Introduction: Rethinking Religious Change in Nineteenth-Century South Asia

The introduction presents a new model to account for the emergence of modern Hinduism. Prevailing scholarship on nineteenth-century Hinduism has focused on cosmopolitan Hindu reform leaders who formulated new Hindu expressions in dialogue with Western ideas and models. These studies insist that Western influence provided the impetus for Hindu modernization, leaving little space for Hindu traditions to play a creative role in religious change. This chapter advances a model of modernization that highlights the transformative, modernizing capacities of tradition. It presents new ways of doing scholarly work that more accurately reflect diverse ways of being modern, as well as the agency of a greater range of actors, not just for the case of Hindus, but for colonized people throughout the world.