WHY A GREAT BOOK DIDN’T FULLY SATISFY

This time my column is a book review, but first I would like to alert viewers to a job opening. We Are One Humanity is looking for a part-time Communications Director. More about this opportunity can be found here.

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Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. Published in 2024 by Penguin Random House India. 564 pages.

This is a superbly written, eminently readable, and massively researched book of history. Notes and references consume 219 of its 564 pages. The volume interrogates spicy subjects, chiefly colonialism and Hindu nationalism. The Malayali author’s sharp gaze is broad as well: he examines historical interactions between Indians and Europeans in different parts of southern, western, northern and eastern India. At the end, the reader realizes that he has been fed a rich meal prepared by a brilliant chef. Marvelling at its contents, I was nonetheless left with some dissatisfaction, which I spell out later in this column.

It is well known that missionaries who accompanied the colonizing country’s soldiers and civil servants into India challenged the validity of native faiths. The author shows that in different parts of the country Indians listening to the missionaries adapted the latter’s techniques of argumentation to question beliefs harbored in the colonizers’ land. One delightful result was that some missionaries ended up explaining and popularizing Hindu ideas in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. 

Making this and other points, Pillai also brings up the earlier arrival in India of Muslims from the Middle East and Central Asia. He notes that many Arabs settled peacefully in southern India two or three centuries before Muslim kingdoms were established in Delhi, and that the south’s local rulers allowed the Arabs to practice Islam.

“POLITICAL ONENESS”

After discussing the 11th-century raid by Mahmud of Ghazni of Gujarat’s Somnath Mandir, Pillai suggests that the affront caused by Muslim raiders/conquerors who came in Mahmud’s wake and destroyed temples “alerted Hindus – despite their various differences -- to the possibility of political oneness” across India’s vast space.

Let’s recall that this vast space was only rarely a single state. Three or four centuries before the common era, under Chandragupta Maurya and especially under his grandson, Ashoka, most of what we today picture as India was indeed ruled as one entity. Thereafter, however, for more than eighteen centuries, the vast space we know of as India was not a single state. Eventually, in the 16th century, Akbar, the Great Mughal, ruled over virtually all of India. Two centuries later, however, the large state again disintegrated, regaining its unity only after the British established all-India control early in the 19th century.

In telling detail, Pillai gives us a series of instructive pictures from the last three centuries or so, but he does not remind the reader of one important difference between India’s Muslim rulers (who governed much or most of India from the 13th to the 19th century) and their British successors. Whereas the Mughals and their Muslim predecessors made India their home, in the process becoming Indian themselves, the British remained Brits and always returned to England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales.

Although he alludes to earlier periods of rule by Muslims, Pillai’s chief theme is the formation, following the European arrival, of modern Hinduism, the modern Hindu identity, and Hindu nationalism. To unveil this history, Pillai takes the reader to numerous places across India where rajas and other locals interacted with European missionaries and British rulers.

OPENNESS & RESISTANCE

Finding that these white rulers at times impeded the missionaries with whom, broadly speaking, they shared a common European culture and a common skin-color, while, at other times, the rulers backed their fellow-whites’ religious effort, we learn that these fluctuations were influenced by Britain’s internal politics. The locals too swung between openness and resistance to the missionaries’ arguments, which focused on the reasonableness or rationality of widespread Hindu beliefs. Pillai highlights the locals’ skill in turning those very arguments against British rule and against Christian doctrines.

Because it is a storehouse of stories, Pillai’s thick book is easy to read. Because the author has been able, impressively, to study in some depth the evolving story in multiple parts of India (apart from South Indian languages, Hindi, and English, Pillai seems comfortable with Marathi too), we obtain a comprehensive view. Because he offers quotes from preserved correspondence or conversations, which are detailed in endnotes that fill well more than a third of its pages, the book conveys credibility as well. 

NOTHING GOOD?

Why then did I feel dissatisfied, in addition to being hugely impressed? Chiefly, I think, because the book seems to suggest that India’s encounter in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries with missionaries and other Europeans was almost entirely negative -- that nothing good resulted from that encounter. Indian resentment at the uninvited encounter with Europeans is the constant note floating out from the book’s pages. Whether or not by design, even the author’s photograph on the back-cover suggests the offence that was caused.

There is no doubt about the reality of offence. Anyone with even a passing awareness of the cruelties of 1857, or of the horrific famines that punctuated British rule over India, or of the sarcasm and ignorance in some British books about India and about Hinduism knows about it. Among the examples of damaging ignorance that Pillai provides is James Mills’ 1817 book, The History of British India, which young Brits setting out to serve in India were required to read, and which offered travesties as facts.

Yet it must be asked: did Indians receive nothing helpful from Christianity, from chapters of the Bible, or from the lives of missionaries? People like Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) and his wife Savitribai (1831-1897) were not being untruthful when they spoke of how Christianity and some Christians from Europe had inspired them. Gandhi would repeat again and again that Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount that he first read in London at the age of 19 had gone “straight into my heart”. Christian hymns were seldom far from Gandhi’s mind or lips, and he also spoke of the power of the Psalms of David, which were loved alike by Jews and Christians. 

While dozens if not hundreds of other distinguished Hindu and Indian thinkers have expressed similar thoughts, numerous less famous Indians have spoken of friendship received from a white missionary, a British civil servant, or an English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh school teacher. Their appreciation has failed to enter Pillai’s absorbing account. The lead given by Christian missionaries in care given to the blind, the deaf and dumb, and to those afflicted by leprosy, was soon followed by Indians – by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Zoroastrians. However, this aspect of the encounter too is missing. 

The missionaries’ hopes that Indians would convert to Christianity are central to the book, but are the tens of thousands of elderly Indians still living who went to missionary schools in the 1930s and 1940s able to recall instances when a missionary teacher proposed their conversion? If such instances were few or non-existent, it perhaps follows that a degree of warmth and mutual respect too was part of the unsought encounter. 

Another important element in India’s lengthy encounter with the outside world that Pillai might have noted was the encouragement that Hinduism’s Bhakti or devotional poets found in both Islam and Christianity, and the encouragement these poets and their songs gave, in turn, to Muslims and Christians believing in a compassionate and merciful God.

LIMITATIONS OF “AFFRONT” 

I want finally to reflect on Pillai’s surmise that the affront caused by Muslim raiders/conquerors who destroyed temples “alerted Hindus – despite their various differences -- to the possibility of political oneness” and thus created the ground for the Hindu nationalism we see today. Today’s Hindu nationalism, however, is hardly unique. Does it not, in different ways or degrees, resemble the Shia nationalism of today’s Iran, the Sunni nationalism of today’s Afghanistan, the White Christian nationalism visible today in parts of the U.S. and Europe, the Buddhist nationalism that has often sought to grab attention if not power in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and the Zionist nationalism of Israel that would like today to expel all Palestinians from what has been their homeland for centuries?

Any angry oneness against “outsiders” or their descendants may not be an accomplishment worth jubilating over. Or one that can cause real satisfaction. Or one that would preserve a great and large state. It’s the sense of oneness with everyone, even with those whose ancient ancestors or present-day cousins might have offended us, this very Indian, very old, and greatly lost sense of oneness with others that India and the world may need today.