Includes bibliographical references and index.

The major focus of this book is on modernizing Movements - social, religious, and Cultural - among Punjabi Hindus from the 1860s through World War I. The Arya Samaj, one such movement, dominates the volume, as it dominated a half-century of change in the Punjab. Prof. Jones begins with an account of the earliest individual attempts of reformers to adapt their cultural Traditions to the new world of the British Empire. He examines the development of new ideologies, the Creation of group consciousness based on them, and the resultant expression of an overt Hindu politics. He demonstrates that the process underlying cultural interaction between the British and Punjabi Hindus, Beginning in a particularistic manner, found expression by the twentieth century in the demands of a politicized Hindu elite.