The boundary was drawn along the lines of the Protestant division between the essentials commanded by God in scripture and indifferent things falsely superimposed as religion… . In its secularized form, this division between pure religion and human additions was viewed as a general characteristic of all religions, including Hinduism. Since the task of locating this boundary was displaced to the ‘scriptures’ and ‘priests’ of ‘Hindu religion’, the colonial legal system effectively transplanted this conceptual structure into the Hindu traditions.
