Deconstructing The ‘Hinduism vs Hindutva’ Narrative – A Critical Appraisal Of 'Gods, Guns and Missionaries'

In an interview given at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2024, an author of popular historical books, who calls himself a ‘public historian’, claimed that while academic writing of history should be based on hard facts, popular history can blur the lines! 

He went on to say that one should imagine history and that it is a very reductive approach to advocate that one should be proud of one’s history. 

Of late, this group of self-proclaimed public historians has been behaving like a self-sustaining cartel: they quote each other in their books as if that makes their argument foolproof without any supporting evidence from texts or archaeology. They invite and interview each other at lit fests. They ignore or dismiss established scholarship in Indian historiography – scholars who have spent almost their entire career studying and researching Indian history.

The author of the book under scrutiny, Manu S. Pillai, belongs to this new school. In this article, we try to examine and unravel some of the narratives which the author deploys in the work. The goal of the author seems to be to setup classical Hinduism against Hindutva and portray these two as incompatible and mutually conflicting identities:

The Original Public Historians

The term ‘public historian’ was first coined in the United States during the late 1970s. Robert Kelley, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the term in 1976 when he established a graduate programme for training historians for roles beyond the boundaries of traditional academia. 

In India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar and Sita Ram Goel were two amongst the foremost genuine public historians of the twentieth century. Sir Jadunath Sarkar was educated in English literature, but such was the impact of his historical writings that A. L. Basham called him “the greatest Indian historian of his generation.”

Sita Ram Goel, on the other hand, single handedly challenged the whole cabal of Left-leaning historians in the 1980s by producing seminal works on the historical origins of the rift between Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. A whole generation of Hindus were made aware of the historicity of sacred sites like the Ramjanmabhoomi at Ayodhya because of his bold writings. 

Today, the proliferation of digital content has led to an explosion of interest in Indian history and thousands of Indians are eagerly lapping up historical content on social media on a daily basis. Tapping into this huge market is a new generation of authors who have been writing on varied themes of Indian history under this sobriquet of ‘public historians.’ These are people who the mainstream media celebrates as individuals who can speak ‘truth to power.’

Unlike Sitaram Goel who was challenging the school of Marxist historiography of his times, this new group of public historians are ironically virtual cheerleaders of the old Marxist school and are building their brand by claiming to debunk what they call ‘right-wing WhatsApp history’.

The Sanskrit Handicap

This new breed of public historians suffers from a serious handicap—Sanskrit. The author’s lack of proficiency in Sanskrit is conspicuous right at the beginning of his book – in the thirty-four-page long introduction: ‘A Brief History of Hinduism’. 

Someone who is writing an introduction to the world’s oldest religion, whose source texts are largely in Sanskrit, is expected to gain a basic proficiency in reading these source texts in the original and not be dependent on the translations of the usual suspects—Western Indologists and their Indian counterparts. 

The introduction does not have a single original verse or reference from either the Rig Veda, or the other Vedas, or the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or the 18 Puranas, or the Upanishads, or from any Sanskrit texts, or even from any of our bhasha literatures.

Now imagine writing the history of Islam without gaining even basic proficiency in Arabic or the ability to read the source texts of Islam in Arabic and instead predicating your narratives on the writings of those who are hostile to Islam. Or try writing the history of Judaism without knowing a word of Hebrew or Aramaic. And yet, these public historians get away by writing ‘introductions’ to Hinduism without knowing a word of Sanskrit, without reading the source texts of Hinduism and with weird interpretations based on colonial scholarship. 

The Brahmin Bogeyman, a soft target for Hindu baiters

The author uses selective anecdotes from the British period to build his narrative that Hinduism is largely a creation of the imagination and greed of the 'cunning Brahmins' who wanted to retain their dominance through a carefully crafted maze of religious stories and rituals to keep the masses and the elite under their stranglehold. 

The Brahmin community has always been a soft target for those who wanted to vilify or subvert Hinduism because it was the Brahmins who were the gatekeepers of the Hindu faith against the onslaught of the Islamic hordes and the Christian missionaries, and not the gatekeepers of heaven as the author tries to reinvent. From Mahmud of Ghazni’s assault on the Somanath Temple to Aurangzeb’s plunder of Kasi, those who died defending the temples and their faith included thousands of these so-called ‘cunning’ Brahmins. 

Though not all the Rishis of the Vedas were of Brahmin origin, nevertheless the Brahmin community played a critical role in preserving the Vedas and passing it on to posterity. 

In the words of Dr. David Frawley, “The term Brahmanism is a colonial distortion for Vedic Hinduism. Vedic texts back to Rigveda honour rishis, kings, great merchants and those who cultivate the land. Vedic Hinduism is a dharma for all human beings and extends to the entire universe with the Cosmic Purusha.”

Based on the blinkered views of the colonial Indologists like Johannes Bronkhorst, the author tries to project a quid pro quo between the Kshatriyas and the Brahmins by claiming that both mutually benefited from and supported each other in maintaining their hegemony over the masses:

A large portion of the book is dedicated to proving just one point – that structured, organised, well-defined Hinduism is only in the Brahmin’s imagination. And therefore, Hindutva is by corollary, a Brahminical reaction to colonialism. 

Reimagining Aryans and Mlecchas

The word Mleccha was used in classical Indian literature for non-Vedic or foreign people, regarded as lying outside the social and religious boundaries of Vedic society.

In the earlier Vedic books, Mleccha-s were identified as those not speaking Sanskrit correctly or having no Vedic practices. In many cases, the term signified cultural ‘others’. 

In the Ramayana and Mahabharata, Mleccha-s comprised different border tribes like Yavanas (Greeks), Sakas (Scythians), Pahlavas (Parthians), Kambojas, and the Hunas (Huns). Some of them were considered to be corrupted Kshatriyas who had lost the path of dharma. 

The Puranas further developed this concept, describing Mleccha-s as inhabitants outside the borders of Aryavarta, the realm of the Aryas. The term was also used for native tribes that did not follow Vedic practices. 

In a linguistic context, ‘Mleccha’ was also used to describe those who used non-Sanskritic languages, which were commonly viewed as unintelligible. 

While ‘Mleccha’ in early Sanskrit writings implied cultural inferiority, it came to be employed more generally for any given foreign or non-Vedic groups by later sources.

The idea of Mleccha-s expresses the complex relationship between individuals within the Vedic fold with those outside of it, be it by language, geography, or tradition. The term, in the course of time, came to signify some historical groups coming into contact with Indian civilization. 

Based on the writings of Romila Thapar, Aloka Parasher and others, the author has come up with this ridiculous theory that most of present-day India was branded mleccha-desa:

If subaltern historians like Aloka Parasher, and ‘eminent’ historians like Romila Thapar have said it, then it must be true.

It is obvious that the author has not read the Vishnu Purana (ca. 3rd-5th century CE), for example, which declares the boundaries of Bharatavarsha and the unity of its people:

Uttaram yat samudrasya himadreshchaiva dakshinam,

varsham tad bharatam nama bharati yatra santatih

“The land which lies north of the ocean and south of the Himalayas is called Bharata, where the descendants of Bharata reside.”

In the colonial Indological worldview, the Vedic Aryans are always stereotyped as nomadic pastoralists who could evolve only by their contact with the outside world. And so, the author, unsurprisingly, repeats this stereotype too.

The same uncivilized pastoral nomads are also credited with the development of the earliest principles of mathematics and geometry in the Sulba Sutras (ca. 800-200 BCE), the oldest text on astronomy, the Vedanga Jyotisha of Lagadha (ca.700-400 BCE), a refined language like Sanskrit with the oldest corpus of philosophical and spiritual literature of humanity.

Driving a wedge between Vedic vs Puranic Hinduism

Another artificial divide which was perpetrated by the colonial historians and perpetuated by the Indology school is the so-called discontinuity between Vedic and Puranic Hinduism. According to them, Vedic deities like Indra, Varuna and Mitra were relegated into the background and Shiva and Vishnu emerged as the principal deities in later Puranic Hinduism:

Yet another critical error in the chapter on ‘Heathens and Hidden Truths’ is the false identification of the notion of Brahman and Ishvara in Hinduism to monotheism of the Abrahamic kind (similar to the reformation of Hinduism which the Brahmo Samaj attempted as a reaction to the criticism from Christian missionaries). Nothing can be further from the truth as any genuine student or scholars of Hinduism will point out.

The sandhyavandanam, for example, a daily nitya karma that all Hindus belonging to the three varnas are expected to perform thrice daily, contains hymns carefully selected from the Rigveda, Yajurveda and the Samaveda. Most of the 16 samskaras, the rites of passage that mark key stages in a Hindu’s life, are traditionally accompanied by Vedic mantras or hymns. Many Hindu temple rituals incorporate Vedic hymns, especially during core ceremonies like abhishekam (ritual bathing), homa (fire offerings), archana (name recitations), and prana pratishtha (deity consecration).

Hymns from the Rigveda, Yajurveda, and Samaveda, like the Purusha Sukta, Sri Sukta, and Rudram are chanted to invoke, purify, and energize the deity. Vedic mantras remain central to temple sanctity. If the common Hindus are indifferent or ignorant of the Vedic corpus today, it is more owing to the colonial policies of education than an inbuilt preference for what the author calls ‘mass Hinduism’.  

Trivializing the organic Tribal-Hindu Interface

Yet another problematic narrative furthered by authors like Pillai is the one which seeks to drive a wedge between ‘tribals and Hindus’. The evolution of Hinduism and its interactions with local tribal cultures was an organic process, not an artificially stage-managed and predatory cultural assimilation of tribes by Brahmins as the author claims. 

Sandhya Jain in her seminal work Adi Deo Arya Devata: A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface argues with compelling evidence that India’s tribal communities have played a significant role in shaping our culture, with major deities in the Indic tradition having tribal roots.

The British colonialists reimagined India’s Adivasi communities to be outside the pale of mainstream Hindu society. However, India’s spiritual and cultural landscape reveals an organic connection between tribal and non-tribal groups, a relationship well-documented in ancient texts and inscriptions.

Colonial anthropologists and ethnographers noted this connection but actively sought to separate tribals from Hindu society through racial segregation and census classifications. 

Reviving the Ghost of Katherine Mayo

The author takes on the role of a modern Carl Jung to perform a psychoanalysis of colonialism, but he ends up as a poor imitation of the likes of Romila Thapar.

The chapter reminds us of Romila Thapar’s failed attempt to whitewash the destruction of Somanath by Mahmud of Ghazni by undermining the religious intolerance which was the primary driving force behind such iconoclastic invaders.

The chapter is an attempt at building two narratives – 

1. To try and make today’s uninformed Hindus feel embarrassed or even guilty by reading the exotic accounts of idol worship from early European encounters with India (gaslighting the victims). 

2. To give the benefit of doubt to the European (Christian) colonizers by claiming that the vulgar and vituperative portrayal of Hinduism was only a tool for fund raising for Christian missionaries who used these exotic accounts of idol worship to convince their donors of the necessity to civilize India (‘the white man’s burden’). 

By imputing economic or other motives to the Christian missionaries, the author seems to be trying to shift our gaze away from the source of the problem which was the deep-rooted intolerance of other faiths in the Abrahamic worldview. Instead, he uses these encounters as fodder to build the main narrative of his book which is that the modern Hindu identity is an exaggerated and hyper aggressive reaction to these encounters during the Islamic and the more recent Christian colonial onslaught on India.  

What else should one infer from these carefully selected, revolting accounts of Hindu customs, practices, festivals from the writings of these early European settlers and missionaries? Vishnu’s man-lion avatar is reduced to an ugly hellish monster in the imagination of a Dutchman and the sadhus are described as ‘sanctified rascals’: 

The author is trying to build a case that vituperative literature against Hinduism produced by the British missionaries and their aggressive proselytising activities gave birth to the modern avatar of Hindu nationalism. However, the lack of a coherent connecting thread between the chapters and inherent contradictions in his arguments dilute the centrality of this thread. 

One of the most abysmal characters of the Hindu-Christian encounter during the colonial period was the Italian missionary Roberto de Nobili whose impact can be seen even today in Madurai where he created a Hinduized version of Christianity to convert the gullible natives. Yet, in the author’s eyes, de Nobili is no less than a saint compared to the Portuguese and the Dutch missionaries, and he lends legitimacy to the acculturative techniques of de Nobili. 

The author leaves out one crucial difference between the Hindus and their colonizers in these unequal and sordid encounters. Despite a millennium of such horrid treatment by the Christian and Islamic iconoclasts, Hindus have never repaid them in kind, for Hinduism has always taught them to look for the most ennobling aspects of even alien faiths. 

Orientalism and Nationalism

In the chapter on ‘An Indian Renaissance’ the author argues that modern education and Orientalism were key influences on the remaking of modern Hindu identity. Rajah Serfoji Bhonsle II of Tanjore, the pioneer of the ‘Tanjore Renaissance’ is presented as a classic example of how Hindus effortlessly embraced modernity while remaining committed to Hinduism under the influence of modern English education. This section on Serfoji is an interesting read with a wealth of details on how he encouraged a synthesis of modern science with traditional Hindu literature, customs, practices and festivals. 

But here too, the author relies on British accounts and those of Anglicized Indian reformers to claim that the natives welcomed the new English schools and preferred them to the traditional village pathashalas or Sanskrit learning:

We have a well-researched corpus of literature in Dharampal’s works, particularly The Beautiful Tree, which debunks this claim.

It is striking and instructive to see how these public historians always prop up Buddhism as a non-violent alternative to Hinduism, a folly which we dealt with in detail in our previous review in Swarajya of another public historian, William Dalrymple’s book, The Golden Road. Manu Pillai repeats the same stereotype in building his narrative:

In painting the Hindutva of Tilak and Savarkar as a militant form of Hinduism as contrasted with the non-violent means of Gandhi, the author is essentially denying the right of native populations to armed resistance against colonial oppression and religious persecution.

Social reformers like Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Jothiba Phule who viewed Hinduism from the monotheistic benchmarks of Islam and Christianity and were acutely apologetic of the social evils in Hinduism targeted by the missionaries (real and imagined), thus become the heroes of the book’s narrative as they are conveniently mild in contrast to the uncomfortably aggressive Hindu nationalists:

The author sees the rise of Brahmo Samaj, followed by the Arya Samaj of Dayananda Saraswati which initiated the Shuddhi movement (reconversion), as early precursors to a more militant form of Hindu nationalism. 

The unity of Hinduism and Hindutva

Manu Pillai is diligently walking in the footsteps of his mentor Shashi Tharoor. It was Tharoor’s book Why I am a Hindu (2018) that laid the seed of the recent pet-narrative of the secular liberal intellectuals in India. This narrative is centred around manufacturing a divide between what these authors perceive as classical Hinduism (esoteric, non-violent, peaceful, secular, sanitized version of Hinduism) and what they think Hindutva is (violent, aggressive, political, communal version of Hinduism).

For authors like Manu Pillai, who fail to understand this organic consciousness, icons like Tilak and Savarkar are favourite targets for it was from them that the first clear expression of Hindutva in modern times emerged in India’s nationalist discourse. Hindutva is therefore projected as an aggressive form of Hindu nationalism and can conveniently be equated with Western nationalisms of the nineteenth century, some of which were totalitarian in nature.  

That nationalists like Tilak, the Chapekar brothers and Savarkar were Brahmins makes it a compounded crime in the eyes of the author, and he does not let go of an opportunity to harp on their Brahminical origins.

In his attempt to build a theory for the origins of the modern identity of Hinduism as an aggressive reaction to the colonizers and the missionaries, the author ends up subscribing to and legitimizing colonial stereotypes of Hinduism.

Authors like Manu Pillai and the new group of 'public historians' would do well to go back to the original source texts of Hinduism in Sanskrit and read them with an open mind instead of internalising and regurgitating the opinions of colonial historians.