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Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain
Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science.
Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.
Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.
216 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 2001
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September 29, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #World History and Civilizations # Empires, Trade, and Cultural Exchange
Peter van der Veer’s *Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain* is one of those rare books that completely recalibrates how we think about the entanglement of empire, belief, and modernity. Van der Veer takes what could have been a straightforward comparative project—the impact of colonialism on religion in India and Britain—and turns it into a subtle meditation on how imperial power produces not only the colonized but also the colonizer, shaping both sides of the encounter in ways that are enduring and paradoxical. By treating Britain and India as two poles of a single imperial field rather than as separate entities in an asymmetrical relationship, he undermines the old binary of a secular, modern West versus a religious, traditional East. The book reads like a long, sustained argument against the idea of modernity as a unidirectional flow from Europe outward; instead, it shows how “modern” forms of religiosity, nationalism, and secularism were co-produced through imperial contact.
The originality of van der Veer’s approach lies in the double movement of his narrative. On the one hand, he traces how British colonial administrators, missionaries, and intellectuals in India codified, categorized, and sometimes invented “religion” as a discrete domain—turning fluid practices into rigid communities, translating local traditions into “Hinduism” and “Islam,” and embedding these new identities into the apparatus of colonial governance. This is the terrain mapped earlier by Bernard Cohn in *Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge*, where census, survey, and ethnography become tools of domination. But van der Veer goes further. He shows that these same processes also reverberated back into Britain itself, reshaping the British public sphere, the missionary imagination, and even the self-understanding of Anglican Christianity. In his telling, imperialism is not simply an export of European modernity but a crucible in which new forms of “religion” and “secularism” are forged, with effects that reach deep into metropolitan life.
This insight places *Imperial Encounters* squarely in dialogue with Talal Asad’s *Formations of the Secular*, which argued that the secular is not the neutral absence of religion but a historically specific, power-laden category born of modern state formation. Van der Veer effectively extends Asad’s argument into the imperial realm. For instance, he shows how the colonial state’s regulation of religion in India—its privileging of certain communities, its fixation on public order, its management of conversion—shaped British legal and political norms about religious liberty and minority rights. In this sense, the British Empire becomes a laboratory for policies and ideas that later appear as “domestic” debates about secularism and multiculturalism. The implication is quietly radical: modern Britain’s religious pluralism and India’s secular nationalism are not separate trajectories but two intertwined outcomes of a shared imperial history.
Van der Veer is also acutely attuned to the role of missionaries and reform movements in this mutual constitution. His chapters on Hindu reformers like Rammohun Roy and Dayananda Saraswati, and on Christian evangelical activism in Britain, show how colonial encounters produced mirror-image projects of moral renewal. Indian reformers appropriated Enlightenment and Christian idioms to critique idolatry, caste, and superstition, thereby producing a new “modern Hinduism,” while British evangelicals mobilized the imperial mission to reinvigorate their own faith at home. This dual dynamic recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s *Provincializing Europe*, which sought to provincialize European categories without denying their global reach. Van der Veer’s contribution is to show that the “provincial” was already inside Europe, in the form of imperial entanglements that shaped the very categories Europeans used to think about themselves.
Another striking feature of *Imperial Encounters* is its attention to the tension between religion and nationalism. Van der Veer argues that both in Britain and in India, the rise of modern nationalism involved a reconfiguration rather than a disappearance of religion. In India, colonial governance and missionary critique provoked the articulation of Hindu and Muslim identities that fed into anti-colonial mobilizations, from the Brahmo Samaj to the Khilafat Movement. In Britain, imperial expansion coincided with a revival of Christian moral discourse about civilization, progress, and race. This is where van der Veer’s analysis intersects with the work of Partha Chatterjee, especially *The Nation and Its Fragments*, which traced how Indian nationalists created an “inner domain” of culture and spirituality as a refuge from colonial domination. But van der Veer shows that even the “outer domain” of politics in Britain was never purely secular either; it was saturated with religious language about mission and providence. Thus both the colonizer’s and the colonized’s nationalisms emerge as religiously inflected projects, complicating the simple story of secular modernity.
Stylistically, van der Veer writes with a clarity and confidence that belies the complexity of his argument. He does not rely on the sweeping, almost novelistic narrative of a book like Niall Ferguson’s *Empire*, nor does he confine himself to the micro-histories of a single community or region. Instead he moves back and forth across the imperial divide, juxtaposing cases in India and Britain in a way that slowly builds his thesis. This comparative structure allows him to show not just influence but simultaneity—the way developments in one site anticipate, echo, or condition developments in the other. The reader comes away with a sense of a single historical field in which ideas of religion, secularism, and modernity are constantly being exchanged and recalibrated.
Reading *Imperial Encounters* alongside other classics in the field makes its contribution clearer. Bernard Cohn gave us the tools to see how colonial knowledge produced colonial power; van der Veer shows how that production reverberated back into the metropole. Talal Asad dismantled the myth of the neutral secular; van der Veer demonstrates its imperial genealogy. Dipesh Chakrabarty urged us to provincialize Europe; van der Veer provincializes Britain itself by showing it to be an imperial product. Even more recent works like Jürgen Osterhammel’s *The Transformation of the World* and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s *Empires in World History* emphasize the interconnectedness of empires but tend to treat religion as a residual category. Van der Veer puts religion at the center, showing that far from being a premodern leftover, it is constitutive of modern imperial power and modern national identities alike.
What also makes the book resonate today is its implicit critique of contemporary secularism and multiculturalism. By tracing how British policies of religious management in India fed back into domestic debates, van der Veer suggests that current British struggles over Islam, migration, and national identity are not anomalies but continuations of an imperial history. Likewise, India’s ongoing tensions between secularism and Hindu nationalism cannot be understood without recognizing that both were forged in the crucible of the colonial state’s religious policies. In this sense, *Imperial Encounters* is not just a historical study but a genealogy of our present, echoing Foucault’s notion that history is a way of diagnosing the present rather than simply recounting the past.
In sum, *Imperial Encounters* is a model of how to do comparative imperial history without falling into the trap of treating one society as the template and the other as derivative. It shows that modernity itself—far from being a European export—is an imperial co-production, and that religion and secularism alike are part of that story. Read alongside Cohn, Asad, Chakrabarty, and Chatterjee, van der Veer’s book appears not as an isolated contribution but as a keystone in a broader intellectual movement to rethink the categories of modernity, religion, and empire. It is both erudite and provocative, a work that leaves the reader with a deepened sense of how India and Britain, colonizer and colonized, were and remain mutually implicated in the making of the modern world.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
Peter van der Veer’s *Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain* is one of those rare books that completely recalibrates how we think about the entanglement of empire, belief, and modernity. Van der Veer takes what could have been a straightforward comparative project—the impact of colonialism on religion in India and Britain—and turns it into a subtle meditation on how imperial power produces not only the colonized but also the colonizer, shaping both sides of the encounter in ways that are enduring and paradoxical. By treating Britain and India as two poles of a single imperial field rather than as separate entities in an asymmetrical relationship, he undermines the old binary of a secular, modern West versus a religious, traditional East. The book reads like a long, sustained argument against the idea of modernity as a unidirectional flow from Europe outward; instead, it shows how “modern” forms of religiosity, nationalism, and secularism were co-produced through imperial contact.
The originality of van der Veer’s approach lies in the double movement of his narrative. On the one hand, he traces how British colonial administrators, missionaries, and intellectuals in India codified, categorized, and sometimes invented “religion” as a discrete domain—turning fluid practices into rigid communities, translating local traditions into “Hinduism” and “Islam,” and embedding these new identities into the apparatus of colonial governance. This is the terrain mapped earlier by Bernard Cohn in *Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge*, where census, survey, and ethnography become tools of domination. But van der Veer goes further. He shows that these same processes also reverberated back into Britain itself, reshaping the British public sphere, the missionary imagination, and even the self-understanding of Anglican Christianity. In his telling, imperialism is not simply an export of European modernity but a crucible in which new forms of “religion” and “secularism” are forged, with effects that reach deep into metropolitan life.
This insight places *Imperial Encounters* squarely in dialogue with Talal Asad’s *Formations of the Secular*, which argued that the secular is not the neutral absence of religion but a historically specific, power-laden category born of modern state formation. Van der Veer effectively extends Asad’s argument into the imperial realm. For instance, he shows how the colonial state’s regulation of religion in India—its privileging of certain communities, its fixation on public order, its management of conversion—shaped British legal and political norms about religious liberty and minority rights. In this sense, the British Empire becomes a laboratory for policies and ideas that later appear as “domestic” debates about secularism and multiculturalism. The implication is quietly radical: modern Britain’s religious pluralism and India’s secular nationalism are not separate trajectories but two intertwined outcomes of a shared imperial history.
Van der Veer is also acutely attuned to the role of missionaries and reform movements in this mutual constitution. His chapters on Hindu reformers like Rammohun Roy and Dayananda Saraswati, and on Christian evangelical activism in Britain, show how colonial encounters produced mirror-image projects of moral renewal. Indian reformers appropriated Enlightenment and Christian idioms to critique idolatry, caste, and superstition, thereby producing a new “modern Hinduism,” while British evangelicals mobilized the imperial mission to reinvigorate their own faith at home. This dual dynamic recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s *Provincializing Europe*, which sought to provincialize European categories without denying their global reach. Van der Veer’s contribution is to show that the “provincial” was already inside Europe, in the form of imperial entanglements that shaped the very categories Europeans used to think about themselves.
Another striking feature of *Imperial Encounters* is its attention to the tension between religion and nationalism. Van der Veer argues that both in Britain and in India, the rise of modern nationalism involved a reconfiguration rather than a disappearance of religion. In India, colonial governance and missionary critique provoked the articulation of Hindu and Muslim identities that fed into anti-colonial mobilizations, from the Brahmo Samaj to the Khilafat Movement. In Britain, imperial expansion coincided with a revival of Christian moral discourse about civilization, progress, and race. This is where van der Veer’s analysis intersects with the work of Partha Chatterjee, especially *The Nation and Its Fragments*, which traced how Indian nationalists created an “inner domain” of culture and spirituality as a refuge from colonial domination. But van der Veer shows that even the “outer domain” of politics in Britain was never purely secular either; it was saturated with religious language about mission and providence. Thus both the colonizer’s and the colonized’s nationalisms emerge as religiously inflected projects, complicating the simple story of secular modernity.
Stylistically, van der Veer writes with a clarity and confidence that belies the complexity of his argument. He does not rely on the sweeping, almost novelistic narrative of a book like Niall Ferguson’s *Empire*, nor does he confine himself to the micro-histories of a single community or region. Instead he moves back and forth across the imperial divide, juxtaposing cases in India and Britain in a way that slowly builds his thesis. This comparative structure allows him to show not just influence but simultaneity—the way developments in one site anticipate, echo, or condition developments in the other. The reader comes away with a sense of a single historical field in which ideas of religion, secularism, and modernity are constantly being exchanged and recalibrated.
Reading *Imperial Encounters* alongside other classics in the field makes its contribution clearer. Bernard Cohn gave us the tools to see how colonial knowledge produced colonial power; van der Veer shows how that production reverberated back into the metropole. Talal Asad dismantled the myth of the neutral secular; van der Veer demonstrates its imperial genealogy. Dipesh Chakrabarty urged us to provincialize Europe; van der Veer provincializes Britain itself by showing it to be an imperial product. Even more recent works like Jürgen Osterhammel’s *The Transformation of the World* and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s *Empires in World History* emphasize the interconnectedness of empires but tend to treat religion as a residual category. Van der Veer puts religion at the center, showing that far from being a premodern leftover, it is constitutive of modern imperial power and modern national identities alike.
What also makes the book resonate today is its implicit critique of contemporary secularism and multiculturalism. By tracing how British policies of religious management in India fed back into domestic debates, van der Veer suggests that current British struggles over Islam, migration, and national identity are not anomalies but continuations of an imperial history. Likewise, India’s ongoing tensions between secularism and Hindu nationalism cannot be understood without recognizing that both were forged in the crucible of the colonial state’s religious policies. In this sense, *Imperial Encounters* is not just a historical study but a genealogy of our present, echoing Foucault’s notion that history is a way of diagnosing the present rather than simply recounting the past.
In sum, *Imperial Encounters* is a model of how to do comparative imperial history without falling into the trap of treating one society as the template and the other as derivative. It shows that modernity itself—far from being a European export—is an imperial co-production, and that religion and secularism alike are part of that story. Read alongside Cohn, Asad, Chakrabarty, and Chatterjee, van der Veer’s book appears not as an isolated contribution but as a keystone in a broader intellectual movement to rethink the categories of modernity, religion, and empire. It is both erudite and provocative, a work that leaves the reader with a deepened sense of how India and Britain, colonizer and colonized, were and remain mutually implicated in the making of the modern world.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
February 15, 2021
considering it published in 2001! Truly insightful!
October 17, 2010
I don't think I would have picked up this book on my own - I had to read it for a class. But I actually enjoyed it. It was quite ensightful as the author deals with a side of colonialism that I am unfamiliar with. I was also very pleased with the organization of this book. Each chapter had its own layout that was explained at the beginning and then summed up again in a conclusion. It really helped to clear up the authors points and gave the book a good sense of flow and connectivity. The one criticism I have is it was quite dense. I found it hard sometimes to keep up with all of the authors examples but this was where the concluding remarks of each chapter were extremely useful.
March 28, 2013
The introduction is definitely the strongest part of the book, though I found the whole thing to be readable and useful. Fundamentally argues that modernity was constructed in an interactional history of India and Britain, and that religion was key in constructing the public sphere and national subjectivities.
December 11, 2015
Brilliant analysis of Colonial relations within the context of religion.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews