A Financial Times What to Read in 2025 pick
'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William Dalrymple
When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.
Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.
"A deft exploration of four centuries of Hinduism's often terse, sometimes violent and always complex relationship with other faiths, Gods, Guns and Missionaries explodes the myth of a singular, 'true' Hinduism [and] lays out the factors that allowed Hindu nationalists to forge a seemingly secular, muscular identity which has come to define Hinduism for many in the 21st century. Drawing on the lives of missionaries, maharajahs and men of the Dutch, French, and British East India Companies, Manu S Pillai builds the story of a system marked by adaptability, dynamism and compromise rather than ossified archaisms" - Financial Times, The Best Books of the Week
Формат: Скан PDf
'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William Dalrymple
When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.
Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.
"A deft exploration of four centuries of Hinduism's often terse, sometimes violent and always complex relationship with other faiths, Gods, Guns and Missionaries explodes the myth of a singular, 'true' Hinduism [and] lays out the factors that allowed Hindu nationalists to forge a seemingly secular, muscular identity which has come to define Hinduism for many in the 21st century. Drawing on the lives of missionaries, maharajahs and men of the Dutch, French, and British East India Companies, Manu S Pillai builds the story of a system marked by adaptability, dynamism and compromise rather than ossified archaisms" - Financial Times, The Best Books of the Week
Формат: Скан PDf
https://www.yakaboo.ua/ua/gods-guns-and-missionaries-the-making-of-the-modern-hindu-identity.html