ABSTRACT
The articles collected here explore the relationships between religion, society and politics in India in the era of the Mughal Empire, and of what many now would describe as the emergence of an ‘early modern’ world. Not the least of the problems in this well-traversed field is the inherent tension between the study of religion and that of history. For the faithful, religion represents a transcendental system of meaning, rising above the mutable circumstances of place and time. Yet social and political relationships necessarily take place within particular contexts, to which historians necessarily give emphasis. From the perspective of theology, it would be trivial to relate the eternal truths of Islam, Hinduism or Christianity only to the specific circumstances of their discovery or revelation. However, from the perspective of history, it is precisely here that meaning is most often sought and usually found.
