Chips from a Calcutta Workshop

Neilesh Bose is Professor of History at the University of Victoria. His research explores culture, religion, and social change in India, Bangladesh, and their many diasporas in the modern world. His published works include Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (2014), Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives: South Asian Migrations in Global History (2020), and India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization (2022).

• List of Figures; Preface and Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Methods for Modern Indian Religion: Translation; 2. Texts for Modern Indian Religion: Canon Formation; 3. Institutions of Comparisons: Creating a Universal Religion; 4. Tensions in the Reconstruction of Indian Religion: Universalism and Pluralism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Neilesh Bose's Refining Religion: Comparative Religion in Nineteenth-Century India is an important intervention in the field of global religious studies. The argument places itself within the entanglements of religious belief and practice in modern India before the arrival of Gandhi and secularism. A veritable histoire croisée, it is a masterful approach towards writing a broad intellectual history of religion in the Indic universe that accounts for Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Vaisnava, Brahmo and Christian sources along with the Hindu ones. Using the lens of comparative religion, Bose has convincingly made a case for a kind of eclecticism made possible by networks of translation, canon formation, the idea of universal religion, and pluralism, that cannot be explained simply through the categories of colonialism or nationalism but have to fall back on earlier ideas of sulh-i-kull or Din-i- Ilahi. Through a close reading of the works of Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda, this monograph will help scholars across the globe recalibrate their conceptions of Indic religions in the modern world.' Sumit Chakrabarti, Presidency University