Professor Krishna Mohan Shrimali is amongst the handful of scholars who have consistently pursued an academic interest in the histories of religious traditions. What is more, his analysis is almost invariably located within the socio-economic contexts of these traditions and is informed by a careful consideration of historiographical debates.
Companionship’ can be a limp word; it lacks the intimacy of friendship or the instrumentality of a working relationship. And yet, it serves the title of this volume well, claiming to be neither definitive nor comprehensive, an almost leisurely exploration of the subject, his facets and foibles, his many individualisms and his many more many inconsistencies.
The book authored by Amar Farooqui written at the fag end of his teaching career contains the filtered essence of earlier voluminous scholarship on various components and aspects of British consolidation in the Indian subcontinent. The filtered essence has been further fermented by recent historiographical debates on the subject, thus imparting the information and interpretation an unusual freshness.
This is one of those books that breeze across centuries and continents, leaving the reader’s mind ventilated by long cultural cross currents. Puchner argues that culture cannot be considered hived off, discrete, and possessed exclusively by a set of people. This is the kind of nigglingly neat billiard ball understanding of culture that political theorists operated with as they made the case for cultural pluralism or multiculturalism.
In a crucial scene set in an underground temple in Bankimchandra Chatterji’s Anandamath, the protagonist Mahendra first encounters the Motherland, as he goes into a dark room, and ‘Gradually a picture revealed itself to him. It was a gigantic, imposing, resplendent, yes, almost a living map of India. This is our Mother India as she was before British conquest,’ he was told.
It was with keen and eager expectation that I picked up and perused Chad M Bauman’s Anti-Christian Violence in India (originally published by Cornell University Press, 2020). The book is a timely contribution to understanding an issue of extreme significance not just to the Indian Christian community but also to the secular-democratic fabric of India itself.