An ambitious and engagingly history of how encounters with Christianity have shaped Hindu identity and nationalism in colonial and contemporary India
When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.
Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.
About the Author
Manu S. Pillai is the author of the critically acclaimed The Ivory Throne (2015), Rebel Sultans (2018), The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin (2019) and False Allies (2021). Former chief of staff to Shashi Tharoor MP, Pillai is also a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (2017) and holds a PhD in history from King's College London. His essays and writings on history have appeared in various national and international publications. This is his fifth book.
Industry Reviews
A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians
William Dalrymple
A timely and decisive intervention in the contentious conversation around modern Hinduism, Gods, Guns and Missionaries takes the reader on a masterful journey that's enlightening and provocative in equal measure. Told with verve, confidence, and nuance, I struggled to put it down
David Veevers, author of The Great Defiance
Manu Pillai asks how Hinduism, perhaps the most ancient living tradition, came to be a modern identity. The luminous and often surprising account he offers tells us about the making of a Hindu self as part of a complex relationship between India and the world. A real achievement
Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford
A deft exploration of four centuries of Hinduism's often terse, sometimes violent and always complex relationship with other faiths, Gods, Guns and Missionaries explodes the myth of a singular, 'true' Hinduism [and] lays out the factors that allowed Hindu nationalists to forge a seemingly secular, muscular identity which has come to define Hinduism for many in the 21st century. Drawing on the lives of missionaries, maharajahs and men of the Dutch, French, and British East India Companies, Manu S Pillai builds the story of a system marked by adaptability, dynamism and compromise rather than ossified archaisms
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times, The Best Books of the Week
Gods, Guns and Missionaries unpacks the transformation of Hinduism with sharp insight combined with masterful storytelling [and is] truly remarkable is its ability to speak to both sides of India’s modern ideological divide. Exploring the pressures of Mughal decline, missionary intervention, and colonial rule in the 400 years before Indian independence, Pillai examines how a tradition defined by its fluidity and flexibility began to crystallize into its modern form, often in response to external challenges … by tracing Hinduism’s evolution under colonial and missionary scrutiny, [he] provides valuable tools to understand the narratives underpinning contemporary Indian politics
Nishad Sanzagiri, Asian Review of Books
Gods, Guns and Missionaries presents a confident survey of encounters between Indians and Europeans from 1500 onward – five centuries of misunderstanding and mutual appreciation – taking in all the major cock-ups and flip-flops in colonial policy [while also making] a convincing case for the role of convent education in altering the world view of the lower orders.
Pratinav Anil, Literary Review
