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The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad. By Alexander Rocklin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 310. $90.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9781469648705.

Although the question of dening Hinduism has occupied the minds and writings of scholars of Hinduism for some time, Alexander Rocklin brings a fresh perspective in The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad. Here the question is less about dening Hinduism and more about how Hinduism comes to be made through the interactions between the colonized and the colonial state, between Muslims and Hindus, and between Afroand Indo-Trinidadians. Rocklin’s focus is an important one, as academics were formulating ideas about religion at the same as Indian indentured laborers were being transported to various British colonies. Using mostly archival sources, Rocklin argues that the notion of “religion” and laws regulating its practice developed as a way of controlling laborers even as the narrative centered on “religious freedom.” Modeling their practices after Christianity and in defense of their “religion,” Indo-Trinidadians constructed a “Hinduism” that both worked within and challenged colonial categories. While Rocklin’s argument may initially seem to be another iteration of the literature centered on the “the invention of Hinduism,” by taking the discussion out of India to argue that the formation of “Hinduism” does not happen solely in the single origin point of India, he revitalizes the debate, sending it into a novel direction. Following Rocklin’s introduction (“Crossing the Dark Water,”) the book is organized into two parts: Religion and Hinduism. The rst part contains three chapters: “Converting Religion (chapter 2),” “Regulating Religion (chapter 3),” and “Outlawing Religion (chapter 4).” Here Rocklin is concerned with exemplifying what he describes as a “constellation of (at times contradictory) colonial policies and institutions” of colonial secularism (10). As Rocklin explains, the term “Hindu” in Trinidad was initially an ethno-racial term used to describe the practices of Indians without necessarily distinguishing the practices of “Hindus” from those of Muslims. He begins with the petition concerning the Hosay festival, the history of which is the focus of his third chapter, “Regulating Religion.” To increase support for indentureship during a time of antislavery sentiments, the British framed religious freedom as a feature that distinguished indentureship from slavery. As a result, the colonial regime took an interest in dening what practices of the Indian laborers counted as “religious.” Religious freedom and tolerance was part of indentured contracts as a way to ensure the continued ow of laborers from India, but it also offered the laborers a loophole through which they could assert their own power. Rocklin’s main argument is that the adoption of the category of religion allowed for the laborers to construct social groups and experiment with the boundaries of those groups under the connes of the colonial regime. The irony, of course, is that this adoption also allowed for the continued power of these categories. Rocklin writes: “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a consequence of coming under the discipline of colonial institutions such as plantations, schools, orphanages, courts, and jails, Indian Trinidadians incorporated and began to gain a mastery over the category religion and its attendant norms, at the same time that, through the discipline of colonial institutions, they were mastered by them” (4). What becomes clear throughout the book is that the dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized is never a simple exercise in hegemonic or counter-hegemonic practice. As Indo-Trinidadians learned and adopted the categories of “religion” and “Hinduism,” they both challenged and Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021): 450–452 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University doi:10.1017/jlr.2021.32