Commentary

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

Probal Roy Chowdhury and M Pramod Kumar

Jun 08, 2025, 06:51 PM | Updated Jun 13, 2025, 11:44 PM IST


Manu Pillai’s 'Gods, Guns and Missionaries' builds a caricatured Hindu past on the back of colonial sources.
Manu Pillai’s 'Gods, Guns and Missionaries' builds a caricatured Hindu past on the back of colonial sources.
  • A deep dive into how author Manu Pillai’s narrative recycles colonial stereotypes, erases scriptural nuance, and misrepresents the very foundations of Hindu identity.
  • 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. 

    While every Indian has a right to read, research and write about Indian history, it does not absolve such self-appointed public historians from the rigours of writing 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 orthodox tradition of Brahmin elites envisioned a world of four caste groups, functioning in carefully policed harmony. At the top sat, of course, Brahmins themselves, guarding the gates of divine access… It was an aspiration—the portrayal of an ideal Brahmin world—rather than reality as it existed (p. XVIII). 

    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. 

    But even a cursory glance at the footnotes and the bibliography reveals that the author is totally dependent on the (mis)interpretations of the source texts of Hinduism by these Indologists. Here’s a sample of the list of names that appear in the notes: Romila Thapar, Susan Bayly, D.D. Kosambi, Audrey Truschke, Ainslee Embree, Heinrich von Stietencron, Hermann Kulke, Dietmar Rothermund, Johannes Bronkhorst, Patrick Olivelle etc.

    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:

    Or as a key text offers: ‘The Kshatriya does not flourish without the Brahmin, and the Brahmin does not prosper without the Kshatriya’—hence such rituals as of the golden cow to invent Kshatriyas where there were none. (p. XIX)

    The portrayal of the Brahmin community in the book is nothing short of being offensive and defamatory:Company Raj also enabled a Brahmin Raj… In time, Brahmins would become leading promoters of nationalism in India. (p.120)

    One of the brightest gifts of the Indian priest is the ability to bypass awkward corners between theory and reality through the manipulation of tradition. For centuries, kings were consumers of this marvellous Brahmin talent… Cows were, as always, critical: One ceremony required the aspirant to wait inside an artificial gold bovine while his priests chanted mantras. And at the appropriate moment, the man would spring from the womb of his new ‘mother’, reborn into the superior rank he sought. In a 1659 episode, a freshly minted monarch of Tanjore reportedly even sat in the lap of the priest’s wife, bawling like a baby, lest there be confusion about the proceedings. (p. XVI).
    … one Buddhist text ranks dogs above Brahmins… (p. XIX, emphasis added).
    British imperialism in India saw also the rise of a Brahmin collaborator class, serving and aiding the conqueror (p.118)
    Company Raj also enabled a Brahmin Raj… In time, Brahmins would become leading promoters of nationalism in India. (p.120)

    According to the author, British colonialism and Christianity had one positive effect – the emancipation of the lower castes from the clutches of the cunning Brahmins:

    Phule’s life, in fact, exemplifies one of those little discussed consequences of colonialism in India: the political mobilization of subordinate castes, which successfully utilized British rule to bargain for just treatment from their traditional superiors. It is proof of how missionary activities too, even as they incensed Hindu elites, offered marginalized sections of brown society a toolkit for self-assertion and agency. (p.245, emphasis added)

    Contrast Manu Pillai’s cliched portrayal of the Brahmin community, with that of another historian Dr. Meenakshi Jain:

    The British were not wrong in their distrust of educated Brahmins in whom they saw a potential threat to their supremacy in India. For instance, in 1879 the Collector of Tanjore in a communication to Sir James Caird, member of the Famine Commission, stated that “there was no class (except Brahmins) which was so hostile to the English.” The predominance of the Brahmins in the freedom movement confirmed the worst British suspicions of the community. Innumerable CID reports of the period commented on Brahmin participation at all levels of the nationalist movement. In the words of an observer, “If any community could claim credit for driving the British out of the country, it was the Brahmin community. Seventy per cent of those who were felled by British bullets were Brahmins.

    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. 

    The one detail that he does seem to get right here is that in their attempt to bring all Hindus under a common law to govern them, the British ended up creating a rigid Hindu identity rooted in caste and archaic texts which never had a pan-India status earlier:

    They (sastras) never represented Hindu society in full, being an ‘ideologically driven’ (Brahminical) ‘blueprint for the proper management of society’. With glorious inconsistency, they offered Brahmin-approved options for various concerns. (p. 109)

    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 MahabharataMleccha-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. 

    By medieval times, Mleccha was applied to foreign invaders, such as the Turks and Mongols, specifically in Hindu and Jain literature. Though earlier it had a derogatory meaning, the term itself later became more descriptive rather than derogatory. 

    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:

    Most of present-day India, tellingly, was branded mleccha-desa, or barbarian country, including Gujarat and Sindh in the west, Bengal and Bihar in the east, and the southern peninsula; to visit these places was to commit ‘sin through the feet’ (p. XVII).

    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.”

    (Vishnu Purana, Book 2, Chapter 3, Verse 1) 

    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:

    Old gods of the Vedic age, such as Indra and Agni, made way for two powerful deities, Vishnu and Siva, with their own mythologies and strategies to counter Sramanic ambitions. (p. XX).
    Similarly, though Indians used images, this had come largely from outside the Vedic tradition; not all Brahmins, therefore, approved. The most self-consciously ‘authentic’ among them eschewed temple service; priesthood was degrading. Indeed, some thought laying eyes on temple-priests defiling, and a key text equates them to butchers.
    Now however, a set of Sanskrit books was almost mechanically construed as the ‘authentic’ core of a shambolic religious system—and there were at least some Hindu authorities willing to operate on these terms, energized in their own conservatism by conditions of Western creation. (p.85, emphasis added)

    This fallacy stems from a literalist reading of the Vedas leading to the creation of myths like the Aryan Invasion theory. Indigenous scholarship never accepted this artificial dichotomy and rejected it outright. Foremost among them was Sri Aurobindo who understood the deeper spiritual symbolism hidden in the mystic hymns of the Rig Veda and challenged the literal interpretations of the colonial school:

    “The Vishnu of the Veda, with his wide strides measuring out the worlds, is the same high-seated and deep-hearted divine being who in later times assumes the forms of Rama and Krishna to preserve the Dharma.” (Essays on the Gita, p. 389)

    But authors like Manu Pillai rely more on Wendy Doniger than Sri Aurobindo for their understanding of Hinduism:

    The longest in the scheme, the Skandapurana, has even been described as a ‘scrap-bag’. In the Indologist Wendy Doniger’s words, every time someone ‘came upon a story that seemed to be... old but did not... have any known provenance, he could remark, without fear of contradiction, “It’s in the Skanda Purana”’ (p. 21, emphasis added)

    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.

    Pantheism perhaps comes closer, but none of the ‘isms’ capture the all-encompassing vision and worldview of the Advaitic vision of the oneness of the universe.

    The proposition that Hinduism had higher and lower forms—the first resembling monotheism, the other ‘messily’ polytheistic—was neither new nor a European bifurcation. In one Vedic text, thus, a sage is asked how many gods exist. He opens with 3306. But when pressed as to how many really exist, his answer changes: The number is pruned to thirty-three, then six, two, one and a half, and finally one… Even masters of bhakti stressed this; as Purandara Dasa sang in the 1500s, ‘“My God”, “Your God”, don’t talk like that. There is only one God.’ (p.59)
    If Europeans propped up monotheism, Hindus could sing along, even assert ownership, despite the surfeit of gods populating general imagination. If idolatry were rubbished, ‘native’ thinkers could nod in assent, simultaneously showing indulgence. White men saw in this hypocrisy and trickery, but to Hindus, this was entirely in keeping with their many-storeyed history and plural personalities. (p.61, emphasis added)

    Equally erroneous and misguided is the author’s claim that while the Vedas commanded a formal supremacy in Hinduism, their presence and influences in the lives of ordinary Hindu was limited:

    And in more real terms, the religion’s outlines were fixed not so much by the Vedas but by the epics—the Mahabharata and Ramayana— along with orally transmitted Puranic tales. It is these that most Hindus identify with even today, the Vedas being primarily a restricted Brahmin concern. (pp. 81-82, emphasis added).

    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

    Manu Pillai has managed to reawaken the ghost Katherine Mayo and her Mother India – at least that is the feeling you get when you read the opening chapter of his book titled ‘Monsters and Missionaries.’

    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’: 

    “Once van Linschoten passed by some villages and ‘at everie hil, stonie Rocke or hole’ there was a ‘Carved Pagode, or rather Devils, and monsters in hellish shapes’. An image he saw on this journey was ‘so mishaped and deformed’ that that it surpassed all the ugliness so far suffered—the deity (probably Narasimha, the man-lion form of Vishnu) had ‘hornes, and long teeth that hung out of his mouth, down to the knees, and beneath his Navel and belly it had another such like face, with . . . No matter which way he looked, van Linschoten saw in Hindu gods the very creatures Christian mythology warned the faithful to beware… (p.9)
    Van Linschoten asserted so, noting matter-of-factly that since Indian women were ‘leacherous and inconstant’, they disposed of their men ‘to have the better means to fulfil their lusts’… (p.13)
    Then, of course, there was the unsavoury presence of ascetics and fakirs… one sadhu left a European voyeur transfixed with revulsion as he flaunted a golden penis-piercing. Many ‘young married Women’ came to see this holy man, it was added, and ‘taking him [i.e. his member] devoutly in their Hands, kiss’d him, whilst his bawdy Owner stroak’d their silly Heads, muttering some filthy Prayers’… (p.16)

    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 is often left wondering whether he is writing an apology to British colonialism or blaming the British for the rise of Hindu nationalism. 

    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. 

    Instead, de Nobili turned his gaze to the cream of Hindu society. For if they were wooed, prestige would encase Christianity. It was critical, that is, to aim high and pluck from the top. One of de Nobili’s first innovations, therefore, was to discard the cassock. Instead of expecting Indians to become European in all but complexion, he embraced their sartorial tastes, dressing hereon like a sanyasi in saffron robes—the ‘native’ godman’s uniform even today. Sanyasam, or renunciation, is a normative goal for orthodox Hindus — assuming the look of an ascetic Brahmin, the Catholic father exalted here an ideal straight out of Sanskrit textbooks. (p. 37).

    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. 

    In a lecture on “Hindus and Christians” delivered at Detroit on February 21, 1894, Swami Vivekananda expressed his anguish at these unfair accounts of Hinduism and India: 

    And whenever your ministers criticise us, let them remember this: If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us. And what for? Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in the world? We say to you, ‘Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have mine.

    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. 

    Orientalists like William Jones, Charles Wilkins and James Prinsep fuelled a frenzy of new interest in Hinduism in the West and in turn injected a new confidence into the nationalists. The English translation of the Bhagavad Gita which later became the central text of inspiration for the nationalists and revolutionaries is a case in point. 

    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:

    while another traveller observed that to master English, Brahmins would even pick up the Bible. Why, in the Company-sponsored Sanskrit colleges too, pressure resulted in the inauguration of English sections, their popularity surpassing those of the original, founding classes. (p.159)
    The jibe that English education produced an army of clerks was incorrect; it would generate ‘political leaders, professional men, and intellectuals’—not unlike Serfoji. (p. 160)

    It is this newfound popularity of modern English education, he argues, that encouraged British officials like Macaulay to withdraw funding to Oriental learning:

    The transition from Sanskrit to English was most pointedly expressed in the mid-1830s, when the governor general ordered that state funding hereon be reserved for only modern education in English, and that ‘artificial patronage’ for ‘Oriental learning’ be gradually withdrawn. Macaulay endorsed the move. (p.161)

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

    The legitimacy of armed resistance 

    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:

    Focused not on pleasing gods as much as ethical living, these Sramanic (‘striving’) schools elevated non-violence, good conduct and the purity of the soul—simpler narratives capable of appealing to broader interests… Indeed, the third century BCE edicts of the emperor Ashoka, personally a Buddhist, admit these tensions and, wisely, advocate tolerance. (p. XIX)

    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.

    In his criticism of Tilak by selectively pointing out his conservative stand on certain social issues or such scattered utterances, Manu Pillai consciously legitimises the colonial policy of divide and rule – for his criticism of Hindu nationalism rests on dividing Hindu society on caste lines and projecting these leaders as representing only the upper castes.

    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:

    Ram Mohun Roy – would go on to become one of the most striking Indians of the century (p. 215)
    He belonged… to a class of Anglophone Indians who did not view British rule as a disaster… Roy admitted that there was indeed much in Hinduism that was woeful, and sati, as with foreign critics, topped his list. (p.216)
    Roy argued that Hinduism’s loftiest ideas, ‘concealed within the dark curtain of Sungscrit language’, never reached its beneficiaries thanks to Brahmin cunning… Krishna, he declared, committed unholy acts with women; Siva’s (phallic) icon was so ‘indecent’… (p.221-222). 

    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. 

    By now, it would not be difficult to glean that the portrayal of Savarkar’s life and legacy in the book is loaded with the same old cliched stereotypes which have been brandished by the left liberal school of historians – that Savarkar was an admirer of Hitler and his Nazi methods, that his support of armed resistance led to his followers assassinating Gandhi. The author reserves his most caustic tone for Savarkar and delights in the fact that Savarkar died a frustrated man, unable to fulfil his dream of consolidating Hindu nationalism:

    Retreating to Bombay, Savarkar died in the political wilderness. Indeed, just as he was under British surveillance in his twenties, he spent his last years watched by the Indian government. After a meeting with him some years before, the penultimate British viceroy had written: ‘I thought [Savarkar] an unpleasant, intolerant little man, full of communal bitterness.’ And at the end of his career—which had seen guns and plots, prison, and an unrealized mission to give Hindu nationalism wide political appeal— what seemed to remain was indeed bitterness. This comes across in Savarkar’s final major offering, a yarn around six ‘glorious epochs’ in Indian history. Between its fanciful interpretations of the past, there is much frustration, as Savarkar vents on how Hindus ought to have behaved; of what he saw as lost opportunities. (p.309).

    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).

    The liberal ecosystem in this country has had a chronic heartburn ever since the Ayodhya movement gathered steam in the 1980s leading to the reclamation of the Sri Ramjanmabhoomi by the Hindus. The rise of Hindu resistance to grave provocations from missionary arms of other religions, hostile political ideologies like Marxism and a growing discontent against the trojan horses within the community – the English educated rootless elite, who keep siding with the enemy – is an eye sore for the liberals. 

    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.  

    Savarkar naturally purveyed the past not as a scholar but as an ideologue. And where that shared past, so essential to his formulation, did not exist, it was made to exist. History, in his books, that is, appears not in its own context or on its own terms but as raw fodder to support a predetermined position… And so, he would tell the story Hindus needed to hear to enthrone Hindutva and seize power. (p. 299)

    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.

    The attempt to create a non-existent partition between what the liberals perceive to be the classical, docile Hindu identity as against the aggressive Hindutva counterpart is an exercise in futility. 

    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. 

    Probal Roy Chowdhury is Director, Centre for New India Studies, and Professor, Department of English, at Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. M Pramod Kumar is Assistant Professor, Amrita Darshanam International Centre for Cultural and Spiritual Studies, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore.


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