In the past decades, there has been a growing production of scholarly literature devoted to understanding the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, particularly emphasizing its invocation of a monolithic past to consolidate the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Banu Subramaniam, a leading researcher in the field of feminist science studies and professor in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, makes an intervention with her book to retell the story of Hindu nationalism rather uniquely, placing it at the intersection of postcolonial, feminist, and science and technology studies. Moving away from characterizing the contours of modernity in India as scientific/secular or traditional/religious, Subramaniam recognizes the multiplicity that marks India's modernity with its embrace of science, technology, and developmentalism as well as the resurgence of a politico‐religious hypernationalism.

Most crucial in this book is the concept of “archaic modernity,” essentially meaning the reconfiguration of tradition within the milieu of a modern, scientific nation‐state, a vision that is crucial to contemporary India. Using the concept of archaic modernity in outlining five illustrations, she highlights that which makes Hindu nationalism distinctive: it no longer merely invokes the ancient and the traditional. Science and religion in India no longer stand in opposition to one another, and it is in this light that she professes to analyze the multivocal entanglements of science and religion, to recognize them as “tools, allies, synergies, partners, symbionts, challengers, colluders, or syncretic collaborators” (p. 42) coming together to consolidate an immensely robust brand of political nationalism. She identifies certain vital elements that they share for the purpose of her argument: both share a vibrant plurality of cosmologies and ways of knowing the world. Both have been instrumentally imbued in oppressive politics, histories, and practices.

There is existing literature that points to the institutionalized violence of the Western scientific model and its alliance with the developmental vision of post‐Independent India. Subramaniam takes a further step and argues that the epistemic authority of modern science does not merely impose its supremacy upon its colonies; instead, the tyrannical character of science finds new allies, new modes of realization in a Hindu nationalist India. The deeply heterogeneous narratives of mythology in India provide a corpus of stories of transmutation of humans, human‐animal hybridization, imaginary creatures that defy distinctions between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and ancient and modern. Emergent claims are keen on harnessing these stories to demonstrate that science and technology have been intrinsic and indigenous to Hinduism, for instance, the belief that anthropomorphic gods such as Lord Ganesha (the elephant‐headed deity) are a testimony to the fact that ancient Hindu civilization was privy to medical knowledge of cosmetic surgery.

Subramaniam provides an array of fascinating illustrations of archaic modernity, but a particularly exciting one is discussed in her section on genetic nationalism. The cultivation of “origin stories” of Hindu identity draws legitimacy from scientific and genetic evidence, be it in the form of state‐funded genomic projects the sequencing of genomes in the Indian population to uncover susceptibility to disease, reports of genetic evidence for the origin of the caste system and linkages of upper‐caste DNA with European haplogroups, the incorporation of indigenous medical knowledge such as Ayurveda into genetics (Ayurgenomics), all of which espouse for the standardization of human biology of the Indian population, and consequently interlinking genetic and national identity.

Biology has come to be the core of political Hindu nationalism in establishing Hinduism as a modern, scientific religion. Claims to a homogenous group identity, endogamy, purity, and pollution are rooted in nativist scientific and biological discourses around the purity of Hindu blood and the commonality of DNA. Subramaniam calls this “bionationalism” to describe the transition of a traditional ethnic nationalism into one in which its core ideas are scientized using biopolitical claims. On the one hand, it allows for the claim of the long‐term existence of scientific thought in ancient India and, simultaneously, retention of gender and caste hierarchies in its embrace of a new modernity. She draws from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics but reframes it in the context of her analysis of the postcolonial world. Postcolonial biopolitics, she argues, has to account for not only Western practices of governmentality during the colonial rule but also the biopolitical practices that emerged through the anticolonial struggle. Postcolonial biopolitics, thus, has to be characterized by competing claims that have come to shape “bionationalism.” This heterogeneity is best understood in the case illustration of the legacy of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in which the category of “unnatural sex” was not only produced by colonial Christian and medical imaginaries of sexual hierarchy. It was also remade by the anticolonial elite who reified categories of home, family, and sexuality with an upper‐caste morality while constructing the non‐Hindu, lower‐caste, and Muslim as a sexual “other,” positing them as uncivilized and promiscuous.

The book persuasively makes some important contributions in the disciplinary domains of STS and postcolonial studies. Building on the critique of the religious‐secular binary, she disrupts the idea of a nonreligious science by revealing that what is understood as Western science not “secular” but is fundamentally built upon Christian ideology. STS needs to seriously account for the mutual constitution of the religious and secular instead of reifying science as a separate and secular domain and the wide‐ranging cosmologies of religious beliefs and practices in the postcolonial world. She also seeks to disrupt the understanding of the supremacy of Western science on the postcolonial world by bringing into light the complex and hybrid contestations in the interaction of Western and indigenous systems of knowledge that simultaneously contradict and harmonize with each other.

Subramaniam's writing style is particularly fascinating as she begins her chapter‐wise illustrations with short stories of science fiction, stories that mean to display her larger argument about the creativity of storytelling and the “naturecultural possibilities” that it enables. In highlighting the animated practice of storytelling in Hindu mythology, she writes the hegemonic, unilinear conception of Hinduism that has been cast to promote an idea of the Hindu nation obscuring an array of diverse, plural, polytheistic, flexible imaginative worlds, their defiance of the binarism of nature and culture, human and nonhuman, scientific and spiritual, which provide tools that can be reclaimed as a site of radical politics. The eschewal of these possibilities to construct singular narratives in history, she claims, reminds us that “nothing is inevitable, and other lives and other futures were and are always possible” (p. xiii). Since the mythological stories associated with Hinduism are burdened with oppressive meanings of caste and gender in the current era, one is skeptical about the extent to which an emancipatory reclamation and retelling is possible. However, this book proves to be enriching in systematically bringing back the enchanting prospects that underlie science and religion and in showing that the stories that end up being told are the ones that are produced by networks of power hierarchies that deploy the hybridization of science and religion to facilitate oppressive, totalizing claims of truth.