A Field Guide to Post-Truth India

This book describes the refashioning of thought in contemporary India.  The thread that runs through the essays collected here is that under the pretext of decolonization of the Indian mind, our fundamental conceptions of reality and truth are being brought in line with “Indian Knowledge Systems.” A post-truth culture is emerging in which myths substitute for history, pseudoscience parades as science, mysticism lays claims as a legitimate scientific method and baldfaced lies drown out objective facts.  Post-secular India is on its way to becoming a post-truth society.

Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1.  Big Lies and Deep Lies in Post-Truth India.
Chapter 2. Defending Tradition, Defying Science:  Ayurveda in the Time of COVID-19
Chapter 3. The Dark Age of the Unicorn: Searching for Indigenous Aryans
Chapter 4. India’s Long Goodbye to Darwin
Chapter 5 . Yogic Perception and Hindu Sciences, from Early Beginnings to Our Troubled Times
Appendix. Science Sanskritized: How Modern Science Became a Handmaiden of Hindu Nationalism
Bibliography
Index

Cover image: Etching by Francisco Goya.’The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’. 1797-98.