This carefully crafted, densely packed, finely nuanced and thoroughly researched work weaves together two narratives. It argues that we cannot really understand how a secular political system in India was formed without understanding the crucial role in this process played by Indian Christians. It does this by looking, specifically, at laws that dealt with religious education, with administering religious institutions, and with family property and relationships. Debates over religion and law that took place in British India, that began under Company Raj and continued under the crown, led to institutional procedures and governmental attitudes that continue to define and determine the nature of secularism in India down to our day. Drawing upon court records, political pamphlets, official archives of missionary and governmental agencies, as well as private papers, Nandini Chatterjee deftly shows how Indian Christians were eventually able not only to shape their own destiny and identity, but to do so as an emerging All-India ‘minority community’ within a rapidly changing body politic. In so doing, she argues that they played a disproportionately important role: influencing and even shaping Indian political and social culture as a whole. As a consequence, the emergence of modern India itself can be traced back to sets of specific historical events and local circumstances in which local Indian Christians played an important part. Thus, in encounters of India's people with conditions of imperial rule, the particular experiences, and influences, of India's Christians have served to shape a particular form of secularism that is uniquely Indian.

Secularism in India, distinctly different from the secularism now flourishing in the west, denotes not the absence, or banishment, of religion in public life but acceptance, equivalence, support and tolerance of different religions as crucial for the survival of any large political system. Indeed, secularism, or secularisation, has become an obsession in India. Hundreds of articles and books on ‘Secularism in India’ have appeared. Religious toleration, so essential for holding together linguistically pluralistic, segmented and hierarchical social structures, can be traced from ancient times. The ‘logic of circles/spheres’ (‘mandala nyaya’), requiring policies of impartiality, neutrality and toleration, served to bind together elite groups of different ethnicities and religious beliefs within any large political system. The larger or wider the reach and sway of an imperial system, the more essential was this kind of proto-secular policy. It was this kind of logic that emperors, from Ashoka to Akbar, employed. It was this kind of logic that was utilised by the Raj as its imperial sway spread across the whole continent. It is this ‘secularism’ that is essential for India's survival. Secularists in the west have forgotten how policies of (Protestant) Christian religious toleration, inspired by ideas of Hugo Grotius, were codified in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The importance of elite communities of Indian Christians, not just in struggles against civic disabilities, but also in forging national secular consciousness, is vividly brought out by Nandini Chatterjee.