Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries – The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
Author: Manu S. Pillai
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093656
Pages: 564

Hinduism is a constantly evolving religion. This characteristic is also a proof of its vitality. Contrary to what happened to Paganism in Greece and Rome at the end the classical period, Hinduism withstood the crushing impact of not one, but two Abrahamic religions one after the other and still survived to tell the tale. Hinduism is flexible enough to accommodate any number of gods or even to incorporate external deities somewhere on the branches of its vast mythology. It successfully employed this strategy to absorb strangers into its fold till the arrival of Islam which could not be reconciled due to its professed exclusivity and monopoly on divinity. The same thing happened with Christianity too. At the same time, the Hindus also felt compulsions of various sorts to convert them to the new ‘monotheistic’ faiths. Evidently, Hinduism had to change subtly to effectively engage with the new threat. This was felt more seriously on interactions with the Christian faith. Though the Islamic invasions were militarily brutal and materially exhausting, it proved to be intellectually bankrupt. It somewhat transformed Hinduism but never on the immense scale Christianity did. This book tells the story of how gods (reinvention of Hinduism by anchoring on its philosophical past), guns (colonial power) and missionaries (evangelical efforts at proselytization) completely reformed Hinduism in the last four centuries after the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Manu S. Pillai is a talented, young author and this is his fifth book. You can find reviews of all his earlier works here. This book’s title involves a little bit of plagiarism with Jared Diamond’s incredibly well-written book, ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’.

Pillai begins his exhaustive survey with the practical adjustments Hinduism made on the ground even before the arrival of Semitic religions. Brahmins acted as a repository of theoretical knowledge and provided the mechanism to bend it constructively to make life easier – at least for themselves and their patrons. Brahmins bypassed awkward corners between theory and reality through the manipulation of tradition. Kings of low birth changed caste and varna by a ritual in which they symbolically emerged out of an artificial gold cow. The four-fold division of varnas – which is often portrayed as rigid and unchanging – was only an idealized aspiration of the Brahminized world that never existed in such perfection anywhere in India. Hinduism is not what Brahmins actually wanted; instead, it is the story of their negotiations with a bewildering variety of counter-thoughts and alternate visions. Change is coded into its DNA (p. xix). This book is the study of Hinduism of the last four centuries. Its motive is to survey the historical setting and emotional stimulus empowering present-day Hinduism. The author also claims that it is not a history of Hindu philosophy or of the lofty ideas of ancient sages. It deals with human actions and reactions in the context of political conquest, cultural dominance and resistance.

Hinduism met Christianity on many fronts and in different time periods. In the pre-medieval and early-medieval accounts of European travellers and merchants, India was portrayed as a heathen country where the devil was worshipped and was home to revulsive sexual practices. Hindus didn’t care. They lay diffused across the country and were nonchalant as to be concerned with what was being said of them in distant lands. But with European powers establishing trade with India and meddling in internal politics by the seventeenth century, they sat up and took notice, but still in isolated pockets. It was in response to the European portrayal of Hindus that Hinduism took its contemporary modern form, drawing pride and confidence from certain aspects of its past and shame from others. The book describes the early interactions of missionaries with Hinduism. Hindus listened to them with genuine interest and was even willing to accept their precepts as true, but stoutly refused to concede that this was the only way of knowing divinity. Hinduism always made space for ideological diversity and could not acquiesce in to claims on monopoly of truth. The Hindu philosophers never accused Christianity to be false, but that it might be adapted to the missionary’s part of the world. Quite contrary to this expression of tolerance, the missionaries thought everything else as diabolical pretension of primitive paganism. Over time, the missionaries collected and began to study Hindu texts and were gradually compelled to admit some goodness in it. One scholar grudgingly remarked that ‘even though much reeked of the dung pit, Hinduism had pearls by which white men too could benefit’ (p.56). This attitude grew with further study. In the peak of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, white intellectuals dismissed the Hindu society of the present, but romanticised its past. The formula would be amplified by Hindus in future. The Western philosophers, disillusioned with the religion at home, felt the need to idealize an alternative Hinduism which was presented as just the item with the mysterious Vedas.

The eighteenth century saw the dawn of a fresh chapter in Hindu-Christian relations with the entrenchment of British power in Bengal and North India. Warren Hastings and William Jones researched on Indian law and literature respectively. The aim was to reformulate ancient Hindu law so that the present society could be administered on its basis. But the law they painstakingly unearthed had no universal applicability. Customs of caste, region and sect were what guided people’s lives. It only suited the empire’s purposes to have a set of rules of whose legitimacy the subject people could not challenge. Intellectual emphasis focussed on scripture above custom and the enthroning of philosophical Hinduism as more legitimate than the ‘lower’ form. Pillai also amusingly notes how Victorian morals censored portions of open sensuality in Indian texts. While on one occasion Kalidasa describes Shakuntala as sweaty, it was translated into English as ‘glowing complexion’! When faced with such censure of their ancestors’ tastes, natives unnecessarily developed feelings of shame. All in all, Indian confidence ballooned as an unforeseen by-product of Orientalism. Its retrieval of past heroes and celebration of Indian accomplishments injected pride into the colonial subjects. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the British oscillated between promoting traditional learning and introducing Western ideas through school education in English.

The nineteenth century saw another marked shift in the religious equation. Having successfully set up a colonial regime and also keeping internal security on a firm footing, the colonial masters again took on an aspect of complacent disdain on the native religion. Meanwhile, Hindus felt the days of Sanskrit education was over even though it was supported by the colonizer. A Hindu college to teach Western literature and science was set up in Calcutta in 1817 by Indians and dissenting British men who collected Rs. 1,13,000 locally, while the entire government budget for education in Bengal was only Rs. 1,00,000. The Orientalists objected to this, but the transition from Sanskrit to English was most pointedly expressed in the mid-1830s when state funding was reserved only for modern education in English. Meanwhile, the missionaries encouraged vernacular education, the only target being the conversion of pupils. The author cites a geography textbook in one of these schools that urged ‘the people of India’ to ‘accept the message of Christ’ and ‘endeavour to spread it’. By 1850s, British political power reached the zenith and even the son of the ‘Lion of Punjab’ Maharaja Ranjit Singh, named Duleep Singh, was converted to Christianity. Viceroy Dalhousie was restless to spread the Christian faith in India. It was he who cleverly stage-managed the conversion of Duleep Singh. A prominent cleavage in the conception of India among the British society became very evident at this point. Orientalists praised the glories of India, its ancient philosophies and Sanskrit literature, while the evangelists were producing material that cast Hindus as a class of ‘infant-murdering, wife-burning debauchees, in desperate need of reform’ (p.177). With the East India Company’s charter amended to accommodate evangelical work in 1813 and 1833, officials’ attitudes stiffened. Patronage extended to temples was withdrawn. In 1857, however, India responded with a full-blown revolt that forced the British to adopt a technically neutral stand on the issue of religion in future. In 1790 itself, Governor General Cornwallis had written that the company’s security rested on native troops and to meddle in the religion would jeopardize security. The book however keeps silent on the religious aspects of the 1857 rebellion's causes. The issue of greased cartridges was only the fuse that lit the fire, while the powder had been accumulating for years. Anyhow, I am fairly sure that the current breed of Indian secularists, including the author, would accuse the rebels of narrow-mindedness and communalism for their refusal to handle cartridges lubricated with the fat of cows and pigs.

After the Rebellion, the religious kaleidoscope shifted once again. Reform movements sprang up everywhere to give a facelift to the ancient religion. Demands for equality for the oppressed lower castes followed close on its heels. At the peak of these two, nationalism blossomed – both of the secular and cultural varieties. Pillai finds a strain of resemblance between the Protestant movement in England and the Hindu reformers. Like Protestants, Indian reformers placed scripture over custom and accumulated tradition. They parked blame for Hinduism’s decline from unparalleled purity on the Brahmins, just like the Protestant battering of Catholic priest craft. Ram Mohan Roy was vocal in denouncing Brahminic obfuscation of Vedic ideas on monotheism. This blunted the Christian threat to Hinduism as the Catholic Church’s liturgy differed not much from full-blooded idolatry. But very few Hindus practised what they preached and ordinary temple worship thrived as vigorously as before. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj began venerating the cow as a formative rite to unite Hindus. The author deliberately hints here that cow worship began at this point, while in fact it was followed from very early times. Reconversion back to Hinduism through ‘Shuddhi’ was also developed. By the latter half of nineteenth century, untouchables began to assert their identity. Jyotiba Phule repudiated everything Hindu, from Vedas to idol worship, while Narayana Guru of Kerala accommodated some degree of Sanskritization, himself a Sanskrit scholar. Guru’s reforms lay in rejecting Brahminism as a social practice, while democratising Brahminic Hinduism (p.253).

The book’s final chapter, ‘Drawing Blood’, is reserved to heap scorn and mockery on Tilak and Savarkar, the two glowing figureheads of Hindu nationalism. A reasonably true biography of both are given, but interspersed with skewed and derisively paraphrased quotations. It seems the author’s pique against the duo is for the fact that they tried to unite the Hindus socially, perhaps for the first time ever in Indian history. This might be going against the grain of Western philosophical theory that could not comprehend the coming together of such diverse peoples under a common banner. This book is part of the anti-Hindutva movement and is relentlessly chipping away at its roots. Pillai does not mention this openly, in variance to what Charles Allen openly confessed in his recent book, ‘Aryans – The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth’ (reviewed earlier here). Tilak started the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to gather people together as a means to move political work forward. Fun and play were the vehicles to impart political awareness among grumbles of turning faith into spectacle. The author nit-picks on Tilak’s speeches in order to find snippets against untouchables. With this in mind, he quotes a little known research paper at an obscure Canadian university to claim that Tilak made a disparaging remark about two communities as “which have no job avenues left other than thieving” (p.282). The source of this discovery is only a paper by Amar Khoday submitted at Manitoba University, but this information is concealed deep in the thick jungle of notes at the end of the book.

The book is very big at 564 pages, 238 of them nothing but notes totalling 2308 which are thoroughly researched entities that appears as a corporate effort rather than of a single person. However, Pillai has not acknowledged it. A very large number of books and papers have been consulted obviously but unusually for such an effort, no bibliography is given at the end. This is somewhat strange, forcing the reader to go through each and every note to find the sources. Quotes from Wendy Doniger and Audrey Truschke are given prime spots of accommodation though – or because of? – they are outspoken critics of Hinduism. Some parts of the book are recycled from the author’s previous works. The activities of the monk Roberto de Nobili who dressed, worked and lived like a Brahmin, wearing even the sacred thread, to convert Hindus can also be found in Pillai’s book, ‘The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin’ (reviewed earlier here) and stories about Serfoji II of Tanjore are in ‘False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma’ (reviewed earlier here). The book includes early sketches of people and events starting from the sixteenth century and sourced from rare collections in Europe and the USA. Islam makes only a cameo appearance in the book, but when it does, the author treats it with kid gloves unlike what he does with the others. He remarks that Brahmins ordered the world into castes while Islam proposed egalitarianism. Instances of proper justice meted out to Hindus in the Mughal period, however rare, are unearthed from little-known works to generalize it. The sentence construction in the book is a bit laboured with lots of commas, hyphens, semicolons and brackets that affect readability. Of course, some may enjoy them. Even though the author’s views on the making of modern Hinduism are not agreeable to most readers, he has provided a lively survey of the encounter between Hindus and the Europeans in their various avatars as missionaries, orientalists and colonial administrators.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star