Description
Book SynopsisHow did Hindu reformers make the religion modern? Brian Hatcher argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Exploring two nineteenth-century Hindu movements, the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, he challenges the notion of religious reform.
Trade ReviewRequired reading not only for scholars of Hindu studies and South Asian religions but also for any student or scholar engaged in reflection on the concepts of reform, publics, modernity, and coloniality. The book is also highly recommended for anyone invested in interrogating the persistent colonial legacy of the concepts and categories used in the study of religion…Hatcher shows us a different way of thinking not only about colonial India, but also about what it means to read and understand texts in their respective contexts. -- Bennett Comerford * Reading Religion *
In opening up new ways to understand the history of pre-modern and modern India, Hatcher gives scholars in history, religious studies, and theology new material to rethink Hindu-Christian relationships…Delightful reading. -- Edward T. Ulrich * Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies *
This ambitious book challenges some of our basic assumptions about the beginnings of modern Hinduism and our understandings of its present. Brian Hatcher bravely spans the Indian subcontinent, from Arabian Sea to Bay of Bengal, to compare two foundational religious movements of the early nineteenth century. Working outside the usual framework of ‘reform,’ Hatcher explores the fundamental problems and possibilities of religion in early colonial modernity. -- Richard H. Davis, author of
The Bhagavad Gita: A BiographyBrian Hatcher makes us radically rethink the master tropes of the study of religion. The alternatives he proposes and his delineation of the ‘Empire of Reform’ are of immense value to any project that has not already escaped the strictures imposed by the discourses of coloniality, modernity, and globalization. -- Leela Prasad, author of
Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian TownIn
Hinduism Before Reform, Hatcher engages with two important early colonial religious movements in India to argue that what we think of as ‘Hinduism’ is intricately involved in an ‘empire of reform’ bequeathed to us by the British Raj, the Enlightenment, Protestant missionaries, and Indian reformers. The result is at once radically plural, culturally provocative, and intellectually persuasive. Readers are in very good and very sure hands on every page of this sophisticated mind-bender. -- Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of
The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of KnowledgeIn this major contribution to the discourse on religion and reform, Brian Hatcher spotlights two contemporaneous religious innovators in early colonial India: Rammohun Roy and Swaminarayan. The result is a splendid, nuanced reassessment of what we now call ‘modern Hinduism.’ -- Paul B. Courtright, author of
Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings
