Writing the history of secularism in India is as fraught a task as writing the history of liberalism, the history of socialism, or the history of nationalism. Like these three other concepts, secularism implies both a set of ideas as well as practices that relate back, at some level, to the European origin point of these ideas. For their appearance in colonial India, historians have been offering a variety of interpretations that seek to both situate India in its own history but to come to terms with encounters with ideas that emerged elsewhere. Cassie Adcock’s The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom is one of the latest contributions in the ongoing debates about the nature and history of secularism in India.

Through three parts of two chapters each, Adcock takes her readers on a critical history of secularism in India through the particular history of the Arya Samaj in the Punjab in the northwest of India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a manifesto about the historiography of secularism and at the same time a history of the Arya Samaj, the book offers an intellectual history of the term religion in colonial India and the historical results of the emergence of this term in the specific context of the colonial Punjab.

She begins in her introduction with a brief analysis of the tendency for scholars to declare that Tolerance (used in Adcock’s text with a capital T) functions as a discourse that played a major role in the specifically Indian history of secularism that emerged in colonial India. Adcock presents the Tolerance perspective as one that interprets Hinduism as essentially tolerant of difference and, significantly, non-proselytizing, contrasted with proselytizing religions such as Christianity. Furthermore, this Tolerance is the bedrock of Indian secularism and, for Adcock, hides a number of assumptions about religion. The Tolerance perspective and the ideas it upholds, for Adcock, is shown through numerous laws passed in independent India that restrict the right to proselytize, keeping the assumption that proselytisation is not a part of Hinduism, and also that Hinduism is the religion of the majority of Indians. Adcock sets out her goal to deconstruct and then historically examine what lurks behind this Tolerance through a historical study of how the term religion emerged in nineteenth century India, its European inheritances, and the Indian uses to which the term religion has been marshaled.

Adcock approaches this topic by offering three inter-related historical discussions: the emergence of categories of religion in nineteenth century India, the historical rise of the Arya Samaj, a reformist organization based in the Punjab and their usage of shuddhi, or the reconversion or inclusion of individuals into the Hindu community, and a focus on the “ritual-politics” of non-elites’ relationship to shuddhi. Part I, Religion and Translation in Colonial India, offers her manifesto, that “only by abjuring religion as a descriptive category can we suspend established narratives of Indian secularism and foreground the politics of translation” (40). Here, she argues that rather than focus on the politics of representation, as has been the case in many studies of religion in colonial India, the more appropriate focus for a critical history of secularism would be the politics of translation, in which Indian actors had appropriated and recast various definitions of religion for their own purposes. In this section, readers learn about the procedure of shuddhi, sometimes defined as “reconversion”, often understood to be a technique that the Arya Samaj, a reformist organization based in the Punjab, used to increase the numbers of people counted as Hindu in colonial India. Rather than simply shore up numbers, this practice was actually appropriated in particular terms by many different individuals and groups across the caste and communitarian spectrum, including low-caste Hindus, Untouchables and Muslims. In her second part, The Political History of Universal Religion in India, Adcock offers a critical intellectual history of the term “religion” as it was used in colonial India, including strands such as universal religion, deemed by Orientalists, Deists, and other European protagonists to be religion based on revelations but not restricted to any one particular culture or place. Other sorts of religion would be “natural” (or anthropological and based not on the singular truth of any one tradition) and also national religions, restricted in place and time, and religions based on special revelations, such as Christianity, claimed by its promoters as the singular home of truth. Rather than simply state the superiority or Indianness of the Vedic religion, Arya Samaj promoters argued for the universal nature of their religion, and, through that definition, pushed for proselytisation within the terms of their universal religion.

In her final section, Adcock focuses on how the controversial practice of shuddhi, interpreted by some as proselytisation and therefore a target of opprobrium for those supporting the Tolerance perspective such as Gandhi, was understood by low-caste, Untouchable, and Muslim protagonists. Adcock charts how individuals like Dharm Pal, Sham Lal, Satya Deo, born Muslims who participated in shuddhi, and low-caste and Untouchables also saw shuddhi not in religious terms but as a path toward education, assertion of the right to access public wells, and jobs. In the meantime, during the turbulent 1920s and 30s, Gandhi, along with others had targeted and attacked shuddhi as an attack on non-Hindus, and directed attention (and by extension much of the Indian National Congress also) toward inter-religious harmony as well as the upper castes doing penance for their sins. This move neglected the radical potential of shuddhi, and also cemented the idea (for Adcock, central to the Tolerance perspective) that all low-caste and Untouchable peoples were, by default, Hindu.

Adcock places a huge burden on the Tolerance with a capital T perspective, which is articulated by Gandhi in the 1920s and cited across time and space by Radhakrishnan and others, and allegedly stated in vague terms by the Brahmo Samaj, another reformist organization of the nineteenth century. Though certainly identifiable as a popular idea within India and reflected in the anxiety around proselytisation today, Adcock gives the perspective a great coherence and power, such that it “paved the way for political developments during the 1930s, when Gandhi and the Indian National Congress secured a constitutional arrangement that established a Hindu political majority, encompassing Untouchables despite the strong opposition of vocal Untouchable political leadership by Ambedkar and others, and fixing Muslims in a political minority, despite continuing objection from many Muslim leaders” (168). Such grand statements are not supported by any detailed or intensively researched conclusions. Rather, the identification of Tolerance with a capital T is more of a rhetorical device that moves her argument forward about the radical potential of the Arya Samaj’s controversial shuddhi program. When it is not dismissed as simply Hindu nationalism, and when terms like “religion” are held up to intellectual-historical scrutiny, shuddhi then holds potential to complicate received narratives of secularism. Though Tolerance with a capital T may not be the great monster that she has made it out to be, Adcock does identify an extraordinary and potentially field-changing aspect of the fraught history of Indian secularism: the perspectives of low-caste, Untouchable, Muslim, and other subaltern voices within the context of shuddhi. Such a topic holds the potential to historicize secularism in India in a manner that deepens the field’s historical understanding of religion as it emerged as a category, but also transforms the very meanings of secularism itself. Adcock’s contributions here are tentative, as her evidence in this regard is relatively light compared to the grand claims she offers, such as that non-elites took up shuddhi “as part of their efforts to transform, reorient, and refuse the ‘meticulous rituals of power’ that rendered them subordinate to Hindu and Muslim (or Sikh) elites” (47). Such claims, alongside her discussions of Muslim shuddhi beneficiaries, are suggestive but thinly argued.

Adcock does show in a manner—unprecedented in the field—how Arya Samaj members alongside other Indian protagonists used multiple strands of definitions of religion (from universal to national to natural) to push forth claims about their own activities in ways that scholars of colonial India must confront for any meaningful assessment of religion and secularism in India. Though her focus is on colonial India, an easy parallel that comes to mind for scholars of South Asian religions is the historic and complicated competitions that developed between Buddhist preachers and Christian missionaries in eighteenth and nineteenth century Sri Lanka. In colonial Sri Lanka as in India, the manners in which Sri Lankans and Europeans engaged in mutually constitutive relations of power in the realm of religion requires a full-scale investigation that transcends any simplistic reading of religion as a category inherited from Europe. Adcock goes to such lengths to claim that all appropriated European discourses of religion and to such detail into how these debates were complicated by the local realities that it is not clear how “European” these discourses of religion were in the Indic context. As studies of liberalism, socialism and nationalism have advanced beyond simplistic diffusionist models, perhaps the time has come to shed the labels and anxieties of thinking through a putative “European” origin to debates that became transformed in India. Rather, scholars now may search for how such debates did not begin only with European intrusions into India, but form a part of a global intellectual history that includes, but is not fundamentally shaped by, the “European” component of this history. Adcock’s book represents a powerful step in that direction.