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Science as Other than Itself

Strategic Anti-essentialism and Keeping-While-Disposing among Indian Rationalists
Jacob Copeman and John Hagström

Abstract

India’s rationalists work toward the disposal of attitudes they consider to be unscientific and to promote respect for and understanding of scientific evidence. Rationalists tend to see the relationship between science and religion as zero-sum: there is a fundamental disjuncture between science—arrogated to themselves—and religious mentalities. Figures like religious gurus have embraced certain scientific techniques—for example, chemistry methods to enact “miracles” and digital communication technologies to enhance and distribute their auras—but such techniques have only subverted science: science is employed to make itself disappear; or, if it is made visible, it is only as something other than itself. Yet this “misuse” of science finds a reflection in the rationalists’ own attempts to inculcate scientific attitudes: they think and hope they are communicating science, but it may be received as something other than itself. Rationalists recognize that their efforts at debunking superstitious attitudes and practices are not always effective. What is significant is that some activists respond by strategically pausing their own essentialism in order to establish and disseminate temporary relations between their own agenda and understandings of reality that are otherwise essentially antithetical to that agenda precisely in order to extend it. We show that rationalists are surprisingly flexible in pursuing their agenda: science may be pursued “unscientifically,” and secularity via religion. While this complicates existing perceptions of an atheist essentialism that sees only immutable and irreconcilable differences between science and religion, it also sheds light on “struggles about collective nonreligious identities” (Quack, Schuh and Kind 2020), as found within the Indian movement. The article also explores debates internal to the movement concerning the way to situate rationalism in regard to inherited tradition.

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1India’s rationalists work toward the disposal of attitudes and understandings they consider to be unscientific.1 They seek to publicly promote respect for scientific evidence in numerous ways, including by setting up science clubs and science education fairs, campaigning against “pseudoscience” (e.g., astrology) and traveling in “science vans” to rural areas to show villagers films on scientific methods and to demonstrate basic scientific experiments. Particularly significant among these activities has been their publication of vernacular pamphlets explaining scientific concepts in layman terms; for instance, in Punjab, where science teachers played an important role in founding and later spearheading the rationalist movement, the Punjabi Kan Kan Vich Vigyan (Science in Every Speck) (Mitter 1993), whose title counters the popular religious adage that God is in every speck of earth, answers simple questions about biology and the natural sciences; and books such as Maade Ton Manukh Tak (From Matter to Man) (Mitter 1993) and Mitti ton Manukh Tak (From Dust to Man) (Paul 2018) explain the theory of evolution.2 Another prominent means of overtly contesting supernatural claims about reality has been public demonstrations of miracles, the aim being to set up a kind of “theatre of proof” (Ecks 2010) in which to expose the trickery of holy men who gain followers and funds through the performance of “miracles.” Activists demonstrate the “science behind miracles” in front of audiences—most often schoolchildren—who are shown how to perform them and encouraged to replicate the work of exposé themselves (Quack 2012a; Binder 2019; Copeman and Hagström 2022).3 Countless other means of promoting scientific literacy are also pursued.

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2While many rationalists privately admit to being atheists (some proclaim it publicly), most organizations are quick to state that they do not take issue with religion per se but only those elements of it that are exploitative and patently damaging (“superstitious”): for instance, accusations of witchcraft (which can lead to ostracism and murder), spiritual healing methods used in place of those based on modern medicine, claims of science-defying miracles by individuals or organizations as a means of soliciting monetary donations, and so on. Despite this insistence on neutrality toward religion, however, religion and science may come across as zero-sum in activist rhetoric and Indian rationalism may seem to echo New Atheism’s production of binaries, with religion opposed to science, belief to doubt and the pre-modern to the modern (Tremlett and Shih 2017:81).4 In this article we show how three major types of relations—synecdochic, strategically anti-essentialist, and contested and partial relations to “tradition”—structure rationalist efforts to foster scientific attitudes amongst the public at large.

3Our mapping of relational forms in this article contributes to existing literature by illuminating key aspects of the rationalist movement’s relations to science, religion and secularity: in particular the manner in which generalized essentialist understandings of science and religion as unqualified separate entities amongst rationalists are not always met by essentialist practice. Despite this divergence, we argue, rationalist essentialism is not undermined. Rather, the divergence is, so to speak, an essential driver for establishing it in the long run: science may be pursued unscientifically, and secularity via religion. Rationalist activists and educators tend to act according to the hope or understanding that targeted audiences will take a part to be representative of the whole; namely, if one science-defying miracle is successfully exposed as fraudulent, then those who witness it will be less credulous concerning miracles more generally: we gloss this in etic terms as the “synecdochic method.” Though the synecdochic method is by no means always a failure, when it does not “take” due to an audience’s (non)recognition of synecdochic relations between exposed or unmasked superstitious parts and larger unscientific wholes—the problem of non-extrapolation and the absence of the conjugate—rationalist responses disclose the situational nature of rationalist essentialism/anti-essentialism. While this complicates existing perceptions of an atheist essentialism that sees only immutable and irreconcilable differences between science and religion, it also sheds light on “struggles about collective nonreligious identities” (Quack, Schuh and Kind 2020:28), as found within the Indian movement. In this article we explore how the experimental formation of strategically anti-essentialist relations between essentially different understandings is not uncontroversial within the rationalist community but rather points to tensions concerning the prioritizing of social work versus the disposal of “unscientific attitudes.”

4Our work here builds on key existing ethnographic studies of the organized criticism of religion in India by Johannes Quack (2012a, 2012b) and Stefan Binder (2019, 2020), which delineate the particularities of rationalism and non-religion as a way of life. This work has entailed a kind of balancing act between acknowledging the pervasiveness of religion and the prevailing importance of caste without corroborating the frequently unchallenged assumption that all Indians are “notoriously religious” and only to be understood as homines hierarchici. The majority of present-day atheist, rationalist, and humanist organizations are integrated within a broader movement, despite employing various identifiers. Many of these groups trace their origins back to nineteenth-century England and the social and religious reform endeavors of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. A significant feature of the Indian atheist movement is its notable involvement in social and political advocacy (Quack 2012a)—an observation that is of acute importance for the present essay. Study of rationalism in the activist mode—for example, its promotion of body donation as a means of enacting materialism and social reform—has formed the primary subject matter of this research.

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5In his work on organized atheism in the Telugu-speaking parts of south India, Binder (2020) documents how supporters of the movement aim to build a moral, fair and rational society by eliminating what they term as “mental slavery” (bhavadasyam). This state is primarily evident, though not solely, in religious beliefs and rituals. Binder pays particular attention to the aesthetics of atheist transmission—for example, the movement’s anti-superstition and miracle exposure campaigns and verbal propagation wherein the principal aesthetic forms at stake are sonality, oratorical mastery (involving, for example, memorization and fluency) and a “hyperliteral” attitude toward religious texts in order to expose absurdities therein.5 The resultant speeches are intended not only to persuade via logical exposition but to be means of fabricating—making perceptible—“secular difference,” that is, secularity as a figuration of perceptible difference. Binder’s detailed examination of the “moral negativity” that is “constitutive of the … category of the secular” in the region is particularly poignant in the light of the series of lethal attacks on Indian freethinker and atheist activists and writers that occurred between 2013 and 2017, with the internationally reported assassination of Maharashtrian rationalist leader Narendra Dabholkar, the leading protagonist in Quack’s landmark study Disenchanting India (2012b), taking place in 2013. Though many skirmishes between rationalists and right-wing Hindu (or “Hindutva”) activists had taken place in the years preceding Dabholkar’s murder, his death marked the time when, to be a critic of religion in the country, was to be exposed to a new level of danger, with Hindutva activists accusing rationalists of unfairly targeting Hinduism whilst ignoring other religions. Some suggest more broadly that the murders during the period 2013–2017 mark a significant juncture in India’s post-independence history: this may be the first instance where esteemed writers were targeted and killed for expressing dissenting views (Guha 2016).6

6The next section provides an overview of the three aforementioned major types of relations that characterize and structure Indian rationalist engagements with “science.” The sections that follow—Synecdochic Relations, From Synecdochic Relations to Strategic Anti-Essentialism and Keeping-while-disposing—then consider each relational type in turn. The article concludes with a final reflection.

Relational forms

7The first type of relation we examine is an anticipated or hoped-for relationship that requires—from those who spectate displays of rationalist exposé—the recognition of a synecdochic relation between part and whole. But recognition of this relationship, as we will show, cannot be guaranteed. Rather than the part standing for and in relation to a “whole,” the part can quite easily detach from it: the audience may not take a synecdochic view at all. This is the “falsification riddle” as it applies to rationalist exposé. Stanley Tambiah uses this term (borrowed from Popper) in a discussion about magic: “if indeed magical acts are decisively falsified,” as indeed they are by rationalists, “why do they continue to be enacted?” (1990:46). If unscientific practices are frequently decisively falsified, why do they continue to be enacted, indeed, to proliferate and to convince?

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8We show that the absence of recognized synecdochic relations, resulting from the failure of spectators to properly conjugate part and whole, has a number of key implications. Rationalists, as noted, tend to see the relationship between science and religion as zero-sum—science is framed as a singularity; an abstract agent or force standing outside of social relations.7 This reflects how, “over the course of the nineteenth century, English, French, and German academics would come to establish scientific unity via a putative opposition between “science,” now fully identified with reason, and “religion,” increasingly associated with faith or perspectival belief. These shifts in turn increasingly amplified the authority of a unitary conception of ‘science’ as the source of civilizational progress” (Josephson-Storm 2017:60). India’s rationalists, like their nineteenth-century forbears, hold that there is a fundamental disjuncture between science—arrogated to themselves—and religious mentalities. Of course, rationalists understand that figures like religious gurus have embraced certain scientific techniques—for example, the use of chemistry methods to enact “miracles” and the adoption of digital communication technologies to enhance and distribute their auras—but such techniques have only subverted science: science is employed to make itself disappear; or, if it is made visible, it is only as something other than itself.

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9As the above implies, India’s rationalists profoundly disapprove of attempts—ongoing since the nineteenth century and particularly prevalent in the context of Hindutva politics—to “scienticize” Hinduism. Indeed, the notion that Hinduism is a “religion of science” has been “a central pillar of modern Hindu thought, especially the currents affiliated with Hindu nationalism, for nearly two centuries. From Narendra Dutta (aka Swami Vivekananda) in the nineteenth century to Narendra Modi in our own times, countless protagonists for Hindu exceptionalism have celebrated the Vedic tradition for its non-dogmatic rationalism and its super-sensory ‘empiricism,’ which presumably enabled the ancient ‘seers’ to intuit the laws of nature that modern sciences are only now coming to grasp” (Nanda 2020:264).8 India’s rationalists dismiss all such initiatives in support of this notion of Hinduism as a “religion of science”—from claims made by Hindutva politicians such as “the test-tube baby procedure had existed in ancient India because Ram’s wife, Sita, was born in an earthen pot”9 to more insidious changes made to science textbooks in BJP10-led states, which amongst other things have incorporated hymns from the Arthavaveda (Jaffrelot 2021:174, 172)—as dangerous instances of “pseudoscience.” The rationalists Copeman accompanied during the 17th National Children’s Science Congress in Ahmedabad in 2009 reacted with horror when the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, attended the event as guest of honor. It was not only his politics they objected to but also what they viewed as the sickening discordance between the noble aims of the congress—inculcation of scientific awareness in support of the Indian constitution’s mandate that citizens foster “scientific temper”—and Hindutva’s perversion of them.11 Of course, none of this is to say that religion cannot play a role in the development of scientific knowledge or that there cannot be “scientist-believers” (Thomas 2019, 2021)—while, for some, the natural sciences are a thoroughly secular undertaking, for others, the Book of Nature is a way of studying God’s revelation to humankind (Copeman and Quack 2015)—but rather to state that India’s rationalists hold the strong conviction that religion and science are indeed conflictual, antithetical endeavors, and they engage in “boundary work” (LeDrew 2019) to maintain their vision of a science purified of “pseudo-scientific” obscurantism (van der Veer 2014:38).12 Indeed, they complain repeatedly and often about how “we claim to have science and technology of the twentieth century going on to twenty-first. But in many respects, we continue to possess primitive thinking”:

We have a tendency to claim that we knew modern science and technology, stated in our scriptures, thousands of years ago. And Vedas have been repository of all modern scientific information. This is absolutely baseless. When protagonists of this school of thought claim that we had even aeroplanes centuries ago, I have been requesting such people to show evidence in any ancient text such as Vedas regarding at least such simple things as the composition of water or atmosphere. There is no mention of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen or carbon dioxide or their equivalents in any of these scriptures. Without knowing such elementary scientific facts, it is absolutely impossible to make any significant progress in science … It is a matter of deep regret that vested interests try to defend all kinds of irrational beliefs and traditions by cleverly giving some kind of “scientific touch.” But when many such blind beliefs and traditions are tested on the anvil of experiment by using well established scientific methods, their hollowness will be exposed. (Narsimhaiah 2007:11)

10The irony here, as we shall see, is that the sorts of misuses of science just described find a reflection in the rationalists’ own attempts to inculcate scientific attitudes through the synecdochic method: they think and hope they are communicating science, but it may be received as something other than itself.

11This brings us to the second major type of relational practice we consider in this article: the production of “strategically anti-essentialist” relations. India’s rationalists contend that reality is “exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’” (Papineau 2007: para. 1). There is and can be no relation between natural and supernatural realities, which are essentially different. Here the essentialism of rationalists and essentialism as the paramount “conceptual sin” (Herzfeld 2002) of anthropology risk a certain imbrication. One of the reasons anthropologists sometimes evince suspicion of rationalists, atheists, and humanists is due to the perception that a modernist essentialism or foundationalism informs their reputed uncritical adoption of ostensibly modern secular notions such as progress, science, truth, and reason. However, the ethnography presented here incites caution by demanding that we avoid essentializing their essentialism. We show that rationalists are surprisingly flexible in pursuing their agenda.

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12Rationalists are not incognizant of the fact that their intended or hoped-for synecdochic relations do not always materialize. What is significant is that some activists and educators in the movement respond by strategically pausing their own essentialism in order to establish and disseminate temporary relations between their own agenda and understandings of reality that are otherwise antithetical to that agenda precisely in order to extend it. We use the term “strategically anti-essentialist relations” to describe this practice of forming relations between entities that nevertheless retain essential differences.13 This can cause rationalists to become complicit in perpetuating the form of misrecognition—science taken to be other than itself—they otherwise seek to dispel. Connectedly, we explore the rationalists’ method of generative antagonism which refers to how, on occasion, they bring their worldview into generative antagonistic relation—to the point of identification—with the forces they criticize, the better to reformat their didactic practices and call those forces into question.

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13The third and final relation we explore is the one between rationalists and inherited tradition. Indian rationalists seek disposal of what they consider to be essentially superstitious within inherited tradition. Yet they are also keen to counter accusations on the part of proponents of Hindutva and assorted postcolonial critics that their movement is “imported,” even “anti-national.” They therefore strategically emphasize—create relations with—modes of inherited tradition of which they approve or see as congruent with their overall project and sensibilities. This includes the materialist Lokayata (or Carvaka) school of Indian philosophy but also a religion like Buddhism, which they praise, and certain reformist Hindu gurus. But what is the proper balance here between relatedness to inherited tradition including religion and disposal of harmful elements of the latter? These matters are far from being settled or straightforward. The British humanists studied by Matthew Engelke (2015) face similar dilemmas. They disparage (and would dispose of) some aspects of religion, such as illogical propositional assents (“beliefs”), but they also find other aspects redeemable. For example, although life-cycle ceremonies are often considered—by both academics and popular commentators—to be inseparable from the “routine, discipline, and authority associated with religion” (Engelke 2015:217), organized humanism clarifies this practice, reframing it as something that is essentially natural and human. Accordingly, non-religious ceremonies have been developed to mark especially meaningful or momentous occasions such as namings, weddings, and funerals. We have elsewhere introduced and developed the conceptual pair of clarification and disposal as critical secular methods for the production of self-consistent secular lives.14 Identifying the proper relation between clarification and disposal in particular cases is a major constituent of distinctly non-religious cultures, and it has specific implications for the cases described in this article. We will see how the experimental formation of strategically anti-essentialist relations between essentially different understandings is not uncontroversial within the rationalist community, raising difficult questions about the proper relation (and relative proportions) of relatedness-to-tradition and the disposal of elements of it.

14The three types of relations (synecdochic, strategically anti-essentialist, and contested and partial relations to “tradition”) that we identify in this article are frequently—though not always—in relation to each other. Strategically anti-essentialist approaches—controversial because they entail practical compromises—are causally downstream from the “purity” of the synecdochic method, with the synecdochic method ontologically prior to strategic anti-essentialism, even if, in practice, both methods often operate simultaneously. The latter only becomes necessary because of certain failures associated with the former. Relatedness-to-tradition, on the other hand, is capable of operating independently from the other approaches: rationalist historicization along these lines frequently operates simply as a means of disarming the postcolonial critique of Indian rationalism: disposal of “harmful’” religious practices can be (re)framed as manifesting the best traditions of Indian critical thought. At the same time, the boundary between strategically anti-essentialist approaches and those that emphasize relatedness-to-tradition is not always obvious and can form the basis of internal dispute and demarcate different factions in the movement, as we shall see. Dilemmas concerning relatedness-to-tradition are a locus of active discussion by rationalists, even if they might not use a relational framework to describe them. “Synecdochic relations” and “strategic anti-essentialism,” on the other hand, are explicitly etic concepts imposed by the authors to refer (1) to the supposed or hoped-for recognition of the relation between the part and a whole that rationalists expect from religious observers of their programs, and (2) to the practical suspension of rationalist essentialist precepts concerning science and religion in specific contexts. We employ them to describe how rationalists understand or anticipate their target audiences’ “way of thinking” and the practical adjustments they make in respect of the responses they receive.

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15Relying principally on three types of sources—extracts from Copeman’s interviews with different rationalists in the context of his long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Punjab and elsewhere in India,15 analysis of filmed events (a TV show and a documentary film), and existing ethnographic work on rationalists in India—we now consider how the (non)recognition of synecdochic relations between exposed or unmasked superstitious parts and larger unscientific wholes can haunt the rationalist project even during some of its greatest moments of success.

Synecdochic relations

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16In 2008, the India TV news channel staged what it called the Great Tantra Challenge (GTC) in which a tantric guru was asked to prove, live on air, his claim that he could kill anyone within three minutes via potent rituals. The proposed challenge was to kill noted Delhi-based rationalist Sanal Edamarukuon the very TV channel that activists accused of being the biggest propagator of superstition. For decades, rationalist activists have challenged those they see as unwavering purveyors of superstition; in this context, the challenge was modified to suit a sensational TV format. The real-time, duel-like nature of the event made it exceptionally engaging, which was evident in the impressive number of viewers. Live on air, the guru attempted to harm Edamaruku using mantras, symbolic rituals, and dramatic gestures—tightening a noose around a dough effigy, sprinkling water, and waving a knife—all to no effect. As hours passed and his efforts failed, the guru insisted his ultimate destructive ritual could only work at night, leading to a much-hyped nocturnal showdown. Under the night sky, the guru invoked elaborate rituals involving fire, chants, and mystical ingredients, claiming Edamaruku would soon die in agony. Despite their escalating theatrics—burning his name, cutting dough figures, and reciting increasingly frantic mantras—Edamaruku remained unfazed, even amused.16 Significantly, the program featured the headline: “Tantric power versus Science.” Albeit with added TV melodrama, the headline assumes and underscores just the kind of synecdochic relational effects of “demonstration” that rationalists seek: a victory for one party would signal a final decision in its favor; conversely, the defeated “part” would stand for, and thus bring into question, the whole—whether that be “Tantric power” or “Science.” At the close of the event, Edamaruku emerged unscathed and was declared the winner, while the guru was exposed as a seeming fraud. But would, indeed, wider lessons be learned?

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17Edamaruku, originally from Kerala state, heads an activist organization that focuses on the affordable publication of local and global rationalist literature and on media activism. He has a long track record of the latter. We met him four months after the GTC in his office, located above a shop in east Delhi. He was still euphoric. On YouTube, his uploaded footage of the GTC was gaining millions of views. He had written accounts of his victory for his website and other news outletsone article even ended up in the UK’s The Guardian newspaperand global humanist media was glowingly reporting on it. Edamaruku told us that the movement had made more progress in the past two years than it had in the whole previous 20-year period thanks to TV. As a profile on his own website puts it: “Some of his TV programs have created great sensations … In March 2008, a famous tantric claimed he was able to kill any person within three minutes by chanting special mantras. Sanal Edamaruku challenged him on live TV to demonstrate his powers on him. India TV broadcast the breath-taking event live over several hours, gluing millions of viewers till midnight to their TV sets. The tantric suffered a humiliating defeat. Sanal’s real-time exposure of the tantric humbug did not only shake India but was celebrated for several months all over the Internet, sparking many articles and interviews in the international media.” An article in the Indian Journalism Review endorsed what it saw as the “win-win” combination of enlightenment and entertainment apparently entwined in the event, which seemed to presage a new dawn of activism: “Over a couple of hours, a dangerous and widespread Indian superstition had been slayed in the studios, while the channel laughed all the way to the top of the ratings chart.”17

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18As already mentioned, the show staged the encounter: “Tantric Power versus Science,” and in the course of this Edamaruku stated that “tantra, mantra, yantra18 and all these things are entirely (a matter of) superstition. There is no scientific basis”; and tantra “is blind faith we should wipe from our country. When scientific literacy comes into our country, such blind faith will be wiped out.” His remaining alive was proof enough that tantra had been “slayed” and that scientific attitudes are necessary. Note how “Science,” capitalized, is called forth as just the kind of agentive singularity we referred to earlier. The defeated tantric, meanwhile, claimed that his inability to kill the activist was due to the latter’s own tantric defensive abilities and protection by the gods, a statement that is in keeping with what residents of a mixed-income neighborhood in west Delhi told us when recalling the episode a few months later. The memory still quite fresh in their minds, they said that they had, indeed, found the GTC entertaining. Some of them had watched the whole thing, which lasted for several hours, totally gripped. Though they agreed that Edamaruku had “won,” they were certainly not convinced that tantra had been “defeated.” For most of them, Edamaruku’s demonstration of invulnerability revealed no far-reaching truth beyond itself: it proved only his own adeptness at withstanding tantric assaults. Such failure or refusal on the part of the audience to recognize the debunked element as a sign that the whole entity of “miracle-monger gurus” is invalid would appear to provide exemplary evidence in support of the influential argument that India is predominantly a “context-sensitive” society (Ramanujan 1989). Edamaruku, as one TV viewer put it, simply “had the stronger magic.” The rationalists were still waiting for science to be taken as science.

19A second case concerns rationalists’ long-term preoccupation with debunking the popular south Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (d. 2011) due to the centrality of miracles in his spiritual offering. The famous rationalist Basava Premanand was particularly keen to demonstrate that the guru’s signature miracle—the materialization of sacred ash out of thin air—was a sleight of hand. Premanand explained to us how he gathered as much video footage of the guru as possible, focusing especially on clips where the guru performed miracles. By painstakingly replaying these videos in slow motion, Premanand scrutinized the guru’s techniques. The slow-motion analysis validated what Premanand, as a rationalist, had always believed: the guru’s miracles were nothing more than sleight of hand: “I took all of his films and proved it: vibhuti [sacred ash] is taken from his fingers from his left hand—with slow motion it was very easy.” This experience enabled him to master the skills firsthand and to pass them on to others. These individuals, in turn, were expected to see through the guru’s deception and to relay these skills. In the documentary Mystery Hunters, Premanand describes how insights gained from analyzing slow-motion footage reinvigorated efforts to reveal Sai Baba’s tricks in real time: “I wrote an article ‘You too can be a godman,’ and I trained lots of girls and boys. I said to them, ‘You go to [the guru’s residence in] Puttarparthi, and say, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and fall at his feet and he will think you are bhaktas [devotees], and when he gives you vibhuti you knock his hand.’ One girl from Hyderabad University did it.”

20In Delhi, we met some ex-devotees of Sai Baba who had been put off him because of such exposés. The problem, from the rationalists’ point of view, was that the former devotees had not extended their disillusionment to encompass other gurus who performed miracles. As with Edamaruku and the GTC, no broader lessons were learned from the debunking about science and the impossibility of miracles: this is the problem of the synecdoche. The ethnographic record is replete with examples that are evocative of this problem; specific hail charms and curers can be branded fraudulent, but such scrutiny might well “leave the main belief in the prophetic and therapeutic powers of witch-doctors unimpaired” (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976:107). Indeed, while the specter of the fraudulent spiritual leader may breed anxiety about the origins of (spiritual) value, “fakery appears as the margin, the horizon against which a moral center is clarified” (Shipley 2009:524), which is to say that the very work of exposé that successfully designates someone as a fake witch doctor or guru can seem to rest on the assumption (and reconfirm as fact) that real or true witch doctors or gurus do exist; debunkers’ very success may be their failure. Sonja Luehrmann’s work likewise describes Soviet atheist propagandists who sought to unmask religious wonders by performing chemical experiments during a so-called “Evening of Miracles without Miracles (Russian Vecher ‘Chudesa bez Chudes’)” in Tashkent (2011:68). To the chagrin of activists, audiences could misread the experiments as “a scientific confirmation of biblical narratives” (2011:68). Thus, scientific demonstration may impair rather than invite the abjuration of miracles, since the work of exposé cannot reliably provoke a recognition of synecdochic relations, with the debunking of one superstition failing to debunk anything other than the particular instance.

21There was also the sneaking sense that the attention focused on this guru by rationalists, rather than undermine his credibility in the eyes of devotees and others, provided instead a kind of evidence of his power. The fixation on Sathya Sai Baba reveals a rationalist form of “fetishistic inversion” (Žižek 1991:30): rationalists think they scrutinize him because he is inherently powerful but, in reality, his power is amplified by their relentless preoccupation with disproving him. The notion of a guru whose actions lie beyond scientific explanation is enhanced precisely by those who are seeking to diminish it. A related account of rationalist debunking efforts near Bhilai also depicts scientific explanation as an ever-receding horizon. There, the anti-superstition work of the rationalists seemed to enhance local belief that there was an epidemic of human sacrifices taking place: “The more loudly the enlightened proclaim their falsity, the more plausible it is to conclude that there must be many others who give them credence, and a few who are likely to act on their superstitious beliefs” (Parry 2015).

22However, rationalist activists are not unaware that their performances can generate unintended responses. In the case of the GTC, the responses to it cited above—concerning Edamaruku’s “stronger magic”—reconfirmed to other activists the need to demonstrate miracles in person, rather than on TV, through audience participation. Other activists were dismissive of televised demonstrations of miracles because “Talking isn’t enough—it only works when you do and show.” This approach is crucial for overcoming a major challenge for activists: the risk that their own ability to perform “miracles” (as part of their effort to expose them) might lead others to see them as having supernatural powers themselves. “Demonstration only on ourselves has no value—the audience has to come and demonstrate it.” Demonstration is only meaningful when “people do it by themselves.” As a Mumbai-based activist emphatically put it: “When I burn myself, they think I’m magical, but when they do it—that is the proof [it is not magical].” Such insights evince the impact of what might be called generative antagonism, as pedagogical failures lead to more refined methods. Consider Luehrmann’s observation that Soviet atheist researchers, while antagonistic in their approach to religion, overhauled their own understandings over time in order to better inform the methods of anti-religious propagandists; such “antagonistic insights” (Luehrmann 2015) have led some activists in India to emphasize participatory forms of rationalist exposé. Although perhaps only in a weak sense, these rationalists have grasped a version of what most anthropologists of religion have been arguing for quite some time: that many forms of religious commitment are not comprised of “beliefs,” or testable propositional assents (e.g., Asad 1993; Engelke 2014:300); instead such commitments can be immanent in bodily and affective encounters with the divine. Thus, we can glean from these activists that antagonistic insights can underpin those forms of exposé that most successfully provoke experiences of detachment from the miraculous.

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23This is a peculiar form of religious learning—that is to say, science arrogated to rationalism is brought into productive relation with an antagonistic force—in order, ultimately, to undermine the forms borrowed from. Elsewhere we have framed the enactment of this type of generative antagonism in terms of “similarity as strategy” and compared rationalists to hunters who transform their bodies into the image of their prey, all the better to catch and kill them (Willerslev 2004).19 Rationalists, likewise, bring their worldview into generative antagonism with the forces they criticize by learning its key performative methodologies: appearing as if gurus (e.g., dressing up as them all the better to unmask them) and showcasing the science behind the miracles they come to know so intimately. Binder’s (2020) work on miracle exposure programs in South India outlines another instance of antagonistic insights. When a rationalist debunker performs a miracle in the same way as a holy man, albeit to debunk it later, a formal similitude marks the actions of the criticizer and criticized religious figure. Rather than undercutting the activist project, however, such similitude serves to underline and publicize “secular difference”: the skeptical publicity (Copeman and Schulz 2022) of the replication of miracles allows activists to show that they conduct such exercises to educate, whereas others do so to exploit.20

From synecdochic relations to strategic anti-essentialism

24A second set of cases from Punjab comprises a more radical strategic undermining of rationalist essentialism concerning immutable and irreconcilable differences between science and religion. Such approaches are not orthodox among rationalists but are important to showcase in order to demonstrate that rationalists are quite capable of acting flexibly with respect to the essentialist understandings they nevertheless normally hold.

25Rationalists see themselves just as much as social workers as disposers of unscientific attitudes, and the two usually go together. For example, caste, they say, is the biggest superstition of all. Seeking to counter the discrimination and suffering it entails, they promote inter-caste marriages and offer protection to newlyweds who have defied their families. Further, the tantrics and gurus discussed above are debunked and denounced not simply due to the unscientific understandings they rely on and entrench but because they use them to take money from those who can ill afford it.

26However, sometimes disposal and social work can part ways, creating dilemmas for rationalists and a more conscious awareness than in the cases already described of the possibility of themselves prolonging the wait for science by their own actions. We relay three such cases.

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27Ghost illness and ghost possession cause widespread affliction in rural Punjab (Freed and Freed 1990). As elsewhere, these ghosts are the spirits of those who have died before their time (e.g., by suicide). They are often known to the victim. According to mainstream medical science—and the local rationalist society—ghost illness and possession are actually (scientifically) instances of dissociative disorder or somatoform-conversion disorder.21 These afflictions take a number of different forms, inhabit both genders, and all age groups. However, in the countryside near Ludhiana where the Punjabi rationalists we know work, those afflicted tend to be members of a household suffering distress due to intra-family land disputes or marriage difficulties. Indeed, echoing earlier anthropological analyses (e.g., Lewis 1971), local rationalists explained to us how these illnesses are an index of relative deprivation. If, as in much of their other work, rationalists’ first impulse is to educate the afflicted and attempt to dispose of what they know to be the latter’s false beliefs, they frequently quash this impulse in order to prioritize their social work. That is to say, the educative project is suspended in favor of seeking immediate relief for the suffering individual (and family).

28The method they use to help the afflicted is hypnosis. “In the hypnotized stage I show the women [it is almost always women] a hand cloth. I tell them that this is the dead person who was seen by or was inside them in the haunted stage, and I tell them: you catch the throat of that ghost and press it hard so it dies and you throw it in a brick kiln. So they think that they have murdered the ghost and in this way they are out of the clutches of these so-called ghosts.” Another local rationalist told us of a specific instance in which the role of the rationalist seems to have been even closer to that of a traditional exorcist (cf. Freed and Freed 1990). “An eight-year-old girl was brought to my house. She said she had three ghosts torturing her. Her father said, ‘Please solve this because we have come many kilometers [to see you].’ So I told her, ‘You see, I am taking three ghosts from your body—one is a jinn [being of smokeless fire], the second is a bhut [male ghost], and the third is a bhutni [wife of the bhut]. I am putting them in this bottle. I am sealing the bottle and throwing it in the canal’; and then she was normal [laughs].”

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29But the process entails a triple challenge to “science,” for (1) in order to help the afflicted individual in that instant, belief in ghosts is left unchallenged; (2) rationalists elsewhere in India disapprove of hypnosis as itself an “unscientific” practice incompatible with their project; and (3) rationalists gain (unwanted) renown as spiritually powerful individuals somewhat akin to the holy man figures they otherwise seek to debunk (see above).22 That the family of the eight-year-old girl had traveled so far to seek their help is indicative of such renown, and the hypnotism process enhances the effect. As a local leader explains: “Before hypnotizing a person, you have to affect him. You have to show him that you are a great personality, you have done so many things, you have to create an inferiority complex in the person. The gap between your superiority and his inferiority should be large. This is to help hypnotize and influence through hypnosis.” This willingness to postpone educative disposal in order to achieve an ameliorative social end sets these rationalists apart from their historical counterparts elsewhere in the world (e.g., Luehrmann 2011; Bantjes 1997).23 Quack (2012a:67) points out that “the distinguishing characteristic of the Indian atheist movement is its strong engagement with social and political activism”—an observation that is congruent with, and partly explains, why Indian rationalists are, on some occasions, willing to suspend disposal in order to achieve ameliorative ends. By appropriating the critical affordances of a “superstitious” belief or practice to subvert it while leaving its ontological premises intact, they deal in a kind of contested rationalist placebo. The difference between this instance and those discussed earlier, however, is that here rationalists are knowingly complicit in achieving such an outcome. They are willing to compromise their understanding of an essential separation between religion and science by temporarily and strategically forming “anti-essentialist relations” between the two otherwise irreconcilable domains in order to achieve an outcome that both further delays the complete arrival of science and makes it present in the form of a background effect.

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30Vishav, son of one of the founders of the rationalist movement in Punjab, recalled similar instances of “impure” mobilization in which superstition and science were, for strategic reasons, entangled together in activist practice. His father and other activists, Vishav remembers, used to use “an interesting but dangerous chemical called mercuric chloride to ‘treat’ people suffering from paranormal activities and ‘ghosts.’” This chemical, readily available in school science labs—recall the central part played by school science teachers in the movement— was employed as part of a deceptive practice. They would discreetly apply a small amount to a coin or metal piece and ask the possessed person to hold it tightly. Due to a chemical reaction, the metal would become extremely hot within minutes and release a powdery substance. This temperature change was used to convince the victims that the “ghosts” had been cast into a brick kiln and burned. The rationalists would then claim that the released powder was the ashes of the burned ghosts. Surprisingly, says Vishav, this technique often worked: victims came to believe that the ghosts had indeed been cast out and therefore found relief. Science is certainly present here—it is “put to work”—but it is once more recognized as something other than itself, with the rationalists prioritizing ameliorative social ends over educational ones.24

31As we noted above, activist use of hypnosis is controversial within the movement. Some rationalists defend their use of it by emphasizing that they are first and foremost social workers—in other words, science can wait; what is more important is solving the immediate problem they are faced with. Others seek to align it with their larger purpose as a useful technique for removing superstitions, even if, since the practice does not overtly challenge beliefs about ghosts, it leaves the content and nature of the superstition intact while apparently removing its impact. Nevertheless, their own and others’ misgivings have led them to deemphasize this technique—to recommit to ending the wait for science to be taken as science. To do this they use books. “Now when a family comes, we give them books to read [so they can] study our experiences [with ghosts], and this is more effective. Enlightenment through books has a permanent effect.”

32But even the “purified” method of cure by literature can produce unintended effects and delay the “arrival” of science. One of the main founders of the Punjabi rationalist movement, Meghraj Mitter, recounts several such instances. (1) 27-year-old Pushpa, from a village near Barnala, was being “bothered” by three ghosts: a maternal aunt, a paternal aunt and her grandmother. They choked and bit her, and demanded that she build mati (tombstones) and feed sadhus (wandering ascetics), amongst other things. Having consulted and been extorted by a long line of “godmen,” the family finally invited the rationalists to their home. Mitter had “many dialogues with her on the non-existence of ghosts”: “I also instructed her to read all three books published by our society so that she could stay away from such disease even in future. Finally, after reading our books and deliberating upon them, she was able to come out of the crisis she had been going through. But I was shocked when I came to know that her father was telling others, ‘Masterji [i.e., Mitter] treated my daughter with exorcism.’” (2) Mitter also explained how he “treated” a “haunted woman” from the outskirts of Ludhiana with rationalist literature. He told the woman, who was illiterate, to get someone more educated to read it to her. After some time, she came back to Mitter to tell him that the book had gone missing and she was once again suffering from ghosts. She confessed that while she hadn’t managed to have it read to her, simply keeping it under her pillow had meant she felt safe from the ghosts. Mitter, once more prioritizing a necessary but impure strategic anti-essentialism in the immediate present over and above the essentialism of his own understanding, and knowing full well it would again take on the function of a rationalist placebo in the modality of a magical protective amulet, gave her some more atheist literature.

Keeping-while-disposing25

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33We now consider a kind of limit case in that the anti-essentialism at stake is neither strategic nor can it necessarily be contained within a framework of relationality. Sant Sri Lokopakari is a north Indian rationalist and renouncer (sadhu) or holy man. “Lokopakari” translates roughly as “Humanitarian,” but is also suggestive of “Humanist.” Indian rationalism harbors a latent tension between two perhaps antithetical goals that are both central to the movement: on the one hand, establishing its connection to historical antecedents, in particular Buddhism and the ancient Lokayata (or Carvaka) school of Indian materialism; and on the other, critiquing inherited beliefs based on unscientific or illogical propositions. However, the exact form and extent of this critique is unclear. Should rationalists seek simply to counter specific unscientific practices or beliefs and instances of exploitative religion, or should they go further and seek to dispose of the symbolic repertoires associated with those practices/beliefs? Is it in fact possible to have the former without the latter? Further, how far is it possible to go in seeking “relation” to—and/or “keeping” aspects of—traditions otherwise subject to these critiques?

34The connections many activists claim to exist between their work and historical forbears, such as Carvaka and the Buddha, tend to be genuinely deeply felt at the same time as being strategically useful in allowing the movement to marshal evidence that “rationalism was not grafted from outside in recent years, rather it has roots in [our own] history and culture” (Singh 2019:23). This “narrative” (Quack 2012b:49) of rootedness is particularly important in light of the accusation made by Hindutva-allied groups that rationalist organizations form part of a foreign-funded, anti-national plot to uproot Hinduism and induce conversion to Christianity and/or Islam. To be able to claim that their movement is a continuation of the best traditions of critical Indian thought, one which maintains as well as disposes of aspects of inherited tradition (with the latter, indeed, a function of the former), is vital both for ensuring a sympathetic hearing from their audiences and for countering the “many critics of organized rationalism in India [who] hold that the rationalists are ‘agents of the West’ who merely continue the colonial imposition of ‘Western’ ideas on India, a process begun by the British” (Quack 2012b:49). Following on from this, much rationalist energy is expended on seeking to resolve dilemmas about the parameters and proportions of keeping-while-disposing; that is, on arguments seeking to clarify the boundaries between the irredeemably religious or superstitious—to be marked out for disposal—and the legitimately cultural, which may be kept.

35Consider the example of how, at pan-Indian humanist meetings, the wearing of turbans by some Punjabi delegates persistently provokes questioning from others present. A Punjabi activist recounted the problem to us:

Some people think the turban is [a Sikh] religious [symbol], right? [But] some people think that it is a cultural thing; and becoming an atheist doesn’t mean to leave culture, but certainly it means to leave religion. My colleague in the [Punjabi association] wears a turban, so in [national meetings] people raised an objection, you know, that he is not practicing secularism. He replied that it is a cultural thing; our [Punjabi] culture is based on humanity, and do not tag that with religion. So then [other non-Punjabi delegates] asked me, is this legitimate? Is this person right? I said he’s definitely right. Before [Sikh] Guru Gobind Singh there was also a culture of wrapping the turban. That [Punjab] is where he is from.

36The French state has notably engaged in similar secular policing with strict laws banning visible religious signs such as turbans and Islamic headscarves in schools. French Sikhs have fought legal battles in order to be allowed to continue wearing turbans in schools and other public spaces precisely on the grounds of freedom of religion. The French state, like the pan-Indian humanist body that similarly would dispose of it, views the turban as a religious sign; and those French Sikhs who contest the ruling concur on this at least (Shani 2008). However, the Punjabi humanist delegates seek to clarify the matter: the turban should not be “tagged” with religion; “a cultural thing” and “based on humanity,” it precedes the advent of the religion it is now associated with and so may be kept, remaining a perfectly legitimate adornment for one who is non-religious.

37To go back to Lokopakari, the inclusion of a renouncer-led organization within the wider rationalist movement, albeit one that professes to be atheistic and to promote scientific attitudes, was never going to be straightforward. For all that contemporary Indian atheists trace their philosophy back to the Buddha’s teachings and ancient South Asian traditions of materialism—sometimes understood as heterodox components of the Hindu tradition—and despite a complex network of connections between Indian atheist thought and the religious reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Quack 2011), the figure of the sadhu or renouncer is simply too closely tied to the guru-figures (“godmen”) whom contemporary Indian atheists expend much energy in seeking to debunk in order to form an unproblematic presence within the movement. In contemporary forms of Hinduism, a guru or sadhu is a divine human being; it would have been surprising, therefore, if Lokopakari’s bid for affiliation with the wider movement were to have passed uncontested. In light of both the contentiousness of the initial affiliation of Lokopakari’s organization and subsequent attempts to expel it, it is evidently considered “out of place” in a domain explicitly marked as non-religious.

38Lokopakari’s name was a matter of concern from the beginning. “Sant Sri” is strongly suggestive of the title of a spiritual master. His claim was that rather than a title “Sant Sri” was just his name. One can see why the distinction was important for other rationalists: spiritual masters would be unlikely members of a movement consisting almost entirely of declared atheists. Yet other female members of Lokopakari’s organization are known as sadhvis (female renouncers), and in other contexts Lokopakari does indeed describe himself as a sadhu, albeit a humanist one. Lokopakari, an atheist who wears the saffron robes of a holy man, evidently confuses category distinctions to an intolerable extent for many rationalists; his name and dress affront Indian rationalist conventions. That is to say, his repudiation (or disposal) of belief in god(s) and unscientific practices are considered to be brought into question by his continued bearing of names and attire too “bundled” up with the disposed-of elements to make the disposal convincing. He is too related to the traditions he is tasked with critiquing. We are here privy to a debate about the nature and limits of relationality and disposal in the movement.

39For most rationalists, the entanglement of dress, name and religion is too dense for one element to be extracted alone; too mutually implicated, they must all be disposed of. By contrast, Lokopakari’s retention of signs and qualities related to disposed elements as key aspects of his own non-religiosity suggests a different balance between relationality and disposal. Lokopakari suggests that name, dress and even renunciation equate not with illegitimate religiosity but instead are entirely legitimate cultural forms from which his own non-religiosity flourished. Is his approach one of strategic anti-essentialism? The cultural familiarity of these signs and qualities almost certainly enables him to receive a fairer hearing for his “scientific” message in a local milieu otherwise likely to be hostile to it. Is he not exemplary in terms of establishing (enacting, embodying) just the sorts of locally nuanced cultural and historical relations that rationalist leaders otherwise call for? For it is a commonplace of rationalist speeches and tracts to assert and encourage demonstration of continuity between the movement and local moral traditions even as the former challenges and marks for disposal certain elements of the latter. Lokopakari’s case thus points to tensions and dilemmas concerning the relationship between relatedness to tradition and disposal in rationalist movements; for what is cultural, human or religious is not self-evident, with the bundled properties of any number of forms of thought and practice bringing potential for indeterminacy and disagreement concerning the design and reach of projects of disposal. Sant Sri Lokopakari might be understood as the point at which two key emphases of Indian rationalism—(1) delineation of the movement as related to local (i.e. not an imported or “alien”) tradition, and (2) internal policing of backsliding and religious regression among members—come into conflict.

40However, Lokopakari is in several ways a limit case: the anti-essentialist relations he embodies between science-arrogated-to-rationalism and overt signs of religiosity exist scandalously beyond the limits of acceptability within the larger movement. His contested presence within it provokes renewed arguments focusing on the clarification of the boundaries between the irredeemably religious—to be marked out for disposal—and the legitimately cultural. Part of the reason it is a limit case for rationalists is that they cannot be sure that Lokopakari’s anti-essentialism exists as a strategic device at all, for he enacts apparently without any conscious design the commensuration and compatibilism of strikingly Hindu forms and a science-not-only-arrogated to-rationalism: a kind of non-secular non-religion which, exceeding the bounds of the conventional politics of rationalist lineage recognition (a project, after all, that is fundamentally pragmatic, irrespective of the question of accuracy), points to where they lie. In other contexts, this would not be controversial at all. There is, as noted earlier, a substantial history of Hindus claiming Hinduism as the most scientific of religions (e.g., Alter 2004; Frøystad 2011). As is also claimed within other religious traditions (e.g., Islam), major Hindu figures assert that their religion has foreshadowed modern scientific advances (Telliel 2019). However, in a (rationalist) tradition that qualifies and distances itself from the relations it forms with inherited tradition, and that sees religion’s engagement with science as entirely subversive, Lokopakari is considered a quisling. His anti-essentialism is neither strategic nor temporary, and the relation he embodies between rationalism and inherited tradition in the form of Hindu-coded ascetic forms is neither qualified nor distanced.

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41This is demonstrated in the story of his renunciation and enlightenment as recounted in a sympathetic humanist publication.26 At the age of 11 he leaves home seeking a guru who could guide him toward moksha (spiritual liberation). He shaves his head, wanders unclothed among naked warrior-ascetics (nagas), eats bark, walks thousands of miles, undergoes various forms of initiation, and eventually reaches the Himalayas. So far, the account is stereotypical of stories of the early spiritual careers of Indian saints; what happens next, however, is not: “It was on the Himalayas that he achieved clarity of beliefs about ishwara (the nature of reality), atma (the life-force), and moksha (liberation). It was here that he realized that supernatural beliefs are a human fantasy but he had no idea that there were any other naturalists, atheists, or humanists in the world.” Consequently desolate and contemplating suicide, he is kindly directed by a swami to an educational philosopher who had personally known and corresponded with celebrated philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell.27 After a series of conversations with the philosopher, and realizing now that he was not alone,28 Lokopakari set up a humanist center, with a school and orphanage, and adopted his new name. The center is similar in some ways to the ashram of a more conventional guru, with staff (“renouncers”) collecting alms, wearing saffron robes and bearing “religious” names. But the center promulgates a worldview that foregrounds science and non-belief in god as key tenets of a strong social reformist message.

42Rather than merely use Hindu signs to gain a hearing for science and social reform, Lokopakari’s atheism emerges from and is substantively formed by the classical Hindu path of renunciation (sannyas). Other rationalists accuse Lokopakari of embracing “a Hindu custom” of taking sannyas and renouncing the world. But it is not the world but god(s) and non-scientific worldviews that Lokopakari renounces, and it is an identifiably Hindu methodology that gives him the tools to achieve this. Disposal, for Lokopakari, is enacted through a classical Hindu form (renunciation) that other rationalists precisely target for disposal. The liberation he teaches is neither spiritual liberation nor liberation from spirituality, but one as the other. The dual meanings of enlightenment as a state arrived at after rationalization and enlightenment as spiritual transformation are not brought into relation or even conflated: rather, they are, ontologically, simply the same thing. Rather than an audience who might be expected to auto-subvert the scientific understandings communicated by rationalists, here it is the rationalist himself who presents science as something other than itself.

43Debates about how to conceptualize parallelism, similarities, relatedness and detachment between religious and non-religious practices and positions are strikingly present among both scholars of non-religion (Quack 2014; Binder 2020) and the secular formations they study (Quack, Kind and Schuh 2020; Blankholm 2022; Lundmark 2022). As an instance of the latter, militant or purist atheists might contrast their positions with those of “accommodationists” who they consider to be all too willing to accommodate “any nonsense from religious BS artists…” (Myers cited in Cimino and Smith 2012, 21). In such terms, Lokopakari, from the point of view of mainstream Indian rationalists, represents a kind of hyper-accommodationist figure who accommodates “the other” to the point of total non-differentiation. The extremity of the accommodation in this instance shatters certain key distinctions cherished by rationalists who may nevertheless be willing to make accommodations, engage in forms of “religion-relatedness,” and generally be “willing to play according to the rules of [the] religious field” (Quack, Kind and Schuh 2020:15) on other occasions, albeit in limited, temporary ways. Frustrated at his treatment, Lokopakari, for his part, retaliates by leveling an analogous accusation of “religion-likeness” (Quack, Kind and Schuh 2020:15) at his Indian rationalist tormenters, whom he characterizes as worshippers of the “Indian-Humanist-god” that prepares his “fate” and outcasts his community as a “Sinner-Group.”

Reflection

[Other rationalists] are confused. For example, [a fellow rationalist] was arguing with me the other day about homeopathy: he said it is scientific. I had to explain that that is wrong. The problem is it’s only me who clarifies all these confusions. The areas I have to clarify are mostly to do with western medicine and areas where scientific knowledge is necessary. Somebody [a rationalist] the other day was trying to explain homeopathy as nano-medicine! (Female Punjabi rationalist).

44The inability or unwillingness of rationalists’ target audience to take the “part” debunked as evidence of the inadmissibility of the “whole”recalling the thesis that India is a predominantly “context-sensitive” society (Ramanujan 1989)has, when refracted through the lens of relational analytics, led them on occasion to explore and employ what we have called a strategically anti-essentialist approach. Strategic anti-essentialism sees rationalists pause the promulgation of the irrelational essentialism of reality, as they understand it, in order to form relational tools for solving problems in the here and now, so becoming complicit in perpetuating the form of misrecognitionscience as other than itselfthey otherwise seek to combat. To adopt vocabulary used by Joseph Blankholm (2022) in his study of disbelievers in the United States, the temporary “pollution” of non-religious positions can be acceptable in order either to solve the immediate problem in front of them or to reach a promised state of “purity” further down the line.

45If the essentialism of Indian rationalists’ understanding of reality (natural/supernatural) mirrors that of New Atheism, they can be surprisingly flexible, in practice, regarding this understanding, a finding thatto invoke an academic kind of synecdochic relationbehooves scholars to avoid imputing simplistic essentialism to humanists, atheists and rationalists, and to pay attention to the ambiguities and compromises that may emerge in its pursuit. However, such compromise by rationalists can generate internal controversy that has as its arena another form of relation: that between relationality and disposal. It is not so much that rationalists wish to “slough off the transcendent” (Taylor 2007:543). Rather, they seek to dispose of what they consider to be socially harmful superstitions. But what these are is not self-evidentisolating them requires processes of clarification. Acknowledging this allows us to see that secularity, far from being an “unthought” doxa (Casanova 2011:55, 66), is explicitly taught, thought, arbitrated and policed through practices of clarification and disposal (Hagström and Copeman 2023). The parameters of keeping-while-disposing are not set. If secular humanism is a kind of “socially embodied argument, and an argument in part about the goods which constitute [it as a] tradition” (MacIntyre 1981:222), then dilemmas about keeping-while-disposing form precisely the substance of that argument. In the case of Lokopakari, his fellow rationalists see him as the embodiment of a proportionally incorrect relation between relatedness to and disposal of inherited traditions: he kept too much, disposed of too little, and was thereby not able to be contained within existing rationalist frameworks at all.

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Notes

1

Our thanks go to Vishav Bharti, Amelie Blom, Ashley Lebner, Yunus Telliel, and the anonymous reviewers—whose excellent commentaries we have drawn on substantially in making our revisions—for their enriching feedback and contributions. Copeman’s participation was made possible through the support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 817959) and Hagström’s by an ESRC PhD studentship.

2

State rationalist societies also tend to publish popular science education magazines in local languages; for example, in Punjab, “Taraksheel Society Punjab is publishing two bi-monthly magazines in Punjabi, i.e. ‘Taraksheel’ and ‘Vigyan Jot’ for the last several years. Whereas ‘Taraksheel’ is devoted to the cause of rationalism and eradication of superstitions, ‘Vigyan Jot’ is dedicated to the cause of promotion and popularization of science and technology” (Singh 2003:4).

3

For example, Vishav, son of the founder of the rationalist movement in Punjab, told Copeman that his father and other rationalists performed in public “experiments where they would set water on fire with the help of sodium, which would catch fire because of chemical reaction. Similarly, another common experiment used to be done with the help of potassium permanganate and glycerin (glycerol); the chemical reaction of both would create fire. To expose the godmen’s trick of setting something on fire with the help of mantras, they would secretly put potassium permanganate (commonly called lal dawai in Punjab) on wood or paper kept in a bowl or pot, then would claim to pour some ghee (clarified butter) on the wood, which used to be glycerin. The masses would get enthralled to see the fire triggering without any human effort from the matchbox.” Afterwards, the performers would explain, through a scientific explanation and with the audience’s participation, exactly how the trick was done—thereby “expos[ing] the godmen’s trick.”

4

“New Atheism” denotes the impact of ostensibly novel arguments against religion that saw widespread popular diffusion in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a result of the publishing successes of predominantly US- and UK-based atheist and humanist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—who are often collectively referred to as the “New Atheists” (see Copeman and Schulz 2022).

5

See also Copeman (2015), Copeman and Hagström (2022), and Copeman and Quack (2015) on non-religious aesthetics and material culture in India (naming practices, uses of visual media and body donation) and, on adjacent issues in Bangladesh, the important work of Schulz (2021, Bradbury and Schulz 2022) and in Pakistan Blom (n.d. forthcoming).

6

If such research on organized criticism of religion goes some way toward redressing the balance concerning prior assumptions of an untrammeled Indian religiosity, there lies the danger of opposing religion to some unified other in binary terms. An alternative way forward has been suggested by Quack (2017) in his more recent work which develops an approach to non-religion that is more ambivalent, graded and indeterminate. Based on a combination of ethnographic and biographical approaches, Quack engaged with people not located at the center of religious life, for example, who generally ignore or reject religious beliefs and practices associated with their religious communities. “Religious indifference” is understood here to be a gradual, temporal, situational stance that involves least possible engagement with mainstream religious concerns.

7

See also Barbour’s famous typology of possible relationships between science and religion (1997).

8

See Killingley (2014) on Vivekananda’s view of the essential harmony of science and religion and of the scientific basis of Hinduism. Elsewhere Nanda (2008) writes further of how “a perverse kind of scientism in which Hindu meta-physics which teaches pan-psychism (i.e. consciousness is a fundamental quality of even the smallest unit of matter) and vitalism (i.e. there is a special “life-force,” or “prana” that accounts for life) is being sold as if it is supported by modern science.”

9

The often-heard claim that “whatever new sophistication the west dangles before us as the latest necessity for any scientifically or socially mature society, ancient India has already produced it … is … a classic counter-hegemonic argument” in the country (Cohen 1995:331).

10

The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party; Indian People’s Party) is a Hindu nationalist political party founded in 1980. Currently in power, it considers the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a moral authority.

11

See Copeman, Duggal and Longkumer (2023:25) on India’s rationalists versus Hindutva “pseudoscience” in the context of COVID 19 and Gupta and Copeman (2018) on how the claims of Ramdev about yoga and Ayurveda are “relentlessly one of science.” Quack (2012a:79) cites the argument of Dr. Vijayam of Vijayawada’s Atheist Center that “Unlike in the West, in India there was no apparent conflict between science and religion. In India, we find that the conflict is between religion and social reform.” While the extraordinary emphasis on social reform in the Indian movement is acknowledged and central to the present essay, there being “no apparent conflict between science and religion” in India does not in any simplistic way accord with Copeman’s fieldwork experiences among rationalists for whom a conflict most decidedly exists. However, a nuanced argument could in principle be formulated—beyond the scope of this article—concerning the demarcation and essentialization, via colonial and other processes, of religion and science as socially disembedded non-overlapping singularities. And we accept Quack’s point that “the question of ‘intellectual compatibility’” between science and religion is often subordinated to “questions of injustice and social change” among India’s rationalists, which is in fact one of our main arguments in the essay.

12

See van der Veer (2014:38) on how “spirituality and secular science were not seen as at odds with each other in the nineteenth century” and also the “common view of the history of science … that over time science purifies itself from such unwarranted speculation.”

13

The term “strategic essentialism,” coined by Gayatri Spivak, which we invert in this article, does not require a lengthy explication here. As a rhetorical strategy, strategic essentialism can foster effective activism; it can also help scholars understand “situated activist logics” (Robins 2003:298). It also presents numerous pitfalls (Jackson 2019). George Lipsitz (2003) has used the term “strategic anti-essentialism” in a different manner to us here.

14

See detailed discussion in Hagström and Copeman (2023).

15

This research commenced in 2009 when Copeman spent several months shadowing activists as they traveled through rural Bihar and Karnataka conducting science education and miracle-debunking programs, and is ongoing, with particular emphasis on the Punjabi movement. Copeman has also visited rationalist associations and events in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, and the research has included attendance at one-off events (such as state- and national-level conferences and specific campaigns or protests) and regular participation in local networks (e.g., attendance of weekly meetings of a humanist society in Delhi). As with rationalist organizations globally, there is an unequal representation of the sexes in the Indian movement. Roughly speaking, active women constitute less than a quarter of the group. The caste makeup of activists is quite diverse, but the movement’s leaders tend to hail from upper-caste and upper-class backgrounds.

16

See Rationalist International (2008).

17

https://indianjournalismreview.com/2008/03/18/how-indian-tv-slayed-a-dangerous-superstition/

18

Tantra, mantra, yantra” is used here, and more generally by rationalists, as shorthand for Hindu-related superstitions. Notoriously difficult to define due to its sheer multifacetedness coupled with sensationalist portrayals in Western publications that have affected general understandings both there and in India, tantra is a set of traditions and texts that are often antinomian and secret in nature. It is popularly understood to involve black magic, sorcery and sexual practices. Mantra refers to the repetition of certain sound forms for the production of mystical effects, and yantra to spiritually charged geometric designs.

19

See Copeman (2018); Copeman and Ikegame (2012).

20

Binder (2020, 143) puts it like this: “[secular] difference can be made sensible only on the basis of similarity: the question is not whether Atheist conjuring is different from religious miracles in a structuralist or ontological sense, but how Atheists employ similarities between miracles and conjuring in order to produce secular difference as an object of perception.”

21

The latter refers to an affliction with a biological cause (Freed and Freed 1990:618).

22

See Quack (2012b:105) on how disagreements concerning the acceptability of hypnosis in educative programs contributed to a schism among Maharashtrian rationalists. Formerly employed by rationalists as a means of demonstrating to audiences how supernatural states such as spirit possession can be caused by basic psychological tricks, most rationalists now consider use of the technique to foster the superstitious states they wish to dispose of and therefore to conflict with their larger project.

23

It is conceivable that, after a very intensive review of all the available historical data, we could find analogous cases. But we believe that it is likely that Indian rationalists are the only ones doing it today.

24

However, keeping this hazardous chemical at home had drawbacks. Vishav recalls a small glass jar of it stored out of reach of him and his siblings on top of a cupboard in his house. But such caution was not always applied. He remembers an activist in nearby Haryana who kept the chemical in his bag. His young grandson once ingested it, narrowly avoiding death thanks to timely medical intervention. Another tragic incident involved the president of the Jagraon unit of the rationalists. He also kept mercuric chloride at home, and his only child, a daughter, mistakenly consumed it, leading to her tragic death. “I still remember in the mid-1990s one of the members of the Tarksheel Society recounting that horrific incident: ‘I have never seen such a violent and painful death even in Hindi films.’”

25

We adapt “keeping-while-disposing” from Annette Weiner’s “keeping-while-giving” (1992), a term that effectively emphasizes how, what is given, always—and critically—takes place in relation to what is kept over.

26

We do not disclose the source to preserve anonymity. Lokopakari’s name has also been changed due to the sensitivity of some of the debates discussed. We recognize that—since his name is a key point of contention and discussed as such in this essay—our decision to change it potentially harms the analysis. We have chosen, however, semantic-functional equivalents which, we believe, allow the sense of our argument to be preserved.

27

Indian rationalism’s global connectivity is longstanding. In the nineteenth century, “the first self-declared atheist groups were to be found in centers of Indo-Western exchange …, cities like Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai), and Calcutta (Kolkata), where ‘infidel literature’ from rationalist, secularist, and atheist groups from Great Britain was available. Initially, terms like ‘freethinker’ and ‘secularists’ were common; later most groups called themselves ‘rationalists,’ arguing that rationalism implied atheism. Most of those behind the emergent rationalist and atheist movement in 20th-century India were well-educated Indian intellectuals with strong affinities to Western education and culture, while some had direct connections to the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) in London” (Quack 2011:631). The tradition continues, for example, with the translation into Tamil of Richard Dawkins’ New Atheist classic The God Delusion. Conversely, for the influence of non-Western rationalism on contemporary Western freethinking communities, see Hagström 2022.

28

See Engelke (2014:297) on “realization humanists.” “The label refers to individuals who, through a variety of trajectories, came to understand—to ‘realize’—that there exists a label (‘humanist’) for ideas and values that they held prior to ever hearing the word” (Hagström 2022).

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References

Electronic reference

Jacob Copeman and John Hagström, Science as Other than ItselfSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 32 | 2024, Online since 24 January 2025, connection on 15 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/9742; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/136kj

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About the authors

Jacob Copeman

Oportunius Research Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela

By this author

John Hagström

Independent researcher

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