In recent decades scholarship on Christianity in India has devoted more attention to Dalit (formerly, ‘untouchable’) studies, tribal religion and controversies associated with caste and conversion. This is understandable considering that the majority of India's Christians are from Dalit or tribal backgrounds. Conversion among Brahmin or other elite communities receives less attention and tends to be centred upon individuals, not groups. A good example is Pandita Ramabai, the Brahmin convert from Hinduism who became a champion of women's rights. Deepra Dandekar's book here explores Brahmin conversion in Marathi-speaking districts of Western India during the nineteenth and twentieth century. While such conversions were by no means as prevalent as Dalit conversions, the author makes a compelling case for its significance for understanding the challenges of Indian Christianity more broadly.

The book consists of a translation of a novel by Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar (the author's great-grandfather), entitled The Subhedar's son. On either side of the novel, Dandekar presents a robust background, analysis and afterword. Some of the author's insights make important interventions for the study of Indian Christianity. We learn for instance that Brahmin conversion in the former Maratha territories gave rise to a vernacular Christian literary tradition (pp. xxxi, 16–17), which helped to consolidate Brahmin, Marathi and Christian identity. It did so as nationalists portrayed Christians as denationalised and as belonging to a colonial religion. During the nineteenth century Marathi-speaking Brahmins converted to Christianity as a result of being demoralised by the 1818 fall of the Maratha state (led by the Peshwas) to the British East India Company. During the transition to British rule, these Brahmins found in Protestant Christianity a source of spiritual renewal, access to education and inroads into the modernity brought by British rule. Conversion to Christianity was preferable to the vision of Hindu social reform, which they found to be ineffective and hypocritical (p. xxx).

The strength of this book is the translated novel itself, to which the author has added very useful notes. The novel offers a multi-faceted window into the experience of a Brahmin, Shankar Nana, and his path to conversion. We learn of the fall of the Peshwas, the migration of coastal Brahmins (the Konkanastas) to the commercial hinterland, the intellectual ferment over religious belief and cultural practices, and the divisive impact of missionary education upon Hindu families. Most significantly, we learn of Shankar Nana's conversion to Christianity, which is intimately tied to his experience of attending a Christian school. Among the most distinctive aspects of the novel is how it knits together political, socio-economic and spiritual questions. For much of the book the virtual absence of pietistic cliché or jargon offers a refreshing departure from many biographies of converts, which amount to hagiographies and are less attentive to historical context. The author contends that such biographies try to compensate for the social dislocation of converts by sensationalising their achievements and heroic break with the past. This compensatory tendency, she maintains, distorts the experience of Brahmin converts who maintained their Brahmin identities after conversion.

Not all of the author's pre- and post-novel analysis is reflected in or informs The Subhedar's son. At some points the author suggests that Christian biographies have invented the fiction of the convert's rupture from the Hindu clan, and that this fiction conceals important continuities, or the essentially ‘non-momentous’ (pp. xi, 37) character of Brahmin conversion. In other instances we are led to believe that the rupture is real and in need of the amelioration provided by literary production and its preservation of Brahmin identity (pp. 10, 18). Which one is it? Or is each true in different cases?

The author contends that Brahmin converts occupied a unique space outside of Hinduism and yet fully in touch with their Brahmin caste. Conversion led them to repudiate superstition, idolatry and untouchability while at the same time retaining aspects of traditional devotion (bhakti) and a distinctive path toward modernity. This complex positioning is evident in the realm of politics as well. Brahmin converts became disillusioned with Hindu rituals and devotion because of the demise of their Hindu state at the hands of the British (p. 35). But this ‘[failure of] their collective past’ did not incline converts to become pro-British. They remained ardent nationalists (p. 37).

How exactly these breaks and continuities are manifest in the life of Shankar Nana is less than clear. The reader encounters little or no explicit reflection on Brahmin identity by the main characters of the novel. There are, however, fascinating theological exchanges which can conceivably reflect an ancient Brahminical tradition of argumentation. But the ties are less than obvious and situating a single text against larger patterns is not easy. In this book, the author draws her observations about Brahmin conversion from a larger literary corpus whose contours she mediates to the reader. In the process, we gain access to valuable perspectives on a community of converts that is often overlooked in the study of Indian Christianity. The book's provocative questions make an important intervention in studies of religious conversion in India.