Introduction

The Introduction broaches how the concept of idolatry, whose history can be traced to the Old and New Testaments as well as to the ‘origin of Western metaphysics’ in Plato’s splitting of eidos (form or idea) from eidolon (image or representation), and which has parallels to the concept of fetishism that arose out of cross-cultural interactions on the West African coast in the 16th and 17th centuries, played a seminal role in thinking India during the colonial period and has its afterlife in the present.