Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast · New Books Network

Neilesh Bose, "Chips from a Calcutta Workshop: Comparative Religion in Nineteenth Century India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

·36 min·3 clips

Neilesh Bose uncovers how 19th-century Indian thinkers used comparative religion to reshape their spiritual landscape.

Comparative religion gets a larger backstory here. The guest argues that the study and comparison of religions belong in modern India, not just in European Enlightenment history. The discussion stays near Calcutta and the Danish company north of it, where company work, missionary translation, Indian language education, and arguments over Hindu practice all meet. Christians in Danish company territory come through as early translators of the Bible and other Christian writing into Indian languages. English domains worked differently. Critical writing on Hinduism starts appearing in the 1790s, just as Ramahun Roy is becoming prominent. The episode does not turn Roy into a simple borrowed-ideas figure. The guest presents him as someone inside company life, shaped by Arabic and Persian education, and aware that those languages carried work, mobility, and power. His learning is also his own project. Before sustained contact with Christians or Christianity, he went looking for the Gospels and Christian literature himself. The timeline matters. By the 1800s and 1810s, Roy is aware of critiques of Hinduism in English and other languages. Sati becomes a major case. His campaign against widow immolation was likely shaped by those critiques, the guest suggests, but not swallowed by them. Roy still acts through his own reading, education, and institutional position. The pressure also comes from Hindus who strongly objected to his claims about ritual, images, and objects. The argument stays careful: modern comparative religion was made through translation, debate, colonial company structures, Indian intellectual agency, and contested reform.

As heard by us

A measured account of comparative religion taking shape in colonial India.

Bose uses Calcutta to show comparative religion being argued over, translated, and remade in India rather than simply imported there. The episode moves through Danish missionary work, early critiques of Hinduism, and Ram Mohan Roy's formation in Arabic and Persian, so it feels…

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For a patient, sharp listen on how comparative religion took shape in colonial Calcutta.

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