Book review

Abstract

A body of recent scholarship assumes that because European writers were constrained by a certain notion of what a religion is, they imposed an artificial conceptual unity on the diverse religions they encountered in India. But during the earlier phases of European contact with India, ‘religion’ had not yet fully undergone the process of reification first analysed by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. A study of descriptions of Indian religions from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century in the works of Roberto Nobili, Henry Lord, Abraham Roger and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg demonstrates that there was no simple and straightforward imposition of unity on these religions. The term ‘religion’ was used, along with others such as ‘sect’ and ‘nation’, to analyse the plurality of religious affiliation in India in a manner that was not divorced from Indian self-representations. While the idea of a unified religion, characterised by canonical texts, a common deity and doctrinal uniformity, doubtless played a role in later nineteenth-century constructions of Hinduism, this very idea is presupposed in current critiques of such constructions which deny that Hinduism is a religion on the basis that it lacks the qualities of a religion defined in this way.