About the event

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: 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, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. 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.

About the speaker

Manu S Pillai

Manu S Pillai is a historian and the author of five books, most recently Gods, Guns & Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. A winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for his first book, The Ivory Throne, he is also a columnist at Mint Lounge. Manu holds a PhD in history from King's College London.

Discussant

Jon Wilson

Jon Wilson is Head of the History Department. He is a historian of South Asia and the world more broadly, with a focus on the history of practical politics. At King’s he’s spent eight years in faculty and other leadership roles. He’s particularly been interested to globalize the curriculum, to developing interdisciplinary forms of teaching, and to creating a research culture based on conversation and the exchange of ideas.

Prof Wilson’s work focuses on the everyday life of the state in South Asia, Britain and beyond. His first book, The Domination of Strangers was a study of the emergence of a modern regime in Bengal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His second major project was on the British conquest of India and its implications for imperial and Indian politics. India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, published by Simon and Schuster (or Public Affairs in the USA/Canada) was published in September 2016, and was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today prize.

Moderator

Vijayta Lalwani

Vijayta Lalwani is an journalist and a researcher reporting on the state of democracy through politics, violence and polarisation in India. She has extensively reported on mass demonstrations, gender inequality, labour rights and the weaponisation of laws to crackdown on dissent. Between 2018 and 2021, she reported for Scroll.in, India’s leading independent digital news organisation. In 2024, she was awarded the Human Rights & Religious Freedom Award for her reporting on the Indian government's crackdown on the diaspora and the Laadli Media & Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity for a longform report on the lack of support structures for queer people in India.

Currently, she is a research associate running the Chevening South Asia Journalism Programme funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, that brings together journalists from across South Asia to London.