Gods Guns and Missionaries
The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
0.0
( 2640 )
Engelsk
**A Financial Times What to Read in 2025 pick**'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 Pil...
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Forlagsbeskrivelse af Gods, Guns And Missionaries The Making Of The Modern Hindu I af Manu S Pillai
**A Financial Times What to Read in 2025 pick**'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 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, 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.
Detaljer
Forlag
Allen Lane
ISBN
9780241456941
Sprog
Engelsk
Sider
624
Udgivelsesdato
23-01-2025
Format
Hardback
Varenr.
3284917
EAN nr.
9780241456941
Varegruppe
Engelsk non fiction div.
Højde/Dybde (mm)
165
Bredde (mm)
242
Længde (mm)
37
Vægt (g)
1044