http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/reviewsprint.php?id=2

"Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward

A review by Robert Nola

Meera Nandas book Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and
compelling book. Few in the West are aware of the alarming confluence
of ideas arising out of the contemporary nationalistic politics of
India with its endorsement of 'Vedic science'"

snip

Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what
Jeffery Herf calls reactionary modernism in his study of the Weimar
Republic and the Third Reich. This is an outlook that enabled Germans
to accept modern scientific technology while at the same time they
adopted politically illiberal and reactionary policies and rejected
much of the rationality of the enlightenment that informs science. Her
thesis is that contemporary India is in the grip of a version of
reactionary modernism in which political nationalism is accompanied by
technological advance; but the science that informs it has been
stripped of its enlightenment context and relocated within the context
of nationalistic religion, 'Vedic Science'. The stripping and