A great deal of modern Hinduism and modern Indian Islam took shape in argument with this administration, and the argument ran in more than one direction. The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Calcutta in the 1820s, pressed for a reformed monotheistic Hinduism without images and campaigned against sati, drawing on Upanishadic texts and on contact with Unitarian Christianity.
Later in the century the Ramakrishna Mission organised a very different response, built around a Bengali mystic and articulated internationally by Vivekananda, which presented Vedanta as a universal philosophy rather than accepting the terms of the colonial critique. Muslim reform in the region ran on its own track, with debates over education, law and the authority of the schools of jurisprudence.
Peter van der Veer has argued that the modern categories of Hindu and Muslim religious identity in India were consolidated in this period rather than inherited unchanged from before it, shaped by census classification, by separate personal law and by competing reform movements that each had to state what their community was. The atlas records the movements under their own entries and notes here that the Presidency is the setting in which most of them were formed.