Brian Hatcher

Brian A. Hatcher, Packard Professor of Theology, Tufts University, is a scholar of religion and colonialism in South Asia whose monographs include Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (1999), Bourgeois Hinduism (2008), and Hinduism Before Reform (2020). He has also translated Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage (2011) and Against High-Caste Polygamy (2023). He is currently researching the failure of colonial-era reformers to confront the problem of caste injustice in Bengal.

For his latest book project, Losing Caste, Brian asks how it is that India’s most celebrated agents of progressive change could be aware of caste as a social problem and yet lose sight of the issue when it came to their own reformist projects. Focusing on 19th and early 20th century Bengal, Brian seeks to offer an alternative history of the long nineteenth century, revealing how emancipatory theological and social initiatives remained bound by, or blind to, the strictures and exclusions of caste society.