Book excerpt: 'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.