Recent historiography of colonialism has emphasized that the colonial encounter was not merely an arena in which ideas originating in the European metropolis were projected and forcibly imposed on the colonized, but rather a process in which those ideas took their modern shape through the actions of both colonizer and colonized. Although scholars have begun to attend to the colonial context in which the category ‘religion’, and its corollary, the ‘secular’, acquired their modern sense, the significance of colonialism for the production and deployment of the categorial distinction is more often asserted than demonstrated. One colonial context where the religion-secular distinction was explicitly invoked as an element of policy on the part of a colonial power was in India, where the East India Company, and later the British Crown, maintained a policy of non-intervention in the religious affairs of its colonial subjects that was predicated upon the distinction. The policy was extensively debated in the early nineteenth century in relation to issues such as the banning of satī and the toleration of Christian missions in Company territory. Arguably the most consequential deployment of the religion-secular distinction during the colonial period in India, however, was in relation to caste.

In his recent work on caste Nicholas Dirks has advanced an important argument that suggests that the analysis of caste as a religious, rather than a political, institution was not merely convenient for the British but a necessary instrument of the very specific form of indirect rule that the British exercised in India.