Before Reform: The Swaminarayan Sampraday and Brahmo Samaj as Early Colonial Religious Polities

An attempt to exit the discursive world of religious reform in order to rethink the first emergence of two major Hindu movements that would come to be scripted (each in their way) as reform movements. This paper asks how might we view the work of Sahajanand Swami and Rammohun Roy, respective founders of these two movements, if we thought of them not as reformers but as articulators of two innovative religious polities within a distinctive, if short-lived, early colonial moment?