Essential (but expensive) reading for anyone concerned with subcontinental religion and the missionary impulse in the post-Mutiny period, Bellenoit's project is formidably researched and closely argued. An unavoidable point of departure is J. N. Farquhar's anodyne vision of a missionary Crown of Hinduism (1913) that would ultimately ‘fulfil’ the major religions of the subcontinent within a South Asian Christianity. Farquhar's vision faded in the face of a post-Mutiny India that had a lively religious life of its own, which included running debates amongst missionaries, pandits, moulvies and sannyasis, in which there were few ‘theological’ concessions on any side. At every level the missions failed to secure significant conversions, least of all among higher castes or Moslem communities concerned with careers and opportunity. It was precisely to these groups that the missionary societies had directed their attention in institutions such as St Stephen's College, Delhi, and the Madras Christian College. The colleges were a crucial imperial asset, subsidising the Raj by teaching standard academic curricula upon which the state apparatus depended, whilst extending a spectrum of opportunities for employment under the Raj. Farquhar's ‘crown’, of course, never materialised, though Hinduism comfortably assimilated some ‘Christian’ concepts. Training and maintaining a proselytising force, however, which would have included a proportion, however supportive, of missionary wives, was far too expensive to contemplate. The colleges, however, had their competitive teaching faculties, recruited at a fraction of the cost of a proselytising mission and engaging with a student body essentially preoccupied with securing credentials for employment, for the most part in one sector or another of public service. Bellenoit is particularly alert to the colleges' contribution to the nationalism fermenting within the student population. The best known, and most inventive and imitated, of the pioneering college principals was Cecil (not, as here, Charles) Tyndale-Biscoe of the CMS (see ODNB), who founded six schools in Kashmir, including one for women. Deeply uneasy about conversion, indifferent to the glamour of intellectual brilliance, the canon, who had been a great Cambridge oarsman, forced his native teachers and their students to break caste by rowing and learning how to swim and save lives. More significantly, they mobilised for public service, along the co-operative lines developed by Gopal Krishna Gokhale's indigenous Servants of India Society. Tyndale-Biscoe's own Kashmiri students developed a Social Service Committee and Charity Organisation, which worked with the urban poor and widows. At Independence, fourteen of his old boys were ministers in Sheikh Abdulla's government in Kashmir. In Banaras, the Revd D. Hutton of the LMS, working on similar lines, articulated the widely shared belief that government-monitored, but mission-run, education, precisely because of its ethical and moral component, would do for the Indian nation what merely state-run education would never do – prepare students for active and not subordinate participation in government.