Manu S. Pillai supplies an interesting analogy of five brown people in a room—in shades of brown different from that of the others—not considering themselves as a single organism. They might, he says, “violently disagree with one another.” However, when a white person enters the very same room, something shifts, “the brown grow cognizant of their own features.” If the white person is hostile, brownness becomes unifying, a template for “joint action.” He concludes, “Inner contradictions might remain—not to speak of the fact that white and brown could cheerfully consort too—but a new dynamic is born.” This work titled Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity is like being thrust into this room and watching the interactions unfold across a sweeping timeline—four hundred condensed years.
Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children, “Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.” Manu S. Pillai charts Hinduism along an evolutionary course that is anything but polished; a history sprawled across four centuries, from Akbar the Great to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Pillai’s work is grounded in academic scholarship, bolstered with exhaustive research and his ingenious wit that elevates the reading. Right at the outset, he calls the work “an investigation into human action and reaction, in a context of political conquest, cultural domination and resistance”. The historian achieves this feat with an eye for detail; assembling opinions, perspectives, sources and portraits, without the slightest semblance of superficiality or trepidation.
Pillai opens with a fascinating anecdote of the travels of Madho Singh II of Jaipur and interestingly ends with that of another, Bijay Chand Mahtab. In the introduction to this text, Pillai documents Hinduism as “a macro-reality of organically united micro-realities”, woven into a civilisation with a predilection for stories. The narrative structure swims and overlaps within the thematic concern at hand, buoyed by the author who has strong control over anecdotes that he presents.
The text sets sail from the Portuguese missionaries on the Goan front, as they traversed the territories of pre-judgement, resulting in the demonisation of Hindu gods, fortifying Hinduism within inflated accounts of Sati, and tales of barbarity; thereby venerating the presence of the coloniser as an agent of civilisation. The initial exploits of the Portuguese transformed into violence and aggressive attacks on “idolatry”, and as the author mentions, “It really did look, then, as far as the Portuguese were concerned, as if god and the gun went hand in hand.” The current soon shifts, from Rodolfo Acqquaviva to De Nobili—towards what is called an “inculturative strategy” and later towards Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg. The amorphous identity of Hinduism undergoes close inspection through the dichotomies, literature of Vedas and Upanishads, and tangible acts of negotiation and assimilation.
Franco Moretti talks about interference by literatures that inhabit the core, upon the literatures of the periphery. He borrows from Itamar Even-Zohar and writes about the lack of symmetry in interference and a “target literature” that is “interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.” The idea of asymmetry exists in Hinduism, which vehemently rejects linearity. However, the existence of Hinduism was not to be ignored by the powerful “core” and Pillai documents the turbulent relationships with equal emphasis on either side of the story. While white men tried to stomp their way in, natives were not ones to give in, and this left indelible imprints on either part. This two-way street is what the historian treads on, like in the case of “Protestantization of Hinduism”—with a profound emphasis on “scripture over custom”—and also when he documents the flight of Hindu ideas into the West for their “intellectual iconoclasts”.
As James Baldwin wrote, “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” The work traverses biographical portraits of men, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reading through them, the history of the empire that wrote back through its “Native Luthers”. Ram Mohun Roy, channelled his efforts into decoding the true meaning of the sacred texts, and to essentially teach, Hindus about their religion, and Europeans about the religion they had “misjudged”. Dayananda Saraswati, “unburdened by the obsession with looking ‘rational’”, sought the ideological core of Hinduism in Vedas. The cow makes an appearance here, as a holy instrument of unification and the Arya Samaj, as “a Hindu evangelical movement”, first-of-its-kind. With the introduction of Jotiba Phule, the author unveils a Catch-22 situation where “social liberation seemed more urgent.” Phule’s part serves as an exposé, of Hinduism’s affinity for “equilibrium” all along remaining oblivious to questions of “equality”.
In the chapter titled “Drawing Blood”, B.G Tilak makes a protracted appearance against the backdrop of the Indian National Congress and its growth, along with V.D. Savarkar and others. Pillai explores the politics of rejection, influence and identity formation. It is in this period that the idea of “Hinduness” and the overwhelming question—“Who is a Hindu ?”—make an appearance into the largely turbid politics of pre-independence. Muslim identity re-enters the rhetoric that has largely remained focussed on interactions with Christianity, and Pillai explores the gradations of fraught relationships between the greatest exponents of Hindutva and the manufactured ‘other’. However, the text drops the narrative at a critical point without venturing into post-independence actors and events that shaped modern Hindu identity, leaving the reader in a mushy theoretical gap. Considering the depth of the narrative, Hindutva makes a late appearance but is in want of supplements. But that being said, the absence does not take the shine off this work that is already quite complex.
Pillai dismisses the identity of modern Hinduism as a “synthetic British construct” and explores it as an active political and cultural process, along the lines of identity formation that did not evolve as an Augmentin response to colonisation and influx of missionaries. It is, Pillai writes, “somewhat like Vishnu assuming different forms to address problems in various ages.” Hinduism, a term the author mentions as one of recent vintage, was not fashioned from the outside but equally from within.
In this remarkable investigative inquiry into the religion, where notes run almost as long as the text, what makes it dispense the garb of a doctoral dissertation or how does this work escape the watertight boundaries of academia (one might as well argue it does not)? The author does not write with exclusivity, attempting to grant admittance only to seasoned readers. The prose is accessible, albeit requiring time and a little effort, yet is transparent and incisive.
Considering the political climate of this country, where religion is definitely “the opium” of the more perilous kind, this exploration, which was apparently sown as a post-graduate thesis, is definitely skating on thin ice. David N. Lorenzen argued that Hinduism was neither a colonial construct nor a European one and took it a step further, arguing that it was not exclusively Indian either. It is, he noted: “a construct or invention only in the vague and commonsensical way that any large institution is… In other words, it is an institution created out of a long historical interaction between a set of basic ideas and the infinitely complex and variegated socio-religious beliefs and practices that structure the everyday life of individuals and small, local groups.”
