Spiritual despots: Modern Hinduism and the genealogies of self-rule
Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the self-governing individual that arose from it. J. Barton Scott reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the 'self-ruling subject' crucial to both 19th-century reform culture and early 20th-century anticolonialism in India. Read more...