Description
Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the selfgoverning individual that arose from it. In Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule, J. Barton Scott
reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled
with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the ‘self-ruling subject’ crucial to both nineteenth-century
reform culture and early twentieth-century anti-colonialism in India. Scott uses the quaint term ‘priestcraft’
to track anticlerical polemics that vilified religious hierarchy, celebrated the individual, and endeavoured to
reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influence. By drawing on English, Hindi, and
Gujarati reformist writings, Scott provides a panoramic view of precisely how the spectre of the crafty priest
transformed religion and politics in India.