This book began after a series of conversations with Ayesha Jalal on the nature of reform and religious life on the campus of Tufts University over a decade ago. An extension, of sorts, of the many discussions with her on the topic since my days as her PhD student twenty years ago, I was struck by the need to study religion in the era of nineteenth-century reform not with an eye toward communalism that developed later in time, but to the many meanings of religion, especially comparative religion, in the nineteenth century.

Another important moment emerged at a 2014 conference on the occasion of the anniversary of the Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, convened by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. In a panel on religion in nineteenth-century India in which I discussed religious reform, I fell into a long conversation with the great scholar Professor Susannah Heschel on various aspects of religion, history, and approaches to empire. This chance encounter led me to think seriously about religion's many historical guises. For that generative discussion and for ongoing friendship and fellowship, I am grateful.

Ideas developed in this book grew after the ‘Religion and Its Others: Power, Sovereignty, and Politics in Indian Religions Past and Present’ workshop, funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute at the University of Victoria in March 14–15, 2019. This workshop featured the generative work of Rinku Lamba, A. Azfar Moin, J. Barton Scott, Shruti Patel, Brian Hatcher, Uday Chandra, and Ramesh Bairy.