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The Harvest of Time shuttles between nineteenth-century India and present-day Britain, as friendships and loyalties between an eclectic group of individuals are continually put to test. Along these transnational trajectories, self and other become entangled as they try to forge their distinctive identities and speak in their own voices. Amos Goldstein, a young student at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, takes a trip to India to retrace the footsteps of his Uncle Zachariah, hoping to discover what he thinks is going to lead him to the centre of his own being. He finds himself in a room where his uncle might have spent some time, almost a century ago, and also in the arms of Nilanjana, a Ph.D. student at Chicago. This love will take him into the deep jungles of Chattisgarh. From within the heat and dust of the vast hinterlands of India, he hears the whispers of an eloquent silence. Soon, a vow bequeathed by William Hudson to his descendants will be fulfilled.

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904–2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu–Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism. Barua argues that the characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations were modulated by a shifting array of socio-economic and socio-political parameters. It is within these contexts that Rabindranath, Nazrul, and Annada Shankar are developing their thoughts on Hindus and Muslims through the prisms of religious humanism and universalism.

In The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Ankur Barua offers an intellectual history of the motif of religious universalism in the writings of some intellectuals associated with the Brahmo Samaj (founded in 1828). They constructed Hindu worldviews that were simultaneously rooted in some ancient Sanskritic materials and orientated towards contemporary universalist visions with western hues. These constructions were shaped by their dialectical engagements with three groups: members of the Bengali middle classes with sceptical standpoints (‘Young Bengal'), Christian missionaries, and Hindu Vaiṣṇava thinkers. In this genealogy of religious universalisms, Barua indicates how certain post-1900 formulations of the universalist compass of Hinduism were being enunciated across Brahmo circles from the 1820s.

This book is a thematic study of the poet-thinker Rabindranath Tagore's conceptual project of harmonizing the one and its many. Tagore's writings, in Bengali and in English, on religious and social themes are held together by the leitmotif of a “harmony” which operates across several existential, religious, and social polarities – the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, and the individual and the universal. Tagore creatively appropriated materials from diverse sources such as the classical Hindu Vedāntic systems, the folk piety of Bengal, and others, to configure a dialectic which shapes his writings on both religious and social themes. On the one hand, each individual is irreducibly distinct from everyone else, and, on the other hand, each individual gains their spiritual depth precisely by being placed within the dynamic matrices of an interrelated whole. Thus, we find Tagore rejecting certain monastic forms of Hindu world-renunciation and also certain ecstatic dimensions of devotional worship – the former because they efface individuality and the latter because they can generate self-absorbed styles of living. Again, Tagore is as sharply opposed to Bengali imitativeness of English modes of being in the world as he is to Bengali forms of insularity – the former because it dilutes the concrete richness of indigenous lifeforms and the latter because it confines individuals to parochial enclosures. Tagore's life-long endeavor was to configure a “third way” by rejecting both the blank homogeneity of an undifferentiated one and the particularistic insularities of a multitude without a deeper center of coherence.

Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of ‘conversion'provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds.The book draws upon several historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of ‘conversion', it demonstrates that these encounters revolve around three main contested themes. Firstly, who can properly ‘speak for the convert'? Secondly, how is ‘tolerating'the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other's viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? Finally, what is, in fact, the ‘true Religion'? The book demonstrates that it is necessary to wrestle with these questions for an adequate understanding of the Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion.'Questioning what ‘conversion'precisely is, and why it has been such a volatile issue on India's political-legal landscape, the book will be a useful contribution to studies of Hinduism, Christianity and Asian Religion and Philosophy.