In this impressive work, Mou Banerjee successfully situates concerns about Christian conversion in nineteenth-century Bengal among the important factors contributing to the hardening of religious boundaries and the progressive marginalization of Christians by both Hindus and Muslims. By focusing on the effects of Bengal’s “conversion panic” (9), Banerjee seeks to complicate typical portrayals of the emergence of Indian communalism, focused as they have generally been on the Hindu–Muslim binary. Conversion to Christianity “…might have momentarily destabilized boundaries of religious, political, social, and legal identities,” Banerjee writes, but “it ultimately reinforced and ossified those very same boundaries…” (15). Making the claim somewhat more boldly, Banerjee argues that “The place of Christianity as an authentic Indian religion … remains a flashpoint of political violence [in contemporary India]. Bengal in the nineteenth century is the origin point for a story that is still unfolding across India today” (21, emphasis in the original).

An astonishing amount of archival labor (involving diverse archives in multiple countries) clearly undergirds this work. Even more impressive is how attuned Banerjee’s archival eye is to the truly moving, interesting, or illustrative letter, poem, sarcastic comment, or detail, which means that even when Banerjee is covering well-trodden territory, the book contributes something of value to the conversation.

While this is a diverse work with diverse interests, much of the content focuses on apologetic Hindu and Muslim responses to Christian evangelism and critique. Some of the apologists discussed in The Disinherited are well-known within the scholarship of South Asian Religion. Chapter 1, for example, considers Rammohan Roy’s debates with the Serampore Baptists beginning in the 1920s, focusing on the way that his “views on conversion [as an act motivated by the desire for material gain] set the colonial template for the exclusion and effacement of converts from Hindu and Muslim discourse on national belonging” (34). Chapter 2 discusses previously well-covered Hindu responses to the work of Alexander Duff and the high-profile conversion of several dominant-caste men and women from Calcutta’s most prominent families. According to Banerjee, these responses served, even more than the movement to ban sati (127), to unite previously factionalized Bengali Hindus “across caste, class, and various kinds of ideological associations…” (78).

In Chapter 3, Banerjee enters more distinctive territory and also marks a shift, from newspapers to courtrooms, in the locus of Hindu/Muslim resistance to Christian conversion. Here, she plunges into the archive for a reconsideration of the Great Tagore Will Case, which involved Prosonnocoomar Tagore, Hindu stalwart and patriarch of one branch of this famous family, successfully disinheriting his son Gyanendramohan after the latter’s conversion to Christianity (and despite the Lex Loci Act of 1850, which was supposed to prevent precisely this sort of Christian disinheritance). Another distinctive contribution materializes in Chapter 4, where Banerjee adds archival detail to the paradoxical, previously known but not terribly well-studied phenomenon of White Christian planters inciting violence against converted Christian (and putatively newly empowered and trouble-making) peasants working on their indigo plantations. “The apologia provided by Indian [Christian] peasants,” and their testimonies in court, “became a metaphor for the … ruptured and interrupted success of the enlightenment project within the Indian experiment” (202), Banerjee suggests.

While these first four chapters mostly center Hindu–Christian dynamics, Chapter 5 considers the work of Muslim tailor cum apologist, Munshi Meherullah, whose oratorical skill neutralized and, in some cases, drove off and/or reconverted would-be Christian apologists and evangelists. The story of Meherullah epitomizes a “rural Bengali Muslim milieu that was shaping itself in reaction to Christian evangelism,” complicating the “binary of Hindu–Muslim contestations in Bengal and India” (209). Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the “radical nationalist politics” (28) of the contemporaneously famous Hindu–Christian Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, whose later “disappearance from the nationalist narratives of India’s freedom struggle show us how attempts by India’s Christians … to find a place within the broader nationalist discourse were (and are) thwarted” (240). Upadhyay’s life also demonstrates that Christian converts “…often had to hide or temper their love and devotion toward their personal faith and publicly perform a cultural and political affiliation to the religious identity they had discarded” to “find a place within the matrix of the anticolonial nationalist movement” (282). While Upadhyay’s biography has been written several times over, what is distinctive about Banerjee’s treatment is that she focuses on the politics, rather than the theological orientation, of his syncretic religion.

In the Afterword, Banerjee situates herself as a non-Christian former student of Bengal’s missionary schools, who was nevertheless deeply affected by the famous killing of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his young sons in 1999 (and her Christian classmates’ reaction to it). Her complex identity may help account for what is a deeply sympathetic portrayal of all characters in this narrative. One finds oneself at various times rooting not only for the “disinherited” Christians but also for what Alexander Duff, referring to the Christianity-resistant leaders of India’s aristocratic Hindu families, derisively called the “the Voluptuous Baboos of the Metropolis” (110).

If I were to raise a complaint about this admirable study, it would be that it lacks the interdisciplinarity now common in much contemporary scholarship. This is a work of pure history, in a sense. Its touchstones are cultural, political, and religious histories. Its major interlocutors are all historians (like Gauri Viswanathan, Chandra Mallampalli, Shabnum Tejani, Penelope Carson, and Nandini Chatterjee). The work also remains rather strictly within its nineteenth-century and Bengali lane, which comes with significant advantages. Among the disadvantages, however, is that those already familiar with the debates about conversion to Christianity in colonial and independent India may find themselves wishing that Banerjee had brought her research more thoroughly into conversation with similar work situated in other regions, eras, or disciplines. One thinks, for example, of the work on Christian identity, conversion, and politics of Sonja Thomas, Selva Raj, Kerry San Chirico, Laura Dudley Jenkins, Corinne Dempsey, Jakob de Roover, Sarah Claerhout, Sarbeswar Sahoo, and Jason Keith Fernandes. Even more surprising is that she nowhere brings her research into conversation with Richard Fox Young’s Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit Sources on Anti-Christian Apologetics in Early Nineteenth Century India (Vienna: Institute für Indologie der Universität Wien, 1981), which considers the same era and, in some pages, the very same region. (Full disclosure: Young was my dissertation advisor.)

These are, however, minor complaints, and lest I be accused of leveling that annoyingly common scholarly critique – “Your work is excellent, but why didn’t you do my project?” – let me acknowledge how difficult it is to cover the entire range of scholarship in a field that is now teeming with excellent contributions. Let me also acknowledge that one of the reasons Banerjee perhaps does not need to rely on earlier research as much as many others must do is because of her archival mastery. An impressive percentage of references in this work are to primary texts and archival materials. Allow me, therefore, to end this review as I began it, by underscoring what a formidable work of history, and what an important contribution to the field, Banerjee has given us. The Disinherited is readable, compelling, and erudite, and scholars from a variety of disciplines will find much in it of interest and worth.