A book about Hinduism which begins with a maharaja’s cows sounds a little like a Rudyard Kipling tale, replete with spices, mystery and “backward” traditions. But in the hands of Manu S Pillai, Madho Singh II’s journey from Jaipur in the west of India to imperial London for Edward VII’s coronation in 1902 becomes the gateway to a deft exploration of what Hinduism actually means as a faith. Drawing on the lives of missionaries, maharajas and men of the Dutch, French and British East India Companies, Pillai builds the story of a system marked by adaptability, dynamism and compromise rather than ossified archaisms.
Hinduism is often imagined as a monolith of arcane and ancient rituals, in spite of the efforts of external invaders. In India itself, the image of a “faith under siege” is a core part of the Hindu nationalist rhetoric wielded by the Bharatiya Janata party — a party that has now led the world’s most populous nation for more than a decade.
Exploring four crucial centuries of Hinduism’s often terse, sometimes violent and always complex relationship with other faiths, Pillai explodes the myth of a singular, unchanging, “true” Hinduism. At the same time, he lays out the factors that allowed Hindu nationalists to forge a seemingly singular, muscular identity which has come to define Hinduism for many in the 21st century.
He argues that even before the arrival of imperial powers, Hinduism was hardly a settled affair, emerging instead from “[Brahmins’] negotiations with a bewildering variety of counter-thoughts and alternate visions”. India’s priestly class was not unified, adds Pillai, adapting to local traditions ranging from sun worship to matrilineal succession as needed.
Matters only become more complicated with the arrival of Europeans in India at the end of the 15th century. Early travelogues read rather like a rejected Indiana Jones script, full of human sacrifice, demon worship and libidinous, treacherous women. Vasco da Gama, upon arriving in Kerala in 1498, was less quick to judge: he entered a Hindu temple and participated in rituals, dismissing frescoes of “multi-armed beings with big teeth” as local forms of saints. And as some priests engaged with Brahmins, they found that the trappings of many gods were simply a humanised vision of something more akin to a familiar and orthodox monotheism. A recognition of spiritual kinship led Italian missionary Roberto de Nobili to swap his cassock for the robes of local priests in an effort to better win over converts.
Not all interactions were so harmonious. Portuguese padres in Goa, facing the pressure of the Reformation at home, clamped down on “paganism” abroad by burning temples. One, Father Acquaviva, disappointed at the tolerance he found at the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great, received his desired martyrdom after erecting a cross at a destroyed Hindu temple. The British East India Company shifted from distrust of missionaries as an impediment to trade to support for its “civilising” mission thanks to pious parliamentarians and pressure groups. Among the catalysts for the Great Rebellion of 1857, Pillai argues, were evangelicals waving Christian texts at Hindu festivals.
The message throughout is that Hinduism is a living tradition defined more by variation than a singularity of thought and that those who would come to call themselves “Hindus” were more than passive subjects. Priests and potentates reshaped their beliefs in ways deemed more acceptable or sophisticated, consciously rewriting older texts to remove imagery considered embarrassing for the mores of the time. Their discussions with colonial powers were not merely those of vassals lapping up to masters, but of reflective thinkers adapting to a shifting world.
Pillai also explores the shaping of Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) identity and how outside pressures knitted a huge variety of traditions into something like a unified whole (albeit imperfectly). The history of conquerors is central to a kind of postcolonial paranoia that sees Hindus’ failure to resist as rooted in their naivety and good nature. The required remedy to resist cultural annihilation, proponents say, is to adopt an equally belligerent stance, bringing all the faithful into the fold.
Pillai avoids straying into the present; there are no references to the BJP or Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the text ends (chronologically) in 2003 with the unveiling of a portrait of Vinayak Savarkar, the father of Hindutva. This is not a weakness: to end with a deep dive into the BJP would suggest that the now prevalent nationalist vision of Hinduism is the religion’s “end point” rather than a single strain.
The book closes with Bijay Chand Mahtab, maharaja of Burdwan, almost informing the pope of the “revolting” idolatry of Madonna shrines in early 20th century Italy. That inversion of early monstrous travelogues is more than a reminder of the underlying complexities of Hinduism; it also reflects the deep similarities between faiths. Those parallels were visible in the Enlightenment and earlier, but are increasingly at risk in an age of narrow populist agendas worldwide.
Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu S Pillai Allen Lane £35, 624 pages
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