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The Arya Samaj has long been distinguished among nineteenth century reform organizations as forerunner of Hindu nationalist politics and exemplar of Hindu religious intolerance. Arya Samaj practices that can be classed as proselytizing lie at the heart of this scholarly assessment: practices of religious controversy between contending Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian organizations; and the shuddhi ritual of conversion or purification. This chapter argues that understandings of the so-called proselytizing activities of the Arya Samaj have been circumscribed by the framing narrative of Hindu Tolerance. One consequence is a near exclusive focus on the motives or intentions of Hindu elite ‘proselytizers’ in the Arya Samaj. When shuddhi is viewed from the perspective of those who pursued conversion, its subversive potential becomes visible. The chapter treats the case of the Arya Samaj controversialist and former Muslim, Dharm Pal, who pursued shuddhi as a step towards radical caste reform.

Chapter 4 details the political connotations that the language of universal religion came to acquire when Arya Samajists and colonial officials negotiated the colonial policy of religious toleration in the years after 1907. As colonial officials became preoccupied with the question of how to determine whether their organization was religious in the generic sense, or whether it was compromised by political entanglements, Arya Samaj leaders found new utility in the language of universal religion. After 1907, characterizations of shuddhi as religious proselytizing subserved Arya Samaj claims to religious freedom from government interference.

Chapter 5 describes the contested practices and politics of shuddhi through the first decade of the twentieth century. Scholars have emphasized how shuddhi served the interests of caste Hindu elites in the politics of representation. The chapter complicates this picture by documenting how non-elites—including Untouchables and Muslims—appropriated shuddhi into their own ritual-political initiatives in ways that rendered shuddhi’s contribution to the upper-caste politics of Hindu unity uncertain. Questioning whether shuddhi can be adequately described in terms of proselytizing or conversion, the chapter makes visible forms of nonelite politics that the language of religion obscures.

This chapter explores how education was used to train both the mind and body to promote active participation in society, a belief common to Indian and Western understandings of the connection between a citizen’s physical health and service to society The leaders of the subcontinent’s social service organizations were keen that healthy Indians became active, patriotic, and efficient citizens. The chapter focuses on the educational interventions of the Arya Samaj, the Kanya Mahavidyalaya, the Theosophical Society, The Servants of India Society, The Kangri Gurukul, among others. Students were also encouraged to reject colonial employment in favour of social service. The observation of brahmacharya was encouraged amongst male students. The chapter also describes the physical capabilities of Professor Ramamurti Naidu, the athletics instructor of Central Hindu College. The influence of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) is discussed as is also the threat posed by the growing number of Boy Scout movements to British power.

This chapter introduces Subhashini as a colonial subject and engages with her life history. It seeks to connect and situate a daughter's testimony within a parallel social history — a history of the Arya Samaj — and her father's life history. The shifting contexts within which the author frames Subhashini's story are informed by the narrative tensions in the testimony. There are many stories in this chapter.

This chapter sets the socio-economic and cultural scene for the book by looking at the meaning of socio-religious ‘uplift’ in Punjab. It begins by analyzing the socio-economic and cultural background in Punjab, and in particular where rural low-caste peoples were concerned. The shifting yet enduringly dependent and isolated nature of low-caste life is explored, and its manifestation in idiosyncratic and combative forms of low-caste religion analyzed. ‘Uplift’ in the Victorian British context is then examined, followed through to its appearance in Punjab in a variety of forms from the work of mission societies and British officials such as Lieutenant Frank Brayne and Sir Malcolm Darling, to Indian innovations such as the Arya Samaj and Ad Dharm religious movements.

This chapter poses the question: Why did the Arya Samaj represent a nav prakāś (new light) for Sankrityayan? It will explain how Sankrityayan envisaged a revival that might take place in Indian society and how he came to regard the Arya Samaj, in its fostering of deś bhakti (nationalism, patriotism) and the desire for rāṣtrīya kārya (national work), as instrumental for the emergence of nationalist sentiment in him. This is the period of Sankrityayan’s first ‘inarticulate glimpse’ (asphut jhā̃kī) of the ideal he saw the nation striving to attain: a mixture of the Arya Samaj’s principles and his own vague understanding of the ideas of the Russian Revolution. It also discusses the different ways Sankrityayan understood the word ‘Hindu’ at different stages of his life.

When the first Indian workers were introduced to the Natal coast of South Africa in 1860, inexperienced entrepreneurs were just learning how to grow sugarcane, and many workers were assigned to civic work in the port city of Durban or the inland provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg. When Muslim traders later arrived in Durban and Gandhi began political organizing in 1893, the primary base of the Indian community was shifted to those cities. Most of the workers in South Africa were from South India, and the temples they built after the beginning of the twentieth century were Sanskritized temples with brāhmanical ritual and a subsidiary role for the goddesses. By 1947, the Natal Indian Congress was fighting for basic political rights for Indians, and that fight inspired the later effort of the African National Congress. Throughout this period, reform religious bodies such as the Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Centre, and the Hari Kṛṣṇas grew in importance.

Chapter 2 revisits the nineteenth-century culture of debate that scholars have treated under the rubric of “religious controversy.” In order to make visible the work of translation that was required when Indians represented their concerns before the state, the chapter unsettles the apparent necessity of describing Arya Samaj practices in terms of religion. Where scholarship has focused on elite practices of debate, describing them in terms of competing truth-claims and disputation of doctrine, the chapter documents how nonelites appropriated Arya Samaj techniques of controversy and reformed Vedic ceremony for what is best described as a ritual-politics of low-caste assertion. The chapter points to the limits of religion as a descriptive category to gain critical leverage on the history of secularism in India.

The plantation owners of Mauritius were French settlers who had established an aristocratic style for themselves during the eighteenth century using slaves from Africa. The Indian workers quickly came to constitute three‐quarters of the total population, but they respected the cultural norms the French had already established. Many were soon plantation owners themselves, and they created a parallel Indian aristocracy. There are fine stone temples for the goddesses Mīnākṣi, Draupadī, and Māriyamman in the South Indian style, and a beautiful North Indian‐style temple in Triolet. In the early twentieth century, the Arya Samaj became active and built a plainer style of temple. After the introduction of democratic government in 1968, the Indian political leadership was careful not to change the French‐led cultural pattern too drastically. The one notable change is the new public celebration of Śivarātri.

In this chapter Ruchi Ram Sahni describes four years of college life at the Government College, Lahore. It includes a lengthy discussion of his teachers at the time, such as Dr G.W. Leitner, J.C. Oman, and Maulavi Mohammed Hussain Azad. It offers several reflections on teaching and pedagogy, some drawn from his own experiences as a teacher. Sahni also describes attempts to challenge various forms of orthodoxy and occultism, for instance, in connection with a visit to Lahore by Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. These challenges were of a piece of the general culture of discussion and debate in which Sahni and his friends found themselves, whether arguing over the texts of Mill and Bentham or engaging in public debates on a variety of topics. Many of these debates were with close friends associated with the Arya Samaj, whose doctrines were opposed by Sahni, an early adherent of the Brahmo Samaj in Punjab.

Many early Victorian writers considered India to be at the threshold of a new way of life under the combined influence of the new administrative and mercantile dispensations and evangelical Christianity. However, the critics overlooked the vitality of the inner dynamism of Hinduism. The character of the mixed response of Bengali intellectuals to the cultural impact of the West is best illustrated by the creed and social concerns of the Brahmo Sabha, founded by Rammohun Roy, and its successor, the Brahmo Samaj. This chapter examines Hindu religious tradition, focusing on religious revivalism and fundamentalism. It then analyses the Arya Samaj, the ideology of Hindutva and the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and Mahatma Gandhi's Hinduism.

This chapter examines the education-for women enterprise of the Singh Sabha reformers which became the common goal uniting various the factions of other reform movements both within the Sikh community and outside it. The help of European women from the Western missionary organizations was sought to teach Sikh women from elite families, while schools for a specifically Sikh education for girls (e.g. the Sikh Kanya Mahavidyala) were set up. How the language issue—Gurmukhi vs. Hindi—got implicated in the education for women are also discussed. The author describes the difficulties facing reforms in education in the light of the Jat Sikh belief in a virile masculinity and which saw education as an effeminizing process. The author also focuses on the Sikh Educational Conference in Gujranwala of 1908. The differences between the Arya Samaj women's educational endeavour (which went back sources in the Vedas) and those of the Tat Khalsa (which went back to the teachings of the Sikh gurus) are also analyzed. While the reformers consistently maintained the ‘proper’ place of their womenfolk was at home, they also encouraged Sikh women to become teachers and headmistresses. ‘Service along with duty’ increasingly became the slogan of the Singh Sabha reformers in their transformational exercise of Sikh women. After a discussion of Bhai Vir Singh (in whose writing there is a concerted effort to create role models for Sikh women), the chapter concludes with a discussion of how the colonial state made sure that continuing loyalty to the Crown was not eroded in the educational endeavours of all reformers.

The introduction examines the Indian secularist ideal of Tolerance as it has informed both public life and historical reflection, giving special attention to how it has shaped debates over religious freedom and conversion. The Tolerance critique of religious freedom is often understanding as a Hindu religious perspective on a human right that has framed predominantly by Christian attitudes to conversion. The chapter argues on both analytical and historical grounds that this is a flawed understanding.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Theosophical Society and the Indian Arya Samaj during the period between 1878 and 1882. While some of the overall details of these events are well known, this chapter offers new insight into how the two parties imagined and misrepresented each other and how these misrepresentations were reflections of the wider contemporary cultural representations of East and West. The chapter charts the relationship between the founders of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, and Swami Dayananda Saraswati of the Arya Samaj over the course of their initial written correspondence and their subsequent personal encounters in India, which began enthusiastically on both sides but ultimately ended in a public breaking of ties.

This chapter explores the history of two of the principal social and religious movements in colonial India: the Arya and Brahmo Samaj movements. It shows how each of these exhibits the characteristics of renaissance movements, and how each contributed to the secularization of Indian philosophical thought and to the modernization of Indian culture.

This chapter illustrates how the development of an associational culture relates to the shaping of Indian society and the conceptualization of the Indian ‘nation.’ The author discusses the views of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Annie Besant, and Madan Mohan Malviya regarding the importance of social service organizations in the consolidation of Indian civil society, and the raising of political awareness among the young. The author emphasizes that the patriotism inherent in social service contributed to Indian nation building. He describes how, because of these associations, M.K. Gandhi was able to mobilize vast numbers of patriotic students and youth in protests against British rule. How institutionally disparate Hindu and Muslim volunteer organizations often worked together is also described. The author concludes by stating that the proliferation of social service institutions in early twentieth century India assumed greater and greater control over national life, and ‘hollowed out’ the colonial state from within, thus diminishing its authority and legitimacy.

This chapter considers the Singh Sabha, a society that protested against the speeches of a Hindu orator, and the missionary activity of Christians and Hindus. It illustrates that the Radha Soami, Nirankari, and Namdhari movements made a small impact on the Sikhs. These all developed into schismatic coteries that owed allegiance to their particular guru and practised their own obscure rituals. It shows that after an American Presbyterian Mission was established in Ludhiana, other religious factions opened their own centres. The British officials, however, actively supported the Christian missionaries. The chapter moves on to discuss the Singh Sabhas of Amritsar and Lahore, and introduces the Arya Samaj. The followers of Arya Samaj believed in a single omnipresent and invisible God who was equal to human beings.