Soumen Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of History at Presidency University, Kolkata. His research interests are in the fields of socio-religious and intellectual history of modern South Asia, with particular focus on questions of identity, religious normativity and social service, sacred travels and sacred space, and on the intersection of religious traditions and scientism. He is also interested in histories of South Asian diasporas and religious networks on the Indian Ocean, and in understanding religious and cultural encounters on the Himalayan borderlands.

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Glossary; Note on transliteration; Introduction; 1. The Khoja Ismailis and legal polemics: religion and customs in nineteenth-century Bombay; 2. The Howardian moment: morality, Aryanism and scholarship; 3. Pan-Islamism and an Asiatic spirit: postnational subjectivities in an age of 'transition'; 4. The Hazir Imam, Ismailism and Islam in late Colonial South Asia; 5. The importance of being Ismaili: religious normativity and the Ismaili International in the age of global assemblages; Concluding reflections; Select bibliography.

'By far the most substantial and sophisticated study of the Ismailis in modern times, Mukherjee's book is at the same time a significant contribution to the study of South Asian forms of intellectual, cultural, religious and economic globalisation. By attaching these processes to the debates and institutions that came to define a small Indian community from the nineteenth century, he is able to ground them historically in such a way as to show how the most minor of groups may come to broach and develop in a distinctive fashion some of the major movements of our time.' Faisal Devji, University of Oxford