Modern hindusim and the genealogies of self-rule
- 1st ed.
- Delhi Primus Books c2016
- xi, 267 p. 24 cm.
Includes index
Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformat on and the liberal idea of the self-governing 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.