A limited but brilliant chronicle of Hindu identity formation

In Gods, Guns & Missionaries, Manu Pillai maps religious evolution through colonial encounters but leaves modern complexities untouched.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s second trial for sedition being argued at the Bombay High Court in 1908. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

The triple boom of Manu Pillai’s title reminds one of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the work of a polymath that sought to explain the uneven spread of wealth across the world. Diamond focused on material changes in the Holocene and found in the geographical distribution of people and resources a probable answer to the question of why late in the 20th century people in the West led affluent lives while others still lived as hunter-gatherers and a good number of nations were in between.

The contrast with the work under review is stark. Pillai’s focus is India, and he deals with soft facts, beliefs, and opinions, both of which are very difficult to document with clarity because they morph and shift shape with maddening frequency. But Pillai is a patient scholar, methodical, sensitive to nuance, and brilliant at understanding the nature of his raw material. He can locate and describe ideas and thoughts and feelings in India with the meticulousness and depth of a Roland Barthes analysing a Parisian scene. He is a master at the semiotics of Indian cultural expressions, particularly the religious idiom in which it is almost always expressed. He chronicles with care; the notes take up as much as space as his text.

Pillai’s book covers a swathe of Indian history, from Akbar’s encounter with Jesuits to the death of Savarkar. But he begins with the story of a Jaipur maharajah’s journey to England in 1902, complete with priests, holy cows, Ganga jal, and all the other items orthodoxy demanded to maintain ritual purity.

In London, he (Madho Singh) rode in a car but had two idols in different cars pilot him through the streets. When Edward VII fell ill, his prayers restored him. Or so Singh believed. The press and the public were deeply impressed by the king’s piety and showy religiosity. Pillai’s seven chapters take us from Akbar’s encounter with the Jesuits to the departure of the British. The story turns dark soon after it begins as Pillai describes the Portuguese and their temple-smashing spree and assorted barbarity towards Hindus in Goa.

Power and a sense of cultural superiority are a deadly combination. When they are just traders, Europeans are nice and pleasant to deal with. The minute they become powerful, guns and missionary zeal dictate terms. Greed is the prime driver; everything else is a ploy to get past native defences. Catholic or Protestant, and irrespective of nationality, the European missionary’s strategies are broadly the same: convince natives of their cultural and educational backwardness and offer them salvation in some form of Christianity. This is a crude way of describing Pillai’s nuanced writing on missionary activity. The same themes play out again and again. European deviousness and ruthlessness and arrogance versus Indian adaptability and accommodation.  

Pillai attempts a chronological narrative, but in India the linear curves in all directions. Thoughts, ideas, and opinions were spreading, mutating, and fusing. Pillai uses a gossamer net and captures all of them. Everything, of course, is footnoted and authenticated.

One must remember that missionaries made up only a small portion of the westerners who came to India. The rest were people in every imaginable sphere. Few of them were focused on religion. Some were administrators whose curiosity and interest in the land they found themselves in resulted in seminal discoveries. William Jones and James Prinsep are just two in a long list of those whose work threw light on India and its past.

Amartya Sen’s schema of three foreign attitudes to India—the magisterial, the exoticist and the curatorial—helped clear the fog Edward Said’s concept of orientalism had spread. A.K. Ramanujan’s brilliant insight into Indian ways of thinking as being nuanced and context sensitive is a very helpful tool to clear a lot of clutter.

On the topic of nationalism, important thinkers are not part of Pillai’s project—not even Perry Anderson’s analysis of “the Indian ideology”. This shows great intellectual self-confidence. One can only speculate how the book would have turned out if he had looked over his shoulders at the work of the more empirically oriented scholars who have worked in this area.

The book speaks from the heart of mainstream India. Authorial intent notwithstanding, the fingerprint of contemporary identity politics can be discerned often. The omissions are more significant than the inclusions. The Constitution of India, the document on which modern India rests, is never mentioned. Modern knowledge in the form of post-Enlightenment schools of thought is also absent.

Pillai’s use of the term ‘philosophy’ (most often preceded by ‘Hindu’ or ‘Brahmin’) differs from how contemporary academic philosophers outside India understand philosophy. They are to ideology and metaphysics, the sense in which 19th-century Indians used it. In Indian terms, they deal with darshana, not anvikshiki. From Ajitha Kesakambala in pre-Buddhist times to the robust but neglected schools of Charvakas and Buddhist logicians, India made enormous contributions to epistemology and knowledge. Brahminical Hinduism was hostile to all of them. Pillai’s writing, perfectly aligned with mainstream Hinduism today, ignores them.

So we are left with the aggressive neo-Hinduism of Tilak and Savarkar, shaped as much by its classical Brahminical and Vedic core as by influences from early 20th century Italy and Germany.

How this ideology prospered after Independence, how it bulldozed its way via the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, Babri Masjid, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the near normalisation of majoritarian violence since then is left untouched. Pillai’s survey ends with the departure of the British, so he has a good reason not to enter that fraught territory.

I admit that it is unfair to blame a book for what it does not include, but the absences merit mention. The importance of this book will grow. Indians outnumber all other peoples, and they form the largest migrant community in the world. As they move into other nations, their hosts would do well to understand the attitudes they come with. Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries would make a good beginning.

P. Vijaya Kumar, a retired college teacher of English, is based in Thiruvananthapuram.