedic Sciences and the scientific Vedas. Moving beyond a critique of India’s emerging bionationalism, this book explores the generative possibility of myth and story, interweaving compelling new stories into a rich analysis that animates alternative imaginaries and “other” worlds of possibilities.

Banu Subramaniam’s Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism is not just an academic text; it is a crucial, unsettling, and brilliantly argued dissection of how science is weaponized in the service of a dangerous political ideology. In an era where truth itself feels contested and the authority of science is both revered and undermined, this book serves as an indispensable guide to a perilous new landscape. It maps the intricate and often insidious ways that Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) marshals the vocabulary, methods, and prestige of modern science to build its vision of an exclusionary, ethno-religious state. Moving far beyond simple critiques of pseudoscience, the authors delve into the sophisticated ideological machinery through which Hindutva appropriates, distorts, and manufactures scientific narratives to legitimize its political project. It is a chilling, meticulous exploration of biopolitics in action—the process by which state and societal power is exerted over life itself (our bodies, our health, our environment, our reproduction) through claims dressed in the objective, unassailable garb of science.

This is a work of immense intellectual courage and scholarly rigour, one that refuses easy binaries. It demonstrates that the battle lines in contemporary India are not neatly drawn between a progressive, secular science on one side and a reactionary, anti-modern religion on the other. The reality, as Subramaniam reveals, is far more complex and dangerous. The architects of Hindutva are not rejecting modernity; they are attempting to hijack its most potent symbol and tool—science—to rewrite history, justify ancient social hierarchies, promote cultural supremacy, and fuel a fervent, often violent, nationalism. The ultimate goal is to present the ideology of Hindutva not as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact, grounded in the unassailable truths of an eternal, primordial, and uniquely superior “Vedic Science.”

The Core Argument: Scientization as Political Strategy

The central argument of Holy Science is as stark as it is profound: Hindu nationalism employs a pervasive and deliberate strategy of “scientization.” As the authors state early in their analysis, in a quote that encapsulates the book’s entire thesis: “Hindutva proponents seek not to reject science but to scientize Hinduism” (Subramaniam, p. 17). This is the master key that unlocks the logic of the movement. It is not about retreating into a pre-scientific past but about claiming that the past was, in fact, hyper-scientific. This project of “scientized religion” and “religionized science” aims to create a narrative where ancient Sanskrit texts are read as coded scientific treatises, where mythological accounts prefigure modern discoveries, and where Hindu identity itself is rendered a biological, scientifically verifiable category.

The book offers a striking and widely publicized example of this phenomenon in action, straight from the highest levels of government. Subramaniam highlights a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose words perfectly illustrate this fusion of mythology, rationalization, and the co-opting of scientific authority. The authors quote him at length before offering their incisive analysis:

“On October 25, 2014, India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, while inaugurating a new hospital run by the industrial group Reliance in Mumbai, proclaimed: We can feel proud of what our country has achieved in medical science at one point in time. … We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb. We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”

Here, the narratives of Indian mythology mingle with the powers of scientific reason to imbue the fantasies of Indian mythology and storytelling with rational possibilities and an energetic Indian scientific prehistory. Perhaps Modi was being humorous or ironic (as some of his supporters have claimed). But Ganesha is an elephant-headed god; he is divine. Modi could well have claimed that a god could, through divine powers, connect the bodies of an elephant and a human, or that a god does not need circulating blood or a central nervous system! Rather, Modi invented a plastic surgeon to operate to connect the two interspecies body parts. This is precisely the imagination of Hindu nationalism that I find fascinating and significant—science and technology and their practitioners mediate mythological and divine worlds. Even gods need doctors! What we witnessed was the prime minister of India, recently elected by a robust majority in the world’s largest democracy, making bold claims of the scientific basis of an ancient Vedic civilization.” (p. 5–6)

To understand this phenomenon, Subramaniam introduces the powerful concept of “archaic modernity.” This term elegantly captures the paradoxical nature of the Hindutva project, which strategically blends ancient Vedic traditions with the aesthetics and authority of contemporary scientific advancements. It crafts a vision of India as a nation that is simultaneously timeless and modern, deeply spiritual and technologically supreme. This fusion creates a potent narrative that claims for India not just a place in the modern world, but a pre-eminent one, rooted in a divine and scientifically validated past.

The authors challenge the long-held Western assumption that science and religion are locked in an eternal, oppositional conflict. In the Indian context, they argue, this framework is not only inaccurate but actively misleading. Instead, they are “tools, allies, synergies, partners, symbionts, challengers, colluders, or syncretic collaborators” (Subramaniam, p. 42). This dynamic, syncretic relationship—what Subramaniam Herzig poetically terms “braided sciences, helical stories, thigmotropic knowledges” (p. 34)—is the fertile ground in which Hindutva’s “holy science” takes root and flourishes. This book, then, is an autopsy of that braiding, showing how the strands of myth and molecule, scripture and statistics, are woven together into a rope used to bind the nation to a singular, exclusionary vision.

The historical roots of this entanglement are traced with nuance. The author show how colonialism created a fraught dynamic, pitting a supposedly rational “Western” science against a mystical “Eastern” spirituality. In response, Indian reformers and early nationalists sought to reclaim their heritage by demonstrating Hinduism’s inherent compatibility with scientific principles. Figures like Swami Vivekananda laid crucial groundwork by arguing for the philosophical parallels between Vedanta and modern physics. However, Hindutva takes this project a perilous and aggressive step further. It is no longer a matter of compatibility, but of primacy and exclusive ownership. This new narrative asserts that all significant scientific knowledge originated in the Vedic period, was stolen or lost, and is only now being rediscovered by the West. In constructing this myth, the book exposes how Hindutva conveniently ignores and erases the rich, diverse, and often syncretic history of scientific inquiry and technological innovation across the Indian subcontinent, collapsing it all into a monolithic, sanitized “Hindu” achievement.

The Scientific Management of the Nation’s Body

At the theoretical heart of Holy Science is the concept of biopolitics. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the authors analyse how the Hindutva movement deploys its “holy science” to manage, discipline, and control populations by defining the very biological essence of the nation. The goal is to construct a “Hindu” identity that is not merely cultural or religious, but is deeply rooted in a supposedly scientific understanding of genetics, indigeneity, purity, and heredity. Subramaniam  coins the term “bionationalism” to describe this chilling process, defining it as “the transformation of traditional ethnic nationalism, primarily of blood and group affiliation, into a biopolitical construct grounded in the biological and scientific” (p. 10).

This is where the project becomes truly dangerous. When nationalism becomes “bionationalism,” political dissent is no longer a matter of disagreement but of biological contamination. Minority communities, particularly India’s large Muslim population, are no longer seen as fellow citizens with different beliefs, but are systematically pathologized and cast as foreign, invasive, and genetically distinct elements threatening the health of the national body. Political questions are reframed as biological imperatives. As the authors argue, “The project of holy science is a biopolitical one, aimed at producing a homogenous, pure, and robust Hindu body politic” (p. 27). Through this insidious lens, discriminatory policies, social exclusion, and even violence against minorities are rationalized as necessary public health measures, vital for maintaining the nation’s biological and spiritual integrity.

Cows to Contested Genes

The immense power of Holy Science lies in its meticulously researched and vividly rendered case studies, which move from abstract theory to the tangible, often brutal, realities of this project on the ground. Each chapter dissects a different arena where this fusion of science and ideology is being deployed.

Perhaps the most compelling and disturbing section of the book is its analysis of the “cow protection” movement. Subramaniam demonstrates that this is far from a simple matter of religious sentiment. Instead, the sacred cow of Hindu tradition has been re-engineered into a modern scientific object, a national resource whose protection is a scientifically justified imperative. The author meticulously deconstruct the claims surrounding the unique and miraculous properties of panchagavya—the five key products derived from the cow: milk, ghee (clarified butter), curd, urine, and dung.

Supported by Hindutva-aligned organizations like the Sangh Parivar and funded by government grants, a parallel scientific ecosystem has emerged to “prove” these benefits. Research is published in compromised journals and amplified by political leaders and media outlets, creating a powerful feedback loop of ideological reinforcement. The claims are as audacious as they are unsubstantiated. As the book chillingly documents, “Claims circulate that cow urine can cure everything from cancer to AIDS, that it is an antibiotic, a pesticide, and a radiation protectant” (p. 93). The sacred cow is thus transformed into what one chapter describes as a mobile, bioscientific laboratory, a factory for producing a host of new commodities (p. 115), from floor cleaners and cosmetics to life-saving medicines.

This “biomythology,” the authors argue, is anything but harmless folk belief. It has direct and deadly consequences. It provides the scientific-sounding rationale for the wave of “cow lynching” and vigilante violence that has swept across India, where mobs have brutally attacked and murdered individuals—overwhelmingly Muslims and Dalits (formerly “untouchables”)—on the mere suspicion of possessing or consuming beef. The pseudoscience of the cow’s unique sanctity is directly linked to the biopolitical control of bodies. It intersects with and reinforces deep-seated anxieties about purity and pollution, which are central to the caste system. Protecting the “pure” body of the sacred cow becomes a powerful metaphor for protecting the “pure” body of the Hindu nation from perceived contaminants: religious minorities, lower castes, and decadent Western influences. The book masterfully shows how this rhetoric demonizes the dietary practices of Muslims and the traditional livelihoods of Dalits associated with cattle carcasses (such as leatherwork), inciting violence and entrenching social exclusion under the veneer of scientific, cultural, and national necessity.

(to be continued)