This book is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures, and political implications of the concept of ‘Greater India’, implying a Hindu colonization of Southeast Asia, and used by extension to argue for a past Indian greatness as a colonial power, reproducible in the present and future. From the 1880s to the 1960s, protagonists of the Greater India theme attempted to make a case for the importance of an expansionist Indian civilisation in civilizing Southeast Asia. The argument was extended to include Central Asia, Africa, North and South America, and other regions where Indian migrants were to be found. The advocates of this Indocentric and Hindu revivalist approach, with Hindu and Indian often taken to be synonymous, were involved in a quintessentially parochial project, despite its apparently international dimensions: to justify an Indian expansionist imagination that viewed India’s past as a colonizer and civilizer of other lands as a model for the restoration of that past greatness in the future. Zabarskaite shows that the crucial ideologues and elements used for the formation of the construct of Greater India can be traced to the svadeśī movement of the turn of the century, and that Greater India moved easily between the domains of the scholarly and the popular as it sought to establish itself as a form of nationalist self-assertion.

Contemporary Paganism is a movement that is still young and establishing its identity and place on the global religious landscape. The members of the movement are simultaneously growing, unifying, and maintaining its characteristic diversity of traditions, identities, and rituals. The modern Pagan movement has had a restless formation period but has also been the catalyst for some of the most innovative religious expressions, praxis, theologies, and communities. As Contemporary Paganism continues to grow and mature, new angles of inquiry about it have emerged and are explored in this collection. This examination and study of contemporary Paganism contributes new ways to observe and examine other religions, where innovations, paradoxes, and inconsistencies can be more accurately documented and explained.

Beginning Apr. 1895, includes the Proceedings of the East India Association.