Book excerpt: In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan McGovern turns the commonly-accepted model of the origins of early Indian religions on its head. Instead of assuming a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical in ancient India, McGovern shows that there were many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical, and out of whose contestation with one another the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical emerged.