The great novelist and thinker Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-94), associated with his famous hymn ‘Vande Mataram’, is sometimes seen as mainly a creator of Hindu nationalist icons. This is unfortunate, for Bankim was an enormously learned man, a deep and subtle thinker. A relatively unknown side of his work comprises his religious and philosophical thought, in particular his carefully argued ideas on Hinduism.

This collection of Bankim’s writings-many translated into English for the first time and excerpted from the author’s Complete Works in the Bengali original-brings out some of the inner anxieties and ambivalence within the novelist-intellectual’s work on religion, ethics, and philosophy.