Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Spiritual Despots by historian of religion J. Barton Scott zeroes in on the quaint term "priestcraft" to track anticlerical polemics in Britain and South Asia during the colonial period. Scott's aim is to show how anticlerical rhetoric spread through the colonies alongside ideas about modern secular subjectivity. Through close readings of texts in English, Hindi, and Gujarati, he shows in compelling detail how the critique of priestly conspiracy gave rise to a new ideal of the self-disciplining subject and a vision of modern Hinduism that was based on unmediated personal experience and self-regulation rather than priestly tutelary power. Spiritual Despots offers a new perspective on what some scholars have called "Protestant Hinduism," and, more broadly, contributes to the emerging field of "post-secular" studies by shedding light on the colonial genealogy of secular subjectivity.

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As the forerunners of Indian modernization, the community of Bengali intellectuals known as the Brahmo Samaj played a crucial role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India from 1820 to 1930. David Kopf launches a comprehensive generation- to-generation study of this group in order to understand the ideological foundations of the modern Indian mind. His book constitutes not only a biographical and a sociological study of the Brahmo Samaj, but also an intellectual history of modern India that ranges from the Unitarian social gospel of Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore's universal humanism and Jessie Bose's scientism. From a variety of biographical sources, many of them in Bengali and never before used in research, the author makes available much valuable information. In his analysis of the interplay between the ideas, the consciousness, and the lives of these early rebels against the Hindu tradition, Professor Kopf reveals the subtle and intricate problems and issues that gradually shaped contemporary Indian consciousness. What emerges from this group portrait is a legacy of innovation and reform that introduced a rationalist tradition of thought, liberal political consciousness, and Indian nationalism, in addition to changing theology and ritual, marriage laws and customs, and the status of women. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.