William Gould is Senior Lecturer in Indian History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (2004) and Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s (2010).

• 1. Introduction: community and conflict in South Asia; 2. Building spheres of community: 1860s–1910s; 3. Transforming spheres of community: the post First World War world; 4. Nationalising spheres of community: anti-colonialism and religious politics; 5. The 1940s, state transformation, community and conflict; 6. National integrity and pluralism, 1947–1967; 7. The decades of transformation: 1970s and 1980s; 8. The resurgence of religious nationalism: 1990 to the present.

'Gould's magnificent tour d'horizon provides a very comprehensive and insightful account of religion and conflict in South Asia, straddling the colonial and postcolonial periods. The author has achieved an ideal combination of depth of analysis with breadth of coverage, weaving his way through some of the major academic debates in the field. The book will, no doubt, become an authoritative text for the study of this important subject.' Nandini Gooptu, University of Oxford