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9780670093656 6707c850d0018e00244460f2 Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity https://www.midlandbookshop.com/s/607fe93d7eafcac1f2c73ea4/6707c851d0018e00244460fb/91r80p8ccgl-_sy425_.jpg

When European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: the worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But soon it became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more complex than white men’s stereotypes allowed, and Hindus had little desire to convert.

But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance. During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion. This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to resist foreign rule. It is this encounter which has, in good measure, inspired modern Hinduism’s present shape. Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionaries’ own tools and strategies in the process, triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country.

In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters?maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen?this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position. Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated?and infinitely richer?than popular 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.
9780670093656
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Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

ISBN: 9780670093656
₹799
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Details
  • ISBN: 9780670093656
  • Author: Manu S Pillai
  • Publisher: Penguin Allen Lane
  • Pages: 664
  • Format: Hardback
  • Release Date: 25 November 2024
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Book Description

When European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: the worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But soon it became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more complex than white men’s stereotypes allowed, and Hindus had little desire to convert.

But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance. During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion. This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to resist foreign rule. It is this encounter which has, in good measure, inspired modern Hinduism’s present shape. Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionaries’ own tools and strategies in the process, triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country.

In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters?maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen?this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position. Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated?and infinitely richer?than popular 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.

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