‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries’: A thorough study of how Hindu identity was shaped by colonialism

Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity is Manu S Pillai’s fourth major offering. The title of the book is ambitious, but the scope has been delimited by Pillai himself when he writes ‘‘The book is not a history of Hindu philosophy…or of the Vedas and holy texts…it is only an investigation into human action and reaction in the context of political conquest, cultural domination and resistance.’’ Political conquest here denotes colonialism.

The advent of colonialism had three important outcomes: first, it changed the commercial and trading patterns along with the entire gamut of social property relations of India; second, between 1750 and 1850 India was incorporated into the global (capitalist) economy and concomitantly served as a market for finished goods and source of raw materials for the capitalist core; third, a new socio-cultural churning in the hitherto still vessel of Indian society.

Many scholars contend that coherent, cogent and cognate Hindu and Muslim social identities developed among Indians only during the long colonial phase. As late as the 1911 Census, tens of thousands of people in the Bombay province alone reported that they were both “Hindu-Muhammadans” and partook of both religions. If the popular level was immune to the monolithic...

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