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.
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