An audacious yet terrific scrutiny of Hinduism
It was with a great sense of pride and affection that I recently released Manu S Pillai’s fifth book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries, in New Delhi. I have had the pleasure -- and increasingly, it must be said, the privilege -- of releasing each of Manu’s books into the world. It has given me great satisfaction to do so, because Manu worked for two and a half stints as my assistant during my first and second parliamentary terms, and it has been tremendously satisfying to witness and celebrate his successful second career as a popular historian.
It was during that first stint, after joining me as a precocious 21 year-old, that Manu burned the midnight oil to complete his first book, the magnum opus on Travancore, The Ivory Throne, and I can testify first hand to his commitment, his talent, his seriousness of purpose and his industriousness, whether as an MP's aide or a writer of compelling history.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries is not only Manu S Pillai’s fifth book, it is also his most ambitious and audacious venture thus far. Breath-taking in its historical sweep and bristling with scholarship -- which explains, but makes no less incredible, his two hundred-plus pages of notes! -- Gods, Guns and Missionaries is an exhilarating voyage down four hundred years of Indian history, with Manu serving as our sedulous, ever-reliable, witty, and vastly erudite guide.
This, in many ways, is an investigative journey through the crucible in which modern Hinduism -- and its more muscular, ethno-nationalist manifestation, Hindutva -- were forged. In charting a course from the arrival of the Portuguese in India in the late fifteenth century, "armed with scarce knowledge but copious pre-judgement" of a land overrun, as they saw it, "with devil-worshipping pagans", via Hindu reactions to European views of their religion (including the attempt at creating a “Protestant Hinduism,” an enterprise helmed by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, in response to European criticisms) to the inception of Hindutva in the twentieth, Manu strives rigorously to scrutinise the makings of modern Hinduism and the modern Hindu identity. This is to say that he seeks to examine how Hinduism evolved -- or devolved, depending on how one sees it -- from a capacious, mind-bogglingly diverse, and "ever-expanding tapestry of uncertain shape" to a "grand, linear", regimented, and restrictive narrative which, "to its most rigid believers, is the only truth."
The Europeans created a dichotomy between pristine, cerebral Vedic Hinduism and ritualistic, spectacle-ridden, and pagan Puranic Hinduism. At this bifurcation Manu baulks, calling it "historically unsound", and writing that "Puranic Hinduism", the lifeblood of Hindu faith, "emerged not because of invasions but through an interaction between the Brahmins’ religion, as it migrated with them across the subcontinent, with a variety of local systems. It was the Puranas -- exactly the material dismissed now for irrationality, its carnal gods and temples -- that was truly representative of Hindus at large". The Vedas, now being hailed as the pure and pristine real Hinduism, had remained the preserve of a small, select set of Brahmin scholars. Overtime, mirroring the Protestant bid to rescue the pristine aspects of Christianity from the despotic grasp of the Catholic church, there solidified in India a distinction between "higher and lower Hinduism", where the higher Hinduism (the Hinduism of the Vedas) resembled Christian monotheism and the lower Hinduism was sloppily polytheistic.
While "European ideas of Hinduism were in good measure shaped by their own cultural and political preoccupations," these European conceptions of Hinduism thus influenced Hindus too, a point Manu makes at length throughout this book. The most spectacular illustration of European social, cultural, political, and religious exigencies influencing -- either directly or indirectly -- Hindus' own perspective on their faith, is Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s effort, in the early nineteenth century, to discard "embarrassing" traditions and undergird "better" ones -- to create, in other words, a more "modern", acceptable form of the faith to Western-educated minds, a "Protestant Hinduism".
Various Hindu reform movements -- the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, the efforts of Jyotiba Phule, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sree Narayana Guru, and so many others -- revived and transformed Hinduism in the 19th century, culminating in the triumphant conquest of the World Parliament of Religions by Swami Vivekananda. In the 20th century, however, the next phase in the shaping of the Hindu sensibility was Hindutva. Manu realises that "colonialism seeded a feeling among many Hindus that their identity needed muscle; and in forging this defensive frame, they would position themselves against the West and Muslims both. That colonialism gave Hinduism a new look is just another turn in a history full of reinvention. Yet, its political consequence is also an exclusionary creed."
As Manu well knows, to some Hindus -- as I have explained in my book Why I Am a Hindu -- such an exclusionary, fanatical, and narrow-minded doctrine is a betrayal of the true nature of our faith. However, Manu tells us in his Introduction, the proponents of "militant Hinduism" view things differently: "Faced, they would argue, with dangerous rivals in Islam and Christianity, Hindus cannot but fortify their new, unified identity."
Hindutvawadis, in order to fortify their faith, would begin imposing alien ingredients upon Hinduism to cast it in the mould of an organised religion, which this faith -- a collectively curated conglomerate of philosophies, traditions, and stories -- had never really been. So the Bhagwad Gita came to be the holy book, Rama the preferred deity, the Sangh Parivar the vehicle for a Hindu renaissance, while a Sanskritised Hindi became the lingua franca of modern Hinduism. Manu stresses that "colonial pressures along with the rise of nationalism led to a tendency towards regimentation. This also birthed, where Hindu nationalism is concerned, a drive for homogenisation. And homogeneity is alien to Hinduism."
Lest I be accused of cherry-picking his arguments to bolster my own point of view, I must acknowledge that he is scrupulously fair to the other side in this contemporary debate. "Two ideas appeared of the Indian nation", Manu writes, "a pluralistic one with room for all, celebrating syncretic aspects of the Hindu-Muslim encounter. And another, equating India with a Hindu nation, galvanized by memories of persecution by Muslim kings and … Christian colonialists. Logic could be found for both. [emphasis added]". Yet, throughout Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu argues that if Hinduism weathered the challenges posed by colonial rule, and by over seven hundred years of Islamic rule before that, by continually assimilating new trends and reinterpreting and reforming itself, it is all because of its inherent pluralism. Hinduism resisted, and indeed prevailed, only on account of being a composite of many traditions, epics, ways of life, and philosophies.
Ultimately, this book is the terrific saga, studded with truths both pleasant and unpleasant, realities both syncretic and strife-torn, of how Hinduism, "faced with frameworks introduced by sternly monotheistic religions -- a different style of conceptualising faith and identity", took on its current form. Mentioning in an interview that this was his first book to undergo a "legal read," (to check for anything that might cause offence in our intolerant and bigoted age, and lead to lawsuits or worse), Manu concedes in the book that such a study is "hopeless at best, controversial at worst." Yet he gamely and prodigiously tries -- and resoundingly triumphs.