A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of Indias most accomplished and impressively wideranging historians William DalrympleWhen European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu idolatry was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters maharajahs, poets, gunwielding...

Binding: Hardback;544 pages; Publisher: TBS-Penguin Random House Wholesale; Classification: HBJF; Weight: 1164 g; Dimensions: 242 x 165 x 37

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