Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
Modern Hindu identity was forged in argument with colonial missionaries, and both sides came away changed.
Manu S. Pillai traces how Hinduism was reformulated between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as Indian thinkers responded to missionary criticism, colonial scholarship and one another. The argument is that today’s Hindu self-understanding is a modern construction resting on a much longer prehistory, and Pillai works through the reformers and the polemics in detail.
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Tyler Cowen
Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. It may be fruitless to argue about this topic on-line, but almost all Westerners under-read when the topic is Hinduism.
Source · June 2025
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