This magnificent and magisterial study, combining breadth and depth with subtlety, and with finely chiselled sentences blending exquisite precision, tight restraint and thoroughness, tells us how European servants of the East India Company came to grips with the manifold ambiguities of trying to rule over the vast domains of an incredibly complex multi-faith empire. This complexity was abundantly manifest, from its humblest beginnings as a private venture striving for survival, down to its bloody ending after the Great Rebellion of 1857. As early as 1639, when Francis Day came to terms with the Velugoti Lords of Chandragiri, a treaty granting a strip of coast along the Coromandel and allowing a fortified settlement of Fort St George, was ratified by agents of Sri Venkateswara, the reigning deity at Tirupati. Terms of mutual benefit were inscribed upon a gold-plated deed (sāsanam); and a special gold coin (hūn: aka ‘pagoda’), minted within the same huge temple, bore the stamped image of this deity, thus legitimising the trade of the rapidly rising city-state of Madras. Over centuries, an innumerable patchwork complex of similar contracts and treaties, ‘small hard pieces’ of local influence, were gradually cemented into structures of what became a vast imperial Raj. By the 1780s, as the shadow of Company authority was falling across the entire Indian Ocean, a local Sanskrit work of that time, The Sarva Deva Vilāsa, celebrated the great wealth that the gods had brought to peoples of Madras. By Regulation 1810 of Bengal, and 1817 of Madras, the Company's Raj itself took formal responsibility for the care of many thousands of sacred shrines, temples, pilgrim sites, ceremonials, festivals and processions, along with hosts of temple schools (matha-s) and dancing girls (devadasi-s). The same care was taken for the support of innumerable Islamic endowments, institutions, properties and traditions, as well as for similar Christian institutions. The very survival of the Company's Raj, in short, required intricately balanced policies of religious toleration within highly complex multi-faith contexts.

Small wonder, then, that the Company, over the long-run, vehemently opposed efforts to introduce British Christian institutions within its domains. A handful of churches, such as St Mary's in Fort St George, and chaplains, some loth to leave comfortable ‘livings’ in England, quietly, if haphazardly, served the religious needs of the Company's European servants. Pietist Lutherans of the Danish-Halle-English missionaries who began to arrive in Tranquebar in 1706, sponsored by the Hanoverian monarchs of the United Kingdom, and Catholic missionaries already in India, provided many conscientious chaplains for the Company's Christian soldiers and teachers to run various kinds of schools. Thus, what Evangelical missionaries encountered, especially after their numbers began to increase in the 1820s, was an already established and funded ‘Hindu’ Raj. The Anglican episcopate, admitted into India after 1813, was also shocked to find itself without those prerogatives of ‘Establishment’ that it had so long enjoyed in England. It was not, and never could be, the state religion of India. Mounting efforts to protest and resist the official ‘connexion’ of government with ‘heathen’ and ‘idolatrous’ institutions met with rebuffs and rebukes. Some officials were summarily dismissed. Others, such as Sir Peregrine Maitland, commander-in-chief of the Madras Army, were allowed to resign. In disgust, he returned to London and organised an anti-idolatry campaign against the Company's practices.

Penelope Carson's superbly balanced, penetrating and thorough examination of the Company's religious policy makes a significant contribution to historical understanding. It reveals how much religion lay ‘at the heart of the Company's relationship with India’ (blurb). From both known and hitherto unknown sources, and with meticulous precision, it shows exactly how, in its policies advocating the free exercise of religion, the Company was perpetually caught between contending religious prejudices and sacred traditions. Christians in Britain, especially Evangelicals, demanded free access to India for all Christians, and denominations, and the eradication of ‘barbaric’ religious practices in India. An unprecedented movement, fuelled by a flood of pamphlets and petitions, comparable in strength to pressures that had been mounted against the slave trade, disturbed public tranquility in London. Insensitivity to the religious ‘sensibilities’ of peoples in India generated comparable public disturbances among ‘Hindu’ supporters of the Company. Such disturbances, with periodic insults and outrages, continued to fuel comparable discontent and hostility from a rising, if yet embryonic, Indian public. The Company, in the end, could please no one; and its own existence came to a violent end – and replacement by crown rule. With compelling artistry, Penny Carson takes us through the twists and turns of the religious issues faced by officials of the East India Company. The story of how its officials dealt with highly difficult dilemmas, trying to deal equitably with different faith communities, has resonances for our own day. Official attempts to accommodate conflicting religious feelings, among all peoples, continues to aggravate political stability, both in India and in Britain.