Chips from a Calcutta Workshop explores the development and nature of comparative religion in nineteenth-century India. It focuses on the ideas and intellectual currents behind a range of thinkers who explored comparative religion in India, drawing on a variety of inspirations from Indian religions. Rather than emanate out of a European Christian set of politics as in the Western world, comparative religion emerged out of religious reform movements, including the Brāhmo Samaj in Bengal and the Arya Samaj in the Punjab. With chapters on Rammohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, and Swami Vivekananda, the book includes a re-evaluation of familiar figures alongside lesser-known thinkers within an intellectual history of modern Indian comparative religion.

‘Neilesh Bose's Refining Religion: Comparative Religion in Nineteenth-Century India is an important intervention in the field of global religious studies. The argument places itself within the entanglements of religious belief and practice in modern India before the arrival of Gandhi and secularism. A veritable histoire croisée, it is a masterful approach towards writing a broad intellectual history of religion in the Indic universe that accounts for Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Vaisnava, Brahmo and Christian sources along with the Hindu ones. Using the lens of comparative religion, Bose has convincingly made a case for a kind of eclecticism made possible by networks of translation, canon formation, the idea of universal religion, and pluralism, that cannot be explained simply through the categories of colonialism or nationalism but have to fall back on earlier ideas of sulh-i-kull or Din-i- Ilahi. Through a close reading of the works of Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda, this monograph will help scholars across the globe recalibrate their conceptions of Indic religions in the modern world.'

Sumit Chakrabarti - Presidency University

‘Neilesh Bose invites us to consider how religion came to be recognized, translated, and deployed by a range of Indian intellectuals during India's long nineteenth century. Revisiting the work undertaken by a range of thinkers associated with the progressive Brahmo Samaj, Bose accentuates the constitutive role played by these figures in an emerging global discourse on religion. He reminds us, too, of their varied recourse to pre-modern and vernacular habits of comparison, doxology, and translation; and he helps us appreciate how their efforts to find truth amid diversity led to active engagement with new epistemologies even as it kindled lingering political challenges in terms of diversity, universalism, and inclusion. But this is no potted history of the religious roots of modern India; instead Bose disarticulates these Brahmo projects from familiar teleologies of the nation, offering instead a valuable set of tools with which to interrogate the complex framing of religion in colonial India. The story is fresh, engaging, and welcome.'

Brian Hatcher - Tufts University

‘An important intervention, this book recontextualizes religious modernity in colonial Bengal within the framework of history of ideas, global histories, and Comparative Religion. It sheds new light on the religious ideas of well-known nineteenth century icons of Bengali modernity, and demonstrates, with a deft and expansive use of sources, how global networks of exchange of ideas are critical to understanding religious transformations in the colonial period. The book makes a pioneering contribution to the study of history and religion in colonial India.'

Varuni Bhatia - Azim Premji University