Bob van der Linden's Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab offers a historical study of three of the most important socioreligious reform movements of colonial Punjab: the Muslim Ahmadiyahs, the Hindu Arya Samaj, and the Sikh Singh Sabha. While each movement has been the subject of major studies, this is the first work to treat all three comparatively and to address larger questions of modernity and world history.
Van der Linden rejects descriptions of these movements and of modern India as dominated by “religion,” instead adopting the term “moral languages” to indicate “traditions embedded in the flux and continuity of history” (p. 231). In his view, this turn to the moral can help distinguish the Indian context from “the secular-religious binary opposition” (p. 10) of the post-Enlightenment West. Thus, the values of rationality, scientific authority, the liberal public sphere, and nationalism are presented as central to the processes by which “Indian...
