Description
By (author) Pillai, Manu S
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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. But it quickly became clear that this ‘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. 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.
Review quote:
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
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Exploding the myth of a singular, ‘true’ Hinduism, Manu S Pillai’s deft exploration of four centuries of the faith reveals its underlying complexities
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[An]
insightful and incisive inquiry into the making of the modern Hindu identity…
Pillai has a singular ability to weave multiple strands into a single coherent narrative without sacrificing a sense of the diverse personalities involved and the raging maelstrom of ideas
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Truly remarkable ... Gods, Guns and Missionaries unpacks the transformation of Hinduism with
sharp insight combined with masterful storytelling …
Pillai provides valuable tools to understand the narratives underpinning contemporary Indian politics
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Scrupulously researched and narrated with an authoritative ease…Gods, Guns and Missionaries is
a courageous work that privileges fact over political correctness and prejudice.
Pillai demonstrates that unusual ability to be at once scholarly and extremely readable
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Gods, Guns and Missionaries delicately and deliciously crosses that bridge between academic rigour and accessible storytelling. Offering its readers new trails to the present through the prism of the past, the book deserves the work it demands. It’s a debate, a conversation, and a question for the future. It’s a dialogue waiting to happen,
as timeless as its subject
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In under 350 pages of text, 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
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Essential reading for anyone curious about the long roots of India’s current political dispensation …. Gods, Guns and Missionaries is about something profoundly bigger than the Indian subcontinent. It is part of a global story in w
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