This book is my extended commentary on the intellectual friendship, against the shadow of empire, between my two parama-gurus, Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Freer Andrews. In working my way through the debates that I outline here, I have often asked myself what Andrews might have said to a Hindu critique of Christian understandings of ‘conversion’ and how Tagore might have countered a Christian response to this critique. Though Tagore and Andrews do not appear anywhere on the pages of this book, they are in fact ‘absently present’ in the dialectical weaves of all its arguments.
I have incurred numerous debts in the course of tracing these densely textured weaves. I thank my students at my own alma mater, St Stephen’s College, Delhi, for teaching me, through vociferous arguments on the idyllic greens of Andrews’ Court, that one person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens. At Cambridge, I have received much illumination from the distinctive ‘catholic’ visions of Jonardon Ganeri, Martin Ganeri, Christopher Bayly, Douglas Hedley and Janet Soskice. In California, Madeleine Haser keeps on reminding me that the spirit freely blows where it wills, across all boundaries – ethnic, national, and, dare I say it, religious.
My readers should regard whatever insights they might discern in the pages of this book as mere variations on the vidyā that I have received over the years in the lineages of my guru, Professor Julius Lipner, though they must, of course, attribute whatever errors they (will probably) find there to projections of my own avidyā.