I’m thankful to a great number of people at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California Press for support, comments and suggestions. These include participants in the MESAAS post-MPhil seminar (Nasser Abdurrahman, Omar Farahat, Yitzhak Lewis, Wendell Marsh, Timothy Mitchell, Casey Primel, Kenan Tekin, Sahar Ullah), the INCITE program at Columbia (coordinated by Bill McAllister), in whose basement office the majority of this book was written, the South Asia Graduate Student Forum (Fran Pritchett, Jay Ramesh, Joel Bordeaux, and Joel Lee), and my colleagues at the Society of Fellows (Alexander Bevilacqua, Stephanie Dick, Alisha Holland, Abhishek Kaicker, Ya-Wen Lei, and Adam Mestyan). My research would not have been possible without the support of the staff at MESAAS and GSAS at Columbia, including Jessica Rechtschaffer, Michael Fishman, Irys Schenker, Sandra Peters, and Kerry Gluckmann. I also thank the staff at Harvard’s Society of Fellows: Yesim Erdmann, Kelly Katz, Diana Morse, and Ana Novak. Bill Nelson produced the map in chapter 2. I thank Whitney Cox, Owen Cornwall, Irene SanPietro, Dalpat Rajpurohit, David Shulman, and Anand Venkatkrishnan for feedback at various points over the life of this project. Yigal Bronner, Allison Busch, Jack Hawley, and Sudipta Kaviraj were generous with comments and suggestions when this book was a dissertation. The late Barney Bate introduced me to much of the literature that is cited in these pages. Sheldon Pollock provided constant support and guidance; it was he who encouraged me to begin this project in the first place. The Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, and the Nepalese–German Manuscript Cataloguing Project all provided important manuscript materials.