My recently published book, Empires of Complaints. Mughal Law and the Making of British India, 1765-93 (Cambridge, 2022) explores how British conquerors built a new colonial state in eighteenth-century Bengal by co-opting and transforming Islamicate, Persianate infrastructures of imperial governance created under the Mughal Empire.

For the past decade, the press in Pakistan has remained rife with stories of the kidnapping, forcible conversion to Islam, and marriages of young Hindu women at the hands of Muslim men. Women’s rights and minority advocacy groups have demanded a state-led response, but two attempts at legislation have already failed. In courts, legal redress requires a clear, visible difference between forcible abduction and what is termed “free-will” elopement. However, these matters are complicated further when the very nature of Hindu women’s desire appears indeterminate.

The figures of the neighbor and friend are ubiquitous in Gandhi’s writings. While he himself assumes he is only reaffirming old figures, something truly radical happens in his writings (as in those of his sharpest critic, Ambedkar). Both write at a time when a modern commandment, so to speak, exemplified in the categorical imperative, is displacing the Biblical and other analogous commandments. It is in order to criticize this new commandment that both affirm instead old commandments around neighbor and friend.

In this paper, I will explore why Vivekananda’s words challenged and enticed so many audiences around the world. Why did publics as diverse as respectable New Englanders and Swadeshi “terrorist” honour him so fervently? I want to suggest that the title of my recent book “Guru to the World” was not designed to reinforce the tired story of Vivekananda as the first global guru who unlocked eastern spirituality for the materialism west.