This book is a pioneering attempt to understand the prehistory of Hinduism in South Asia. Exploring religious processes in the Deccan region between the eleventh and the nineteenth century with class relations as its point of focus, it throws new light on the making of religious communities, monastic institutions, legends, lineages, and the ethics that governed them. In the light of this prehistory, a compelling framework is suggested for a revision of existing perspectives on the making of Hinduism in the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

India is generally regarded as a civilization with a set of intrinsic attributes that emerged in the age of the Vedas or, better still, in the Harappan times. In recent decades, historical studies have moved away from rigid perspectives of singularity in origin and expansion; the emphasis now is on pluralities and long-term processes spanning centuries and millennia. There is also an influential school of thought which rejects antiquity claims such as these and holds that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India's past, Manu V. Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to examine the evolution of institutions, ideas and identities that are characterized, typically, as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he traces their emergence to specific conditions that developed in India between 600 and 1200 CE, a period which historians now call the 'early medieval'.