The flourishing of new knowledge of India's past by British and European scholars and administrators, the emergence of a post-theological notion of religion based on an comparative paradigm of universal religiousness in the contexts of cultural specificity, an increasingly insistent Protestant mission movement, a secular utilitarian notion of civilization, and a new discourse of Hindu among Indians in India were taking place simultaneously in the early nineteenth century. Brian Pennington has investigated each of these threads and their interwoven complexity and located them within the matrix of the post-colonial academic study of religion. A worthy and worthwhile contribution to understanding a misunderstood past.