Manu Pillai on his book Gods, Guns and Missionaries, the evolution of Hinduism and Hindu-Christian encounters under colonialism

You write that when Europeans first encountered Hinduism, their ideas of the religion, “were shaped by their own cultural and political preoccupations”. Could you explain?

As Christianity spread in Europe, old pagan cults and systems were deemed not just barbaric but Satanic. The idea emerged that any gods worshipped through images were really agents of the devil, that idols contained demonic forces. In time, as Europeans encountered Hindu temples and deities in India, they applied the same lens here. It did not help that representations of, say, Narasimha or Kali have a fierce character. To Europeans, these figures could never be forms of gods, only servants of Satan. So, many concluded that just as Europe had been under the wicked eye of the devil until saved by Christianity, India also needed to be liberated from paganism through the light of the Bible.

In their encounter with European missionaries, did Hindus absorb any of the Christian ethos in their own religious framework? If so, was it a way to resist conversions or due to a sense of admiration towards the alien culture?

The Hindu-Christian encounter features both. Each side adapted. Christianity in the South absorbed ideas of caste and ritual purity. For instance, we see missionaries dress like Hindu gurus and adopt Brahmin customs. Meanwhile, as India came under the White man’s rule, Hindus endorsed many Western frames of thinking. Raja Ram Mohan Roy is a case in point. Just as Protestant missionaries claimed that original Christianity was “corrupted” by the Catholic church, until rescued by the Protestant Reformation, Roy began to picture a pristine, abstract, monotheistic Hinduism, corrupted by Brahmins into idolatry; he promoted the idea of a Hindu Reformation. Equally, he resisted conversion, seeing in it not a question of religious choice alone but a political enterprise. Besides, the Advaitic idea of divinity was, to him, superior to Christian conceptions of god. So instead of converting, he urged Hindus to “revert” to “original”, pristine Hinduism.

When and how did militant Hinduism emerge?

In a sense, we can trace a genealogy for militant Hinduism back to earlier times. History offers evidence of friendly exchanges between Hindus and Muslims, but also of animosity and tensions. It is against Islamic power that we first find some hardening of the Hindu sense of self. And under colonial rule this feeling grows more potent, not least because of missionaries’ polemical attacks on Hindu culture. By the end of the 19th century, the word ‘Hindutva’ emerged, and figures like Tilak attempt to define it, before Savarkar’s enduring version appears. This form of militant Hinduism emerged due to a complicated interplay between nationalism and communalism, which are modern forces. It was able to do so because history supplied enough ingredients to support such a turn. All political ideologies, after all, are based on specific readings of the past.

What are your views on the modern historiography of Hinduism? What are its biggest successes or failures?

It would be presumptuous of me to attempt to list out successes and failures in a few lines. What excites me, however, is that there is phenomenal work emerging on the subject, not just by way of academic research but also via people from within the tradition engaging with it in interesting ways, be it in Sanskrit literature or so-called folk traditions. A lot of received wisdom and seemingly established ‘truths’ are being nuanced, there is greater acknowledgment of complexity and a desire to rise above ideological persuasions and categorical statements. This is a healthy trend.

There is a popular perception that in the current political environment, Hinduism has acquired an attention that was denied to it so far. Would you agree with this idea?

These feelings are not new. As societies change, prosper and navigate new forces, they not only look to the future but also examine the past afresh, sometimes in pursuit of emerging ideological goals. What you allude to is probably the grievance many feel that Hinduism has been subjected to disproportionate criticism. This is a debate I do not wish to enter. But I can say that living in the age of Hindutva, there is naturally a greater appetite to study Hinduism, including to examine contradictions between the political face of the Hindu identity and Hinduism’s religious evolution. In practice, Hindutva stresses regimentation; Hinduism, though, has historically not been a regimented system. Many understandably find Hindutva disagreeable therefore. But the more interesting historical question to ask is, whether, in the long arc of Hinduism’s evolution, this too is another milestone.