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 characterisation, the elites did (at times) bake the pie of hate. For instance, a copper inscription written between 1325 and 1350 in the aftermath of the fall of the Kakatiya Dynasty mourns the death of King Prataprudra and heaped opprobrium on the Turks (a term that preceded the word Muslim) for their vile ways.
The modern Hindu identity
Pillai has dived deep into an ocean of primary and secondary sources to show the trajectory modern Hindu identity formation followed while confronting colonialism. The arrival of an aggressive form of Christianity married to the armed version of naval trade (pioneered first by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean) shook the established religious structure by its very roots. One reason that Pillai gave for the aggression of the Portuguese was the growth of anti-Catholic reformation occurring in Europe. Pillai writes, ‘‘With the emerging Protestant movement accusing the Catholic church of perverting the faith, Catholic powers had a special necessity to demonstrate unequivocal Christian credentials…and here, their newly acquired Indian enclaves offered a parade ground, packed as they were with devil-worshipping pagans.’’
The explanation is similar to Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas’s depiction of early modern European commercial practices being ‘‘the crystallisation of profit, proselytism and power in the shape of chartered trading companies.’’ However, a rising Protestantism might not have been the only reason for Portuguese aggression in India as matters between Catholic powers, especially Portugal and Spain were far from cool.
The Treaty of Tordesillas (1493) brokered by the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal. The Portuguese first conquered Ceuta, an important naval base from the Moors (Muslims) in 1415 with crusading zeal. Medieval madness led the Portuguese to believe in the legend of Prester John who was rumoured to be stationed in the rear of the Islamic lands and would help annihilate the “Moors”. In the early 15th century, very few people in Portugal had any idea about “Indies” or “India”. Both the terms were vaguely applied to any unknown or mysterious regions to the east or south-east of the Mediterranean.
Charles R Boxer notes that as early as 1456, almost seventy years before Martin Luther composed his 95 Theses, ‘‘the Pope authorised the King of Portugal to attack, conquer and subdue Saracens, pagans, and other unbelievers who were inimical to Christ; to capture their goods and their territories; to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to transfer their lands and properties to the King of Portugal and his successors.’’ In light of such pieces of evidence, singling out reformation in Europe for the aggression of the Portuguese in India would serve limited historical purposes. Although as a conjunctural contributory factor, it cannot be denied. Therefore, what made the Portuguese aggressive was the (in)convenient marriage of the Church and colonial adventurism.
Ralph Austen has recently shown that the Portuguese aggression was the result of their inability to pay for their purchase of spices on the Malabar coast. The option available to cover the costs was to violently seek control and tax the internal commerce and the Indian Ocean and its surrounding waters. The naval bases that the Portuguese established were marked by enduring forms of violence. The demand that all merchant ships passing near them purchase a cartaz (trading license) was a unique way of extortion that had never been practised on such a geographical scale in the Indian Ocean.
The Portuguese aggression was marked by the breaking of temples and a ban on building new ones. The Hindus responded by hiding the idols of their deities. It was not just the Hindus who suffered at the hands of the catholic zeal. The Nasranis, local Indian Christians who claimed descent from the converts left by the apostle St Thomas in 52 CE and received their bishops from Persia, were also persecuted. Missionaries from other European nations did not follow the trajectory of the Portuguese. Roberto De Nobili, an Italian Jesuit missionary landed in India around the Mughal king Akbar’s death. By the time he arrived, it had dawned on several Jesuits that “Hindu culture need not be condemned wholesale”. What mattered more was “spiritual transformation not cultural or bodily imitation”. The result was the composition of texts such as Kristapurana (Christ Purana) in a blend of Marathi and Konkani languages. De Nobili discarded the cassock in favour of the ochre-coloured robes of the Hindu sanyasi (renunciant).
In Madurai, he roamed preaching Christianity Satya Vedam (true religion) and fashioned himself as the tattvabodhakar (teacher of truth). He adopted the sacred thread of the Brahmins and gave up eating meat. The sacred thread was used for creative proselytising usage. Pillai writes, ‘‘When a Brahmin came on, De Nobili cut his old sacred thread and gave him a Christian one with a cross.’’ Even Akbar, albeit briefly, ventured into the business of translating classical Hindu texts for nearly similar purposes. Audrey Truschke writes, ‘‘Akbar took Brahmins to task for misrepresenting Hindu texts to lower castes and hoped that translating Sanskrit texts into Persian would prompt these arrogant leaders to reform their ways.’’
The Protestants soon followed the Catholics. Past experiences tempered the activities of the latter. Dialogue, debate and written condemnation came in vogue. Attempts were made to forge a monotheistic unity by convincing the Hindus that Biblical teaching and the message of the Vedas were the same. For instance, the German missionary Bartholomaus Ziegenblag wrote Genealogy of the Indian Gods (1713). The book’s purpose was to aid future missionaries, but it also acknowledged that “buried within idol worship and fictitious tales there were parallels with Christian teachings.”
The cumulative outcome of such endeavours was that the Hindu intellectual elites, the Brahmins, who sat at the top of the food chain, responded cooperatively. In the eighteenth century when Indian texts reached European shores, the arguments for the apparent commonality between Hinduism and Christianity were used, rather ironically, by the men of enlightenment in their battle against the Church. The vintage of the Vedas helped them argue against the infallibility of the Bible. Voltaire had called Hinduism ‘‘a tedious rubbish’’ yet he stressed that “Christianity was a miserable copy of ancient Indian theology”.
The churn of colonialism
The coming of the East India Company’s rule and the emboldened arrival of the Protestant missionaries from England, especially in the aftermath of the renewal of the Company’s charters in 1813 and 1833, opened a new and the most significant phase of identity crystallisation, rebellion and a colonial version of secularism. In this phase, the Company was initially footed in the enterprise of conversion. A lot depended on the “men on the ground”. Some favoured a great involvement in cleansing the “Gentoos” (Hindus) whilst some cautioned against the aggressive spread of Christianity. Pillai shows that the most intriguing development of this phase was the growth of the “Brahmin collaborator class”.
These “pen-wielding warriors”, who had been in the business of switching sides, now favoured employment with the Company. Brahmins sat on the clerical and revenue department desks during this period. The honeymoon did not last long as in less than a century “Brahmins would become leading promoters of nationalism in India”. In the interregnum of this conversion, a set of ‘‘native Luthers’’ were born. The continuum of the native Luthers consisted of enlightened colonial liberals like Ram Mohan Roy and Hindu revivalists such as Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj. Pillai shows that the most important characteristic of the native Luthers was that they indigenised the method of Christian (chiefly Protestant) missionaries and stressed a Hindu version of monotheism discarding the Puranic animation.
The second set of native Luthers who did not belong to the Brahmanical stock and instead raged against Brahmanism were anti-caste crusaders in the frame of Jyotiba Phule. The latter succeeded in utilising British rule for the socio-political mobilization of the subordinate castes to bargain for just treatment from their traditional caste superiors. Phule’s activism led to the drawing of a line between the socially conservative yet anti-colonial nationalism of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the immediate need for the social emancipation of subordinate castes. Phule, for instance, made appeals to Queen Victoria and made children recite in his school: ‘‘Tell Grandma (the Queen) we are a happy nation, but millions are without education.’’
Tilak’s disdain for lower castes and his penchant for an upper caste-led nationalism did not last long. His youngest son, Shridhar Balwant Tilak (known as Shridharpant), joined BR Ambedkar in his anti-caste crusade. The younger Tilak participated in the famous Mahad Satyagraha and remained a faithful and reliable pillar for Ambedkar till his tragic suicide was forced upon him by the compatriots of the elder Tilak. Ambedkar was deeply disturbed by the younger Tilak’s death. He wrote that if anyone deserved to be called “Lokmanya”, it was Shridharpant Tilak, not Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
The conservative rump that was left to defend and extend the Brahmanical Hindu orthodoxy in politics was personified by, among others, VD Savarkar and the RSS and its extensions. Savarkar gave Hinduism a political epistemology in the form of Hindutva. In Nazism, he found his favourite political template. Fascist fascination led him to declare: “It is absurd to call Hindus a community in India…the Germans are the nation in Germany and Jews a community.” A Hindu Mahasabha resolution under the leadership of Savarkar read: “Muslims to be treated like Jews.’’
In 1944, Savarkar’s secretary suggested keeping Muslims in “internment camps” until “security of their good conduct is guaranteed”. Apart from Nazism, Savarkar also admired the American system of racial oppression of the blacks. In the 1940s, Pillai records, “an American asked Savarkar how Muslims might be treated under Hindu rule, Savarkar replied: As a minority, in the position of your Negroes.”
The term Hindu first appeared in a written form in the Achaemenid inscriptions and Zend Avesta (the holy book of the Zoroastrians). It had multiple meanings, from geographical to colour. Persian poets also employed “Hindu” as black when referring to the beloved’s tresses (zulf-i hindū) and the planet Saturn (hindū-yi falak; black doorkeeper of the sky). Today the word stands to describe the third biggest religious grouping in the world. Manu Pillai must be congratulated for showing us how the Hindu religion and identity crystallised during the long gestation period of colonialism in India.
Shubham Sharma has a MPhil in World History from the University of Cambridge and is a PhD Candidate in the department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut.
Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: The Making Of The Modern Hindu Identity, Manu S Pillai, Penguin India.
