In our present context, how one approaches and/or answers this question could lead to harmless ripples or to crashing, cataclysmic waves. Despite such repercussions, however, it is one of those questions that must, to partially use one of my professor’s favourite phrases, be “grappled with”. Who is a Hindu, indeed? To briefly recount the history of the term for our purposes, the term “Hindu” originates from the Sanskrit word “Sindhu”, which refers to the Indus river. Ancient Persians, encountering the Indus river, pronounced it as “Hindu”, applying this designation to the lands and peoples beyond the river. This usage appears in the 6th-century BCE inscriptions of Darius I, where “Hindush” denotes the region of the Indus Valley. Initially, “Hindu” functioned as a geographical term without religious connotations, describing the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Over time, especially during the medieval period, the term evolved. By the 13th century, “Hindustan” thus emerged as a popular alternative name for India. And by the 14th century, texts in Persian, Sanskrit and regional languages began using “Hindu” to distinguish indigenous traditions from Islam, gradually infusing the term with religious significance. The formalisation of “Hinduism” as a term occurred during British colonial rule in the 19th century. European scholars and colonists employed “Hinduism” to categorise the diverse religious practices and beliefs of the Indian people, distinguishing them from other religions. This period solidified the association of “Hindu” with a distinct religious identity, encompassing a wide array of philosophies, rituals, and cultural practices native to the Indian subcontinent. The understanding of how the term solidified into its current form, although not an absolute prerequisite, surely helps before diving into Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. It is so because, as the name suggests, the book treads through slightly more nuanced and less straightforward paths. It (re)turns to the question, “who is a Hindu?” and navigates through spatiotemporal dimensions to trace a rather Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy of the ethno-religious group and its journey of self-identification. Pillai states, perhaps as a caveat, in his prodigious introductory chapter that, “It is only an investigation into human action and reaction, in a context of political conquest, cultural domination and resistance. For those who prefer happier, more syncretic aspects of Hinduism’s history — which are, without question, inalienable parts of it — or a romantic celebration of the faith, proceed no further” (p. xlvii). Manu Pillai’s book is a timely addition to the corpus of Hindu studies as well as to that of the history of India, in general. The book begins with the West’s encounter with Indian culture in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. This Indo-European interaction shaped many of the more painfully persistent features of Indian popular imagination in the modern day, like the Indian elitist views of “caste”, the vernacular as uncivilised, and so on. Yet, as the author concludes, it was only by encountering the white man that the brown person reimagined their place in their state and in the world. Ankit Rath is a DPhil scholar at the University of Oxford Gods, Guns and Missionaries By Manu S. Pillai Penguin pp. 568; Rs 999
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