000			02339nam a22002417a 4500
005			20241203112637.0
008			241203b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780670093656
037			_cPurchased _nPrism Books, Kadavanthra
041			_aEnglish
082			_a950.05 _bMAN/GO
100			_aManu S Pillai
245			_aGODS, GUNS AND MISSIONARIES _b: Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
250			_a1
260			_aHaryana _bAllen Lane - Penguin Books _c2024
300			_g564
500			_aWhen European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: the worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But soon it became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more complex than white men’s stereotypes allowed, and Hindus had little desire to convert. But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance. During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion. This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to resist foreign rule. It is this encounter which has, in good measure, inspired modern Hinduism’s present shape. Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionaries’ own tools and strategies in the process, triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country. In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters—maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen—this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position. Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated—and infinitely richer—than popular narratives allow.
650			_aHinduism
650			_aKerala History
650			_aIndian History
942			_cLEN
942			_2ddc
999			_c193940 _d193940