also Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the same period the term “Hindu,” which had
been first a geographical and then an ethnic label, came to be used as a religious
one, and a religion called Hinduism was discovered or invented (see Gavin
Flood’s Introduction to this volume).
The period referred to as “modern” in which these changes took place
extends, very roughly, from the end of the eighteenth century through the twen-
tieth. Some twentieth-century developments are considered in chapters in the
present volume (Prasad, Ramaswamy, Viswanathan, Smith). For our present
purposes, India becomes modern when communication is facilitated by means
such as printing, translation, and education, both in Indian languages and in
English, forming an arena in which public debate can take place. This arena,
however, was a restricted one, to which most of the population had no access; it
functioned mainly in large cities, and even there it was the preserve of an elite.
It follows that in the modern period some parts of India, and some classes in
Indian society, were more modern than others.
The Political Framework
Most of the religious thinkers we shall mention were involved in politics, and all
were aware of the great political fact of foreign rule. Much has been written
about colonialism as a factor in Western (or more precisely North Atlantic)
understanding of India, and in Indian self-understanding (e.g. Kopf 1969; Inden
1990). However, the use of this term, suggesting a single relationship of power
and exploitation, conceals the variety of relationships that existed at different
times and places between different groups of Indians on the one hand, and dif-
ferent British groups on the other.
In the eighteenth century the East India Company, which embodied British
power in India from its establishment in 1600 to its abolition in 1858, still
regarded itself as a trading company, and as deriving its political and fiscal
authority from the Mughal Emperor and other indigenous powers. However,
successive renewals of the Company’s charter, at twenty-year intervals from
1773 to 1853, brought it increasingly under the control of Parliament until the
government of British India was placed directly under the Crown in 1858.
From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century the Company
acquired power in different territories at different times, by different means, and
with different intentions. Moreover, even from the 1850s, when the political map
of India reached the form which it retained, with a few changes, until 1947,
about a third of the area was not ruled directly by the British, but by indigenous
princes bound by treaties requiring them to accept the advice of officials who
were partly diplomats and partly colonial governors. Some enclaves, again, were
colonies of European powers other than Britain: Denmark, France, the Nether-
lands, and Portugal.
The policies of the Company’s directors in London were often at odds not only
with those of the British government but with those of its employees in India,
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