GODS, GUNS AND MISSIONARIES - The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu Pillai

Manu S Pillai’s book must be read from Introduction to Epilogue. When you read how the various rulers in India travelled to England with their retinues (that included cows), you know you’re in for a nourishing read. Take this. When Madho Singh II of Jaipur could not cross the ‘black waters’ but simply could not refuse the invitation to the King’s coronation (Edward VII) the Brahmins he consulted found a solution. Sri Gopalji (Lord Krishna) would go instead and Madho Singh would accompany the family deity! Seriously? Yes,seriously. Manu S Pillai regales us with stories like these that we might find amusing today but were taken in all seriousness back then. 

My first reaction was not of amusement though but that someone should document the suffering of animals in the name of war, experiments, space travel, peace and pageantry. Droll stories apart, the Introduction sets the pace and pattern that we are to see in the pages that follow. Questions will pop up in your mind as you read. Is Brahmanism not just another form of colonisation? A colonisation of mind and culture? In the Introduction itself, the author opens our history-curious minds to this brand of colonisation in Goa to draw our attention to how the simple sacrifice-based veneration of rakhandaars (guardian spirits) is currently changing to more elaborate Vedic pageantry. “In many ways,” the author tells us, “it was a case of mix and match. Non-Vedic gods could be merged with Vedic counterparts, and Brahmins accepted popular elements from the other side while cladding it in their theological principles.” The “left-handed model of worship” (featuring alcohol, beedies, goat’s heads, chickens and leather footwear) was not only endorsed but “adapted even for Brahmin deities” (who ordinarily receive flowers and milk) is a familiar practice in Goa.

In this stream of rivers and sangam of ideas, the Vedas versus Puranas debate, if you were wondering what exactly is this that we call Hinduism, here is the answer: “And so long as the Vedas were not denied and the caste superiority of Brahmins were accepted, practically anybody-holding a variety of ideas-could be brought into the frame. That way Vedic texts remained formally supreme even if it was a later, more mixed corpus that better represented religious reality-a situation we might describe as a ‘win-win’. It is this many-faced multilayered system that we today call Hinduism.”

It is in the Introduction that we crystal-gaze into our medieval past, how the worship of many was intertwined, how “the control of land meant that shrines developed patronage networks, supporting musicians, priests, dancers, farmers, artisans, and, over time, whole communities, all while injecting into these specific social ideologies”. I found it particularly interesting that the list of benficiaries included priests as one component in the system. Were priests not above others? Apparently not. Performing priests were and still are lower ranking in comparison to the higher ranking elite Brahmins well-versed in the Vedas. My ex-husband’s grandfather Bhallal Shivshankar Pandit, for example, was a performing priest who went to Banaras to study the Vedas and was rewarded with the title Pandit. I think I missed being a Bhat/Vyas/Purohit/Vaidya by a whisker!

In this crystal ball, we also gaze at the connections and currents that bind temples (and therefore communities) that both bind or divide us countrywide. And where there is structure, can strife be far behind? Manu S Pillai then takes us into bhakti, breaking down the individual contributions of various poet-saints and carefully demolishing the misnomer of there being a bhakti movement. There were individual poets but no movement, he says. An already familiar narrative, this led to a 'separate ‘culture community’ something that,given the abruptness with which it happened triggered mixed feelings, its worst coming to a head with the subcontinent’s partition in the 1940’s.” 

And so Manu S Pillai tells us what we knew but didn’t articulate-that “Hindus did not think of themselves as only Hindus, viewed in contrast with Muslims”-but that “identities were shared by multiple parameters such as caste and region and language, religion being one of many factors”. Our journey begins with the Introduction in which is outlined “exchanges with tribal cults, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam” and ending with the author’s own description of the book saying, “this is not, then, a study of the religion across the ages but a survey of 400 years at most-a span that supplies the historical setting and much of the emotional stimulus empowering present-day Hinduism”.

In Monsters and Missionaries, he tells a familiar story of how the Jesuits from Goa are invited to Emperor Akbar’s court, the gaffes, wild cards, disappointments. He also paves the way for an understanding of a Euro-centric gaze of the Orient-meant to horrify or scintillate, reflecting the misogyny of the 17th century and also reflecting not just how “they” saw us but how “we” began to see ourselves. “The story of the Hindu’s life under Western authority began in 1498” is an explosive opening line that unveils the drama that begins with a peaceful intention to trade under royal patronage, forming a nexus with the Church interwoven with destruction, violence, conversion, politics “tinting their gaze”. 

In order to understand this, we need to know what else was happening in the European world. Ferdinand II of Aragon also known as Ferdinand the Catholic ruled jointly with the devout (Moor phobic and anti-Semetic) wife Isabelle I of Castille. Together, they started what would be known as the Catholic monarchy. As the author tells us, Protestants attacked the icons of Europe and “the Portuguese had to demonstrate with fire and blood that they were authentic Christians. And Hindus in Goa suffered in the process”. 

In between the arrival of the former Protestants turned Jesuits, when the white Brahmin, Roberto de Nobili arrived “inadvertently enacting the brown man’s playbook” accusations flew far, were fiery and free. With Protestants accusing Catholics of idolatry, superstition and of “burying the faith under “innumerable placations, rites and pageantry”. 

In Heathens and Hidden Truths, we are introduced to the first Protestant missionaries (as opposed to chaplains and ministers) in India, the rather rhetorical and argumentative exchanges between Brahmins and the missionaries over why they should or should not convert to the new religion, an argument that comes to us as being amusing, anecdotal and astounding at best. “Either way the message on Hinduism was clear: the white men might corner power in India but where religion and identity were concerned, though, ‘natives’ could-and would- stubbornly continue to refuse instruction”. This brings us to a cusp where “Hinduism’s current avatar emerged-with one foot in tradition, the other in European sensibilities and confusion”.

In Governing the Gentoos, we are introduced to cunningness, caprice and commerce at both ends with dubashis (interpreters) manipulating both British and Indians through their bilingual skills. Enter Hindu nationalism at the end of the history of British colonial interference, paternalism, “duty-bound” patrimony. Elphinstone, the most influential of all the Bombay governors, seemed to be saying that colonialism “could be made to look less unjust”. “Coupled in future”, says the author, “colonial censuses, Hindus would slowly begin to conceive of themselves in a new manner”. Hindu nationalism? No, not yet. 

In An Indian Renaissance, the middle of the 19th century sees rajahs of various principalities reduced to former shadows of themselves, palaces in ruins, or, in some cases, transformed into English versions of their English patrons. Of these, Manu S Pillai deftly introduces us to Serfoji II, the shadow Maratha prince of Tanjore, whose collection of books and manuscripts, his knowledge of German, English, French writers and scientists, astronomy, natural history, anatomy, medicine and art was not just vast but stunningly intended for disbursement and all the while still supporting temples and festivities of both Muslim and Christian communities. 

Enter the Orientalists… using Shakuntala as a heroine that the West pegged moral, Victorian rigidity on, “Indeed in the Victorian Age,” says the author, “Hindus could surpass Victorians in stiffness, skipping away or obscuring ‘embarrassing’ portions of their heritage”. The floodgates of “Westernisation” and the “English-medium” instructions were opened. In For God and Country, the author introduces us to the British top-down approach where Prince Duleep Singh was deprived of his “land, his subjects and culture” converted to Christianity by cajolement and persuasion. “Dalhousie, in the 1850s, however, was restless, brusque even,” Manu S Pillai lets us know and it comes as no surprise that a year after his term ended in 1856, “India erupted in revolt”. Religion may have had something, but not everything, to do with this.

And this top-down approach then evolved into a concerted deliberate vicious campaign (1813) that, thanks to the printing press, orchestrated a victory in British Parliament to officially export “religious enlightenment”. Yet, as is to be expected, “many Brahmin converts, thus, thought of themselves as Brahmin Christians, conversions did not mean throwing out ‘caste dignity’”. That conversion seemed like an attractive option for reasons of caste exaltation is a story that is familiar to us in Goa.

In Native Luthers, we enter the dragon. A wealthy Bengali, well-versed in Arabic, Persian and English, who would invent his own version of what Hinduism meant to the Hindu. “It is also not, therefore, a minor detail that (Raja Rammohan) Roy was perhaps the first HIndu to appropriate ‘Hinduism’ as a term and label in his writings. And by this, he meant his own version of it”.  We are introduced to Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj and how both these institutions were founded on revulsion of idol worship. Enter Jyotiba Phule, the son of a Mali and a relatively wealthy green grocer. “Phule’s life, in fact, exemplifies one of those little discussed consequences of colonialism in India, the political mobilisation of subordinate castes, which successfully utilised British rule to bargain for just treatment from their traditional superiors”. 

In Drawing Blood, we come upon the meat and the bones behind what lay the foundation of Hindu nationalism as we see it being laid in the 20th century. It all started with the mill workers in Bombay and their rioting. This is the beginning of the freedom struggle, the end of British rule, perhaps when “Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a ‘well-known author’, an ex-professor of Mathematics and ‘sometime member of the Bombay Legislative Council’ was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of sedition”.

Manu S Pillai makes it easy for us to understand how Tilak manipulated the festivities associated with the Shri Ganesh festival to gather crowds and impart political awareness in a lucid and graphic style. This is Pillai at his best. “And the goal was Hindu consolidation-a step towards Hindu nationalism”. By the early 20th century, we were made aware of not so much of who we were but who we were not (read Muslim or Christian). Gradually, (by accident or design?) we learn of a phase where the means justified the end.

“By 1910, in fact, the Bombay Government would diversify its hiring practices to avoid over reliance on this set. For with the rise of Brahmin-designed nationalism, the Raj, it was feared, could no longer safely count on this class’s loyal service”. It is in this (and the Epilogue that follows) that we see what defines Manu S Pillai’s storytelling skills, a charm that escapes us in the preceding stoically academic chapters.