Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review

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

Author: Manu S Pillai

Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024

Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes)

There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva.

The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he had hoped for. But Hindutva, it turned out, was biding its time. And not long after he was enshrined in the house of the people [Lok Sabha], having won power, it would begin a process – now well underway – of remaking the Indian state in its own image.”

In other words, the kaleidoscopic Hinduism has been reduced to a monochrome Hindutva that carries Savarkar’s legacy. Pillai tells us that Lord Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of British India, described Savarkar as an “unpleasant, intolerant little man full of communal bitterness.” Today’s India has inherited all that unpleasantness, intolerance, littleness, and bitterness. And Savarkar’s portrait hangs in the Parliament next to Mahatma Gandhi’s. The irony cannot be lost because Savarkar was always thought to be one of the conspirators of the Mahatma’s assassination.

Gandhi has given way to Savarkar in the present India. The Mahatma’s portrait may soon disappear from the Parliament altogether in order to pave way for a Hindu Rashtra. One of the limitations of Pillai’s book is that it stops short of writing anything directly about the present political dispensation in the country. But his book makes it amply clear that the Hinduism of history is not anything like the Hindutva of today.

His book starts with the Mughals though we are soon reminded of the fact that the Europeans had made their own invasion of the country before the Mughals. Babur was still a teenager in Uzbekistan when Vasco da Gama landed on the Kerala coast in 1498. The Christian missionaries soon followed Gama.

Both the Christian missionaries and the Mughal rulers had their immense impacts on Hinduism. Buddhism and Jainism had already reshaped Hinduism earlier to some extent. Not all these people were trying to impose their religious ways on the Hindus. Many of them like Akbar and the Jesuit missionary Robert de Nobili tried to adapt their own religions to suit certain Hindu ways that were acceptable to them.

Hinduism, like any other religion, underwent a lot of changes due to various influences from external forces like the Mughals and the missionaries. Pillai is eminently successful in narrating the story of the dynamic evolution of Hinduism in those centuries.

The central chapter (fourth out of the seven and titled ‘An Indian Renaissance’) gives us some illuminating insights into the dynamic processes that take place when different religions and cultures encounter meaningfully. British scholars like William Jones (1746-94) and Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821) contributed significantly to the growth and development of Indian literature and arts. The former translated Manu Smriti from Sanskrit before discovering India’s own Shakespeare in Kalidasa whose masterpiece Abhinjnanasakuntalam was also translated. Mackenzie did a historical work of archiving 1568 manuscripts, 2630 drawings, 8076 inscriptions, and 6218 coins with the help of five “assiduous” Brahmins.

Not everything was evil with the Mughals or the British.

Some of the British scholars took interest in the Dravidian part of India too, F W Ellis (1777-1819) being chief among them. Ellis suggested with ample evidence that the South Indian languages formed a distinct family. Pillai informs us in this context that “Future research would suggest that the Dravidian language group – as it is now called – once straddled the subcontinent, illuminating a historical era prior to the spread of Indo-Aryan culture.”

Pillai’s book has a lot more to offer with its remarkable scholarliness. Scholarliness notwithstanding, the book is distinctly readable. What makes Pillai a great writer is precisely that readability. I haven’t come across any other historian recently who makes history so delightful to read, though William Dalrymple is pretty close. There’s something of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins in Manu S Pillai.

The sixth chapter, ‘Native Luthers’, introduces us to some of the remarkable Hindu reformers like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, the Phules, and B G Tilak. This chapter may not offer anything new to informed readers. For the young readers, however, these details can be highly illuminating.

In short, this is a book that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in understanding how India has come to a kind of historical hiatus, if not regression, with the present Hindutva ideology. Pillai doesn’t judge anyone. He presents certain facts though there are subtle undertones that no discerning reader will miss. 

Manu S Pillai

My only complaint is with the bulk of notes that follow the text: half of the book which could have been left online for those who are interested. A much slimmer volume would have been a lot more appealing to a generation that finds the smartphone more alluring.