The volume Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India is a compendium of essays in honor of David N. Lorenzen, whose work on Indian religions in the ancient, medieval, and modern periods has exerted a considerable amount of influence in the field of Indian religious history for the last three decades. The editors of the volume, Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Saurabh Dube, draw on Lorenzen's scholarship to argue that religious systems are not self-contained systems of beliefs and symbols that have no relation to the social contexts in which they are embedded. Religious systems, on the contrary, are constantly shifting sets of beliefs and practices that are intimately tied to the process of negotiation and subversion and arise from the assertion of power and authority (pp. 5–8). Thus, the essays in this volume reflect a major theme in Lorenzen's work: the nexus between religion, authority, and community.

The essays by Romila Thapar and R. Champakalakshmi focus on the use of Puranic literature as instruments of legitimating political authority, while David Gordon White and Benjamin Preciado-Solis use their essays to either deconstruct or reevaluate stereotypes pertaining to yoga and meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism. Purushottam Agrawal and Linda Hess build on Lorenzen's research concerning nirguna bhakti communities by detailing how contemporary members of the Kabir Panthi and Ramananda Samprdaya have continued to refashion images of Kabir and his alleged guru, Ramananda. These essays are complemented by those of Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Daniel Gold on the multiple meanings behind the expressions of religious community in Orissa and Central India. Lorenzen's research on the construction of Hinduism in the colonial period is the basis for Jack Hawley's essay on the construction of Hindu dharma in North Indian religious texts and the essay by Frank Conlon on the formation of caste identity in western India. Finally, the essays by Ines Zupanov, Thomas Trautmann, and Saurabh Dube are all related to Lorenzen's recent research on missionary work and conversion in modern India.

There is much to commend to this volume. The essays provide a wide variety of perspectives on religion, power, and identity formation from different time periods of Indian history, and they are all extremely rich in detail and analysis. The essays by Zupanov, Trautmann, and Dube are welcome for providing some sober historical analysis on the controversial topic of missionary work and conversion in India. Ishita Banerjee-Dube's essay on the Oriya religious figure Bhima Bhoi is particularly important for its contribution to the little-studied subject of religion in Orissa. Frank Conlon's essay on caste formation in western India returns to the much-written-about subject of caste construction in the colonial period, but it is still invaluable for its much-needed critique of constructionist scholars who argue that Hinduism was imagined and invented by colonial authorities. As Conlon rightly notes, such an argument not only ignores the fact that categories such as caste were used even in precolonial times by Indians and Europeans alike, but also fails to recognize the autonomy and agency of Indians in the shaping of their own history (pp. 305–6).

Other essays, however, are not so convincing. This is the case, for example, with Champakalakshmi's rather curious argument that Sankara (788–820 ce) was insignificant during his own lifetime, because the large number of hagiographies on Sankara that were responsible for his deification began to be produced from the fourteenth century onward (pp. 77–79). Even if this apotheosis of Sankara did not occur until well after his death, Champakalakshmi's argument seems to completely overlook the fact that Sankara hardly could have been a minor figure if his work was influential enough to generate very vigorous philosophical debate from the eighth century onward between his supporters and the proponents of Buddhism and theistic Vedanta. In a similar vein, one is left somewhat unconvinced by the argument made by David Gordon White in his essay on yogis, sorcerers, and warriors in medieval India. White argues that the pervasive image of the yogi in South Asia is really that of an outsider who terrorizes people and inhabits their bodies, as opposed to that of a peaceful individual who meditates while assuming the lotus position (pp. 104–5). His conclusion is based on the cobbling together of diverse iconographic and textual evidence concerning yogis from ancient and medieval India, which is then used as the basis for what seems to be a very sweeping generalization about yoga in Indian religions.

These concerns, however, do not warrant the dismissal of this volume. The essays in this book follow Lorenzen's long-standing scholarly commitment to question long-held scholarly assumptions about Indian religions, and they will prove useful primarily for graduate students and specialists who do work in South Asian history and religion.