ABSTRACT
"Religions" are commonly imagined as uniformly built from the same materials, like so many houses that may have different layouts, entrances, exteriors, and roof designs, but share fundamentally similar features like foundations, windows, and walls. The data collected and information formulated by Europeans and their indigenous collaborators proved crucial for nascent secular studies of religion as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European visitors to Indian royal courts, like those of the Mughals, were immediately humbled by the incredible wealth, political power, and religious pluralism evident in most of them. Scholars are compelled to wrangle with "religion" and "religions" because without these categories they would have little basis to compare religious phenomena. One dynamic of religious inter-relationship is bricolage, a term deriving from the French notion of jacks-of-all-trades making use of whatever is at hand. A final ingredient to the quickening certainty of exclusive categories among both Indians and Europeans arose among Christian missionaries.
