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Gods, Guns and Missionaries
  • Published: 10 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780141993492
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 624
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

Formats & editions
Paperback
10 Nov 2026
Hardback
8 Apr 2025
EBook
9 Jan 2025
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An ambitious and engaging history of the development of Hindu identity and nationalism in colonial and contemporary India

When 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. But it quickly became clear that this ‘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. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.
  • Published: 10 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780141993492
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 624
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Manu S. Pillai

Manu S. Pillai is the author of the critically acclaimed The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (2015), Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (2018), The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History (2019) and False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (2021). He is a winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar awarded by India’s National Academy of Letters to writers under thirty-five and holds a PhD in history from King’s College London. His essays and writings on history have appeared in publications in the UK and India.
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Praise for Gods, Guns and Missionaries

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 India’s most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians

William Dalrymple

Exploding the myth of a singular, ‘true’ Hinduism, Manu S Pillai’s deft exploration of four centuries of the faith reveals its underlying complexities

Financial Times

[An] insightful and incisive inquiry into the making of the modern Hindu identity… Pillai has a singular ability to weave multiple strands into a single coherent narrative without sacrificing a sense of the diverse personalities involved and the raging maelstrom of ideas

Times Literary Supplement

Essential reading for anyone curious about the long roots of India’s current political dispensation …. Gods, Guns and Missionaries is about something profoundly bigger than the Indian subcontinent. It is part of a global story in which loosely organised, syncretic religious traditions were steamrolled by the Abrahamic model: one God, one book, one truth that negated accommodation with all other beliefs

History Today

Truly remarkable ... Gods, Guns and Missionaries unpacks the transformation of Hinduism with sharp insight combined with masterful storytelling ... Pillai provides valuable tools to understand the narratives underpinning contemporary Indian politics

Asian Review of Books

Scrupulously researched and narrated with an authoritative ease…Gods, Guns and Missionaries is a courageous work that privileges fact over political correctness and prejudice. Pillai demonstrates that unusual ability to be at once scholarly and extremely readable

Frontline

Gods, Guns and Missionaries delicately and deliciously crosses that bridge between academic rigour and accessible storytelling. Offering its readers new trails to the present through the prism of the past, the book deserves the work it demands. It’s a debate, a conversation, and a question for the future. It’s a dialogue waiting to happen, as timeless as its subject

Business Standard

In under 350 pages of text, Gods, Guns and Missionaries presents a confident survey of encounters between Indians and Europeans from 1500 onward–five centuries of misunderstanding and mutual appreciation–taking in all the major cock-ups and flip-flops in colonial policy

Literary Review

Pillai has dived deep into an ocean of primary and secondary sources to show the trajectory modern Hindu identity formation followed while confronting colonialism…[He] must be congratulated for showing us how the Hindu religion and identity crystallised during [this] long gestation period

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