Meera Nanda is a science historian, writer and academic who has written extensively on postcolonialism and postmodernism in science, with a critical examination of India’s affinity towards pseudoscience fueled by Hinduism. She is an alumni of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with two doctorates in science studies. Her most recent publication, 'A Field Guide to Post-Truth India' was published by Three Essays Collective in 2024. She has written eight books and multiple essays in platforms like the Outlook, Frontline, Economic and Political Weekly, with an exhaustive analysis of secularism, science, modern education, and critique of religious nationalism in India and the United States. Her next book will be released in 2025.
She was in Thiruvananthapuram as a speaker at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters in February, 2025. Shradha Shreejaya, a writer and international development practitioner, spoke with Meera at the Modern Book Centre.
Shradha: The liberals and the Left have alienated most people across nations, even the most marginalised and the workers no longer want to align with them. Meanwhile the supremacists, fundamentalists and nationalists dominate popular imagination and they have united more people than ever in contemporary times. How do you explain these phenomena, with your experience in the United States and in India?
Meera: In fact, not only has the Left alienated the working classes, at least in the United States. The Right Wing has actually made this into their mobilisation issue, that the Left, that these elites sitting in universities and in coastal urban centers, such as New York and California, look down upon you. That's become a rallying cry. This is a very strange contradiction because the motivation of the left is to speak for the marginalised, the poor. But the poor themselves do not find themselves in these descriptions. In India, for example, it is believed that the introduction of certain forms of scientific education were meant to further the colonial agenda – their form of education, their ways of thinking – so that the traditions would be erased. That is the thesis which started with Edward Said’s Orientalism and went on to take various shapes and forms. So the claim that is made, that those subaltern knowledge was erased and western ways of thinking were imposed? The subalterns themselves do not see themselves in these theories. Why is it that, you know, for instance, Ambedkarites or Periyar for that matter, they embraced Western science as a liberation, as a source for critique, and why is it that the Dalits embrace English language? They see that as a way of advancement. So claiming that ‘the bad, bad West silenced us’, even the oppressed don't buy that rhetoric. But the problem is that they have given colonialism such a foundational status as if oppression started only when the British came, you know?
Likewise in the West, in the US, the Blacks want affirmative action because it was supposed to redress the past injustices, which are continuing today. For instance, in the US, suburbs are so segregated. The richer the people, the whiter they get. Asians are like honorary whites, it's [our] class and certain sort of idea of model minorities that ends up segregating suburbs. Cities become black, suburbs become white with space for honorary whites, who are in professional roles and who are class wise equal. But affirmative action which was meant to redress historical wrongs, is now equal to ‘diversity’. That became an umbrella term for rich Asians, rich Hispanics who could afford to get to those universities under the cover of [it], and I'm not saying they should not be. But for the black people, something they had fought for, it ends up opening the doors for the rest of us, for people like me—but they get shafted, they get sidelined. This idea of diversity that the left campaigned for, with some merit, becomes the rallying cry of the right that they are anti-white…that the Left is prejudiced against the whites. And the first thing Trump did when he came in was signing an executive order canceling all DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion] initiatives. But if you had made an economic argument for diversity, you would have included those whites, you would have naturally included all the blacks that you were trying to speak for, the Hispanics, the immigrants, the poor.
The Left has made the mistake both in India and in the US of delinking their critique from class. Class is treated as a 19th century old eurocentric idea of dialectical materialism, whose time has come and gone. And that is the postcolonial critique of Marx—that he was a representative of the European experience, and had a teleology, that history will move according to what started unfolding in Europe, that will be the universal history. That, according to them, is an orientalist way of looking. So Marx becomes a eurocentric orientalist. Therefore class analysis becomes like a non-grata, you don't do class analysis. It's all cultural discourses [in] which the whole thing becomes a reassertion of local knowledges against eurocentric discourses. It’s dissociated from caste, class, and that's why this discourse doesn't speak to the actual people who are living in poverty, who are being ostracized.
Shradha: And this leads to my second question. So the majoritarian discourse has also succeeded in looking down upon science and reason—be this mainstream and popular art, culture and literature. How do you place this in the context of the history of science and enlightenment you have studied so deeply? And how important is this “debate” of science vs religion in the fight for secularism?
Meera: Well, to me, that is just basic. And that fight has not been joined in India, you know. It had some beginnings here and there, but it quickly got stuffed out because, Indian Constitution interprets secularism in a very mild manner. Nehru clearly says secularism doesn't mean any opposition to religion. We are not talking of a secular non-believing culture at all. No animosity towards religion, but openness to all religions. So even that, of course, we know is being threatened and at that point, even just that eclectic form of secularism is something worth fighting for. I don't deny that. My point is that secularism of tolerance that we are aspiring for cannot really take roots in India till the minds are secularised. It cannot, if you think God is of the greatest importance and and necessary for the workings of the universe, for curing my ailment, for everything that I know! If you give a god a divine power, then it's hard to be tolerant of other gods—if you believe that your god is doing [it all]. Some say there are cases of Hindus visiting dargas, it's well known. We live in a modern democracy where numbers matter, right? I mean, the voting blocks matter, so the whole political dynamic is shifted now. People's aspirations have shifted now. We don't live in the premodern world where that tolerance can be. So now we are trying to create a secular culture in which we are tolerant of all gods, and respect all gods, all religions. That's the ideal while having strong beliefs about the superiority of your gods and your religion, your culture; how can you expect a culture of equality of all religions to function? So coming down to [it], I really think unless you displace God from the central position that you give in your heads, in your lives, you cannot really practice secularism. You need a secular mind to practice, to be a secular person.
Shradha: You are uniquely positioned as a historian of science. So when you see this religion versus science debate happening now, do you see this as a cyclical thing that there will be an age of darkness, and will there be light at the end of this?
Meera: It feels like that, doesn't? America we call the enlightened society and in fact, what's happening in America really shakes your belief in the power of reason. Here are a bunch of people who have had access to modern education. Quality of schools varies, but still, there is a literate culture with reasonable spread of scientific knowledge, and look at them? Look at how they have fallen for fake news, for big lies. Where are the reasoning abilities? The enlightenment idea that with knowledge comes power too? It takes the winds out of your sails, looking at what the US does today. But I don't think cycles of darkness are inevitable, or just part of how history works. The darkness that has fallen has political causes, economic causes both in the West and in our country, but for different reasons. I really think in the case of India, India is, and we were talking about it, is truly a wounded society which is reasserting itself, and in that, it's overshooting its mark rewriting history to claim an exalted position in world history, for which the evidence does not exist at all.
Shradha: I think it's so on point when you say wounded society because this kind of overcompensating for trauma that was inflicted on us and that we have inflicted; trying to balance all of that.
Meera: As if Indian civilization was innocent of traumas being inflicted, millions of people suffered partition. Look at Kerala, a handful of Namboodiris had so much power! So to essentialise things as the West equals some sort of materialistic individualistic…West also has its community structures, it's all fluid. These ways of living, ways of thinking, change with the changing of societies, of economies, of how you make a living. So material causes do affect your thinking. That dialectic is lost in the new wave of the Left literature that has come. And they have made themselves irrelevant totally. It's all over the world, the idea that political correctness, wokeness…[that] they use wokeness as a shorthand for the Left and show the absurdities of extreme wokeism and mobilize the common masses. Gender ideology and woke ideologies are at the center of their critique of why we need to take the establishment away from the Left.
Shradha: As an educator you have commented at length about the disastrous effects of the new National Education Policy and its amendments. What do you think will happen to the generation of young people who are exposed to this and new, social media? How do you think they will think, learn and become the “social architects” of a world facing multiple crises and an ecological collapse?
Meera: You know, I'm pretty confident that NEP, all this talk of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) and all, will actually go nowhere. I am quite convinced that the teachers who will be teaching IKS will be pretty pathetic creatures [laughs]. They will botch it up and that's actually a good thing. And it will just wash over the students. But that's optimistic…and students these days they're facing enormous pressures, especially the job market being what it is. So they are just going to retain whatever they can to enter the job market with hook or crook to get some professional positions somewhere in the organised job sector. I mean we know how, it's unbelievable, unorganised unemployment. It's life killing! I don't know how these young people do it. The food delivery, the Uber drivers, it's the gig economy, yes. So they'll do whatever it takes to get into a [job] and right now it looks like only this madness for IT will continue to grow. So optimistically, I hope they botch it up and no lasting damage is done. But that's an optimistic reading, my worry is that the little time students get to develop some degree of critical temper, that opportunity is being just totally shut down, missed. If you're being taught [like this], the situation is really comparable to what happened in the US in an attempt to introduce creationism in biology courses. When the first attempt failed, there were the young earth creationists—they were so absurd that nobody took them seriously! Then came the intelligent design creationism, which used molecular biological arguments, that all these proteins and all these cellular systems act in such a concert that there has to be a creator. They didn't call it a creator God, but an intelligence built into matter. And in fact, in the intelligent design debate, Indians Hindus, in America were the biggest champions of introducing intelligent design. But again, America's First Amendment came down and the Supreme Court did not allow this sort of a thing. The danger of bringing creationism and teaching it alongside Darwin, that's what is going to happen in India today, right?
Shradha: Ending on a lighter note, a book that has given you profound insights or joy recently that you’d like everyone to read?
Meera: Good one! I read this short book on Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. That I really enjoyed and was very thought provoking. Snyder is very relevant for our times right now. I have people asking me to write some academic essays so I'm still surrounded in academic, which can be thought provoking, but it doesn't bring you joy.