Picture two people arguing about a seventeenth-century village in Maharashtra. The first says: the Hindus and the Muslims there were two peoples, eternally separate, two nations sharing a road and hating each other across it — the same fight then as now. The second laughs at him. No, says the second, you are reading the present backward; back then nobody much cared about religion, it was a private little thing, faith was soft and syncretic, the village was a melting pot, and all this Hindu-versus-Muslim business was manufactured later by the British. The two of them think they are opposites. They think they are fighting.
They are making the same mistake.
Both are projecting the present onto the past. The first projects modern communal nationalism backward and calls it timeless. The second projects modern liberal secularism backward and calls it original. One sees eternal blocs; the other sees eternal tolerance. Neither sees the actual seventeenth century, which had neither. That is the double anachronism: not one error and its correction, but two errors that look like mirror images and are in fact the same act of mistaking your own moment for the permanent shape of the world.1
Laine's point is that the second mistake is more dangerous precisely because it feels like the cure for the first. You notice the primordialist lying about eternal hatred. You correct him. And in correcting him you swing so hard the other way that you commit a fresh anachronism nobody catches — because it wears the costume of sophistication, of secular good sense, of being on the right side.2
The double anachronism names a paired trap in how we read religious identity in premodern South Asia. There are two ways to get Shivaji's world wrong, and they pull in opposite directions, which is exactly why historians keep falling into the second while fleeing the first.
Anachronism A is the primordialist one. It holds that Hindus and Muslims "have always been two distinct peoples, bearing two clearly opposed religions, and having rival political objectives and destinies."3 On this view nothing essential changed between 1600 and now. The communal war was always the war. The blocs were always the blocs. Shivaji was a Hindu hero defending the faith against an Islamic enemy in the same sense a modern nationalist would mean those words.
Anachronism B is the secularist one. Modern Indian intellectuals, rightly committed to secular historiography and rightly alarmed by communalist myth-making, reject A. Good. But in rejecting it they reach for a reading of reformist saints and a romantic picture of "the village" as a syncretic melting pot, and from these they "impute a kind of modern liberalism to the premodern subject, according to which religious affiliation is a rather insignificant and private affair."4 They turn the people of 1600 into private-faith liberals who happened to wear turbans. And then, the sharpest part of the error: "in blaming all social and political divisions between Hindus and Muslims on British colonial policies, they may be guilty of crediting the British with a supreme but unwarranted historical agency."5
That last clause is the whole sting. To say the British invented the Hindu-Muslim divide is not anti-colonial. It is the opposite. It hands the Raj a god-like power to manufacture an entire civilization's self-understanding out of nothing — a power no colonial administration ever had. The secularist thinks he is shrinking British guilt to its proper size. He is in fact inflating British agency to cosmic scale. Laine calls this cleavage of past from present "every bit as mythic as the primordialist view."6 Both are myths. That is what makes them twins.
Walk the two errors slowly and you see why they rhyme.
The primordialist needs the past to be like the present so that today's communal politics can claim ancient warrant. He takes modern categories — Hindu, Muslim, nation, religion — freezes them, and stamps them on 1600. The categories become eternal, hard-edged, mutually hostile. Identity is destiny and always was.
The secularist needs the past to be unlike the present so that today's divisions can be blamed on a recent villain. He takes the absence of modern hard categories — true, there was no computer-precise definition of "Hinduism," true, the boundaries were porous — and from that absence he concludes the categories did not function at all. He decides that allegiance to Islam, much less to Hinduism, was "an abstraction at best entertained by ideologues who made up only a tiny fraction of the population," while everyone else did village rituals untouched by any world religion.7 So when communal division undeniably exists now, it must have been installed from outside. Enter the British, the demiurge who made the divide from nothing.
Here is the trap inside the secularist move. He thinks he is being modest about the past — no big abstract religion, just local practice. But that modesty about premodern people forces an immodest claim about the British: that they alone, by colonial policy and reformist redefinition of "religion," produced the entire architecture of Hindu-Muslim opposition. You cannot have it both ways. If the divide is real and large today, and the past had no seed of it, then something enormous made it, and you have just nominated the colonial state as that something. You have made the British more powerful than any empire has ever been.8
Laine threads the needle between them. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maharashtrians did have religious identities. They "defined themselves as Hindus and Muslims (though what that meant varied as much as it does today), even while they calculated their precise interests as soldiers, ascetics, peasants, and kings."9 The terms were already in use by the seventeenth century, with the same fluid and contested usages we find now.10 Identity was real — but it was a family-resemblance term, not a computer definition; it had scope and variation; it was argued over.11 The boundaries existed. "No one can cogently argue that boundaries did not matter... the true arguments were about where to place those boundaries."12 That is the middle thread: not eternal blocs, not invented-by-Britain, but real-and-fluid, contested at the edge, present in the period, not a colonial import. The communal project was already "well under way in pre-British Maharashtra," even if colonialism later realized its full impact.13
The double anachronism is the closing argument of Laine's whole book, and it disciplines every page that came before it. The vault's Purandare cluster — the devotional and nationalist Shivaji, the defender-of-the-faith — sits on the primordialist side of the ledger. This page is its critical-historical counter-text. It does not deny that Shivaji's Hindu-hero image is real and old; it denies that the image proves eternal blocs. The reframing happened in stages: the tale was "already reshaped by bhakti writers by 1800," then "thoroughly overtaken by the nationalist narrative in 1900."14 Construction, not eternity — but construction that began long before the Raj.
The handshake that matters most is with the vault's pages on identity and colonialism. Any concept page in this vault that reaches for "the British invented X" must now pass through this gate: did you just hand the colonial state a demiurge's powers? Laine's warning is a permanent check on lazy anti-colonialism. Blaming the Raj feels radical and is often the more conservative move, because it preserves the fantasy of a pure, undivided precolonial past that never existed.
Now the sting in the tail, and it cuts the believer harder than the scholar.
The Hinduism most modern Hindus treat as timeless — the one that says all paths lead to the same summit, that tolerance and inner devotion and the equal validity of every sect are the ancient genius of the tradition — is itself a recent construction. And its structure is borrowed. Laine asks whether one can speak of a "venture of Hinduism" the way Marshall Hodgson spoke of a unitary "venture of Islam."15 He answers carefully, and the answer stings.
Islam, for all its internal variety, has always held one ideal: to create a single brotherhood, one community upholding common truths everywhere.16 Classical Indian religion held the opposite ideal. "At the heart of Hinduism... the ideal itself has often been the maintenance of internal diversity."17 Classical Hinduism did not aspire to one creed for all Hindus. Its genius was the management of difference — many sects, many gods, many practices, no demand that they converge on shared doctrine. Diversity was not a problem to be tolerated; it was the point.
So what happens when, since the eighteenth century, reformers articulate a "universalistic Hinduism" — the idea "that all Hindus in all times and places should uphold certain truths"? Laine's blade: that idea "is structurally more similar to the 'religion' of Islam than to classical Indian religious formations."18 The universalizing move — one Hinduism, common truths, all Hindus everywhere — is an Islamicate ideal in Hindu clothing. The very feature modern Hindu nationalism treats as proof of Hinduism's ancient superiority over Islam is in fact the feature it absorbed from the Islamicate world around it.
David Lorenzen's careful study marshals vast evidence that "Hinduism was not a British construction."19 Laine does not simply side against him — and this is important, because Lorenzen is largely right that the construction predates the British. But Laine notes that Lorenzen leans on the ideological self-portrayals of popular bhakti, which color what counts as central to Hinduism: nonviolence, tolerance, detachment, sincere inner devotion — exactly "the elements that reign supreme in nationalist neo-Hinduism."20 The all-Hindus-against-Islam narrative required creative selection: tolerant pious bhakti welded to Puranic reverence for cows and images, with caste-based values quietly overcome.21 The construction is real and old and pre-British. But it is a construction. The seamless tolerant timeless Hinduism is the most recent layer of all, and its shape is more Islamic than Vedic.
A scholar sits with a seventeenth-century Marathi ballad of Shivaji open on the desk. The lamp is low. The verse calls him a protector of cows and brahmins, a scourge of the Muslim captains.
The primordialist reader leans in and feels vindicated. Here it is, he thinks — proof. Hindu hero, Muslim enemy, the eternal war in black ink. He reads the present straight into the verse and closes the book satisfied. The categories were always there, hard and hostile, and the ballad says so.
The secularist reader leans in and waves it away. Propaganda, she says, ideologue's froth — a tiny literate fraction playing at abstractions while the actual peasant outside got on with his syncretic village rites and never thought in terms of "Hinduism" at all. She sets the ballad aside as unrepresentative noise and reaches, instead, for the British gazetteers, where the real divide was forged. She closes the book satisfied too.
Laine's reader does neither. He keeps the ballad open and asks a smaller, harder question: where is this verse trying to put the boundary? Not whether Shivaji had a Hindu identity — he did, the poet plainly thinks so, the term is in use and means something in 1670. But what work is the poem doing at the edge? Whom does it pull in, whom does it shove out, what counts as "us" and on whose authority? He notices the identity is real and fluid at once, contested in the very act of being asserted. He notices the construction is happening on the page in front of him, in 1700, a century and a half before any Raj gazetteer. He does not freeze the categories and he does not dissolve them. He watches them being argued. Then he writes down where the poet drew the line, and who would have drawn it elsewhere.
| The verse says "protector of cows and brahmins, scourge of Muslims" | Reading | What it concludes |
|---|---|---|
| Primordialist | eternal Hindu vs Muslim blocs, present read into past | the war was always the war |
| Secularist | ideologue's noise; real divide is British-made | premodern faith was private, the Raj built the divide |
| Laine / boundary-debate | identity real but fluid, contested at the edge, pre-British | the argument was about where to place the line, not whether it existed |
You are committing the double anachronism if you catch yourself doing any of these.
You treat the absence of a hard modern definition as proof the category did nothing. (No computer-precise "Hinduism" in 1600, therefore no functioning Hindu identity in 1600 — false; family-resemblance terms function without strict edges.)22
You explain a large present-day division entirely by a single recent cause and feel radical doing it. (If "the British made it" leaves you satisfied and superior, check whether you just made the British a god.)23
You picture the premodern peasant as a private-faith liberal who didn't really care about religion. That is your liberalism, not his.24
You picture the premodern world as eternal hostile blocs identical to today's politics. That is your nationalism, not his.
You assume the tolerant all-paths-are-one Hinduism is the ancient default. (It is the most recent layer, and its universalizing shape is more Islamicate than classical.)25
The tell, in every case: the past comes out looking exactly like the conclusion you wanted about the present. When the past flatters your politics that cleanly, you are reading a mirror, not a document.
The load-bearing tension Laine refuses to resolve is Lorenzen versus the colonial-construction thesis. Lorenzen (1999) "marshals a vast amount of evidence to dispute the idea that 'Hinduism' was a British construction."26 The colonial-construction school holds the opposite: that "Hinduism" as a unified religion is substantially a product of the colonial encounter and Orientalist scholarship. Laine does not pick a winner. He threads between: the construction is real and predates the British (with Lorenzen, against the strong colonial-construction claim), but it is a construction nonetheless (against Lorenzen's implied antiquity), and it leans heavily on bhakti's self-flattering self-image (a caution Lorenzen underweights).27 Both are preserved. Do not collapse them.
A second open tension: Laine insists religious terms "remain descriptively useful for modern scholars, as they were for historical subjects," even though they are fluid and contested.28 Critics could press: at what point does a term so fluid that it admits endless counterexamples stop being descriptively useful? Laine's answer is Ryle's "university" — a real thing you cannot point to as one object — but the line between useful-because-fluid and useless-because-shapeless is exactly where his opponents would push back. He does not close it.
Open questions. If universalistic Hinduism is structurally Islamicate, is that borrowing, parallel evolution under the pressures of modernity, or something a comparative method would dissolve on closer inspection? How much of the "well under way in pre-British Maharashtra" claim survives if one weights non-elite sources more heavily than the literate bhakti and nationalist texts Laine reads? And the uncomfortable one: does naming the tolerant Hinduism a recent construction itself become a political act — the kind that, two decades after this book, got Laine's work banned and worse in Maharashtra?
Laine reads religious discourse the way Peter van der Veer and Marshall Hodgson do: as constitutive of identity, not a smokescreen over it. Hodgson's "venture of Islam" is the model Laine reaches for directly — Islam as a coherent civilizational project organized around the ideal of a single brotherhood, a thing made by the discourse of its participants, not a mask over economic interest.29 Laine borrows the frame to ask whether Hinduism has a comparable "venture," and the borrowing is the convergence: both men take what people said they believed as a real historical force.
Van der Veer's work on religious nationalism in India runs the same way — religion as a generative engine of modern identity, not an epiphenomenon to be explained away by class or colonial policy. Where van der Veer and Laine converge is the refusal to treat the premodern subject's religious self-description as false consciousness waiting for a materialist decoding.
The tension surfaces against the secularist historiography Laine is countering, which does treat religious affiliation as the smokescreen — insignificant, private, a thing real people barely felt, with the real action happening in interest and colonial manipulation underneath. From inside the experience, this is what Laine will not accept: that the man in 1670 who called himself a Hindu did not mean it, was not moved by it, was really only a peasant calculating grain. Laine's wager is that he meant it and calculated grain, both at once, and that the meaning was as real a force as the grain. The reveal is that treating religion as a smokescreen is not the hard-nosed materialist position it poses as — it is itself the liberal anachronism, projecting onto the past a privacy of faith that belongs to the modern secular reader and not to his subject.
The double anachronism is not really about India. It is about a recurring error in how groups invent their own pasts, and that error shows up wherever identity gets manufactured and then back-dated.
Founding Myth Construction is the direct structural parallel. A founding myth takes a present-day community and retrojects it as eternal — the nation was always the nation, the people always the people. That is precisely the primordialist anachronism. But Laine's contribution sharpens the founding-myth page in a way it cannot generate alone: the debunking of a founding myth has its own characteristic failure mode. When you expose the myth as a recent construction, you are tempted to over-locate its origin in a single villainous agent — the colonial state, the propagandist, the regime — and in doing so you build a counter-myth of pure origins that flatters you as much as the original myth flattered the believer. The insight the pairing produces: every act of myth-debunking risks installing a demiurge, because the debunker needs someone to have made the myth, and the cleaner the maker, the more satisfying and the less true. The double anachronism is the founding-myth page plus its mirror — the over-correction is itself a myth.
Universalism as the Precursor to Nationalism handshakes on the second SIGNAL. Laine's claim that emergent universalism is "the necessary precursor to the ideology of nationalism" — because nationalism presumes all members of the imagined community share one cultural tradition — is the hinge.30 The universalism page traces how a single-creed ideal makes a nation thinkable. This page adds the specific irony: the universalizing Hinduism that made Hindu nationalism possible is structurally Islamicate. The insight neither page reaches alone: the universalism that powers a nationalism may be borrowed from the very rival that nationalism defines itself against. The enemy supplies the form. Hindu nationalism's unifying ideal is built on a structure absorbed from Islam, which means the opposition between the two camps is, at the level of religious form, partly a family resemblance the combatants cannot see.
Ethnic Nationalism within Marxist Universalism gives the third handshake and a tension. There, a universalist frame (Marxism, which claims to dissolve ethnic particularity into class) turns out to incubate the very ethnic nationalism it denies. The structural rhyme with the secularist anachronism is exact: a universalist self-understanding (secular liberalism, Marxist internationalism) becomes blind to the particular identities operating right under it, and that blindness is not neutral — it actively mislocates where those identities came from. The insight: universalist frameworks systematically misread the origin of the particular loyalties they cannot account for, blaming them on external manufacture (colonialism, false consciousness, reaction) rather than seeing them as native and live. The double anachronism is the South Asian religious case of a general pattern: the universalist's confident map of the past is the most reliably wrong one, because his theory has already told him what he is allowed to find. And the correction is not a third universalism but a refusal of all three golden ages — a discipline of watching the boundary get drawn in real time, by real people, with no theory deciding the verdict in advance.
Sharpest implication: the move that feels most anti-communal — "the British invented the Hindu-Muslim divide" — is structurally a gift to the communalist, because it preserves intact the fantasy of a pure, undivided precolonial India that the communalist also needs, just with a different villain. Both want a golden age. The honest history denies both of them their golden age. There was no era of eternal blocs and there was no era of private syncretic peace; there was an era of real, contested, fluid identity, arguing about its own boundaries, all on its own, with no demiurge required.
Generative questions. First: if every act of debunking a founding myth risks installing a demiurge, what does a debunking that refuses the demiurge actually look like — can you expose a construction without nominating a constructor? Second: how many of our current "this was invented by X" stories in other domains — gender, race, the nation, even the self — are secretly crediting X with supreme and unwarranted historical agency, and what would each look like rethreaded through Laine's middle? Third: if the tolerant universalist version of a tradition is its most recent and most borrowed layer, what does that do to the authority of any "return to authentic roots" — religious, national, or personal — given that the roots people return to are usually the youngest part of the tree?