Gods Guns And Missionaries The Making Of The Modern Hindu Identity

Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity is a wide-ranging history of how Hindu identity changed and took modern political form over roughly four centuries. Manu S. Pillai examines the interactions among Indian rulers and reformers, European colonial powers, Christian missionaries, philosophers, poets, and political thinkers. Moving beyond simplified accounts of either an unchanging Hindu tradition or a purely European colonial imposition, he shows how debate, conflict, adaptation, reform, and power shaped religious ideas and social identities. The book also explores the historical conditions that prepared the ground for modern Hindu nationalism, while placing Hinduism’s development within the broader story of colonial India and Indian Christianity.