Part 1: PVK’s review of Manu Pillai’s ‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries’
(Carried by Frontline, 17/Nov/2024 online edtions)
A limited but brilliant chronicle of Hindu identity formation
Manu Pillai maps religious evolution through colonial encounters, but leaves modern complexities untouched
The triple boom of Manu Pillai’s title reminds one of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the work of a polymath that sought to explain the uneven spread of wealth across the world. Diamond focused on material changes in the Holocene and found in the geographical distribution of people and resources a probable answer to the question of why late in the 20th century people in the West led affluent lives while others still lived as hunter-gatherers and a good number of nations were in between.
The contrast with the work under review is stark. Pillai’s focus is India and he deals with soft facts, beliefs and opinions both of which are very difficult to document with clarity because they morph and shift shape with maddening frequency. But Pillai is a patient scholar, methodical, sensitive to nuance and brilliant at understanding the nature of his raw material. He can locate and describe ideas and thoughts and feelings in India with the meticulousness and depth of a Roland Barthes analysing a Parisian scene. He is a master at the semiotics of Indian cultural expressions, particularly the religious idiom in which it is almost always expressed. He chronicles with care; the notes take up as much as space as his text.
Pillai’s book covers a swathe of Indian history: from Akbar’s encounter with Jesuits to the death of Savarkar. But he begins with the story of a Jaipur maharajah’s journey to England in 1902 complete with priests, holy cows, Ganga jal and all the other items orthodoxy demanded to maintain ritual purity.
In London he (Madho Singh) rode in a car but had two idols in different cars pilot him through the streets. When Edward VII fell ill, his prayers restored him. Or so Singh believed. The press and the public were deeply impressed by the king’s piety and showy religiosity. Pillai’s seven chapters take us from Akbar’s encounter with the Jesuits to the departure of the British. The story turns dark soon after it begins as Pillai describes the Portuguese and their temple smashing spree and assorted barbarity towards Hindus in Goa.
Power and a sense of cultural superiority are a deadly combination. When they are just traders, Europeans are nice and pleasant to deal with. The minute they become powerful, guns and missionary zeal dictate terms. Greed is the prime driver; everything else is a ploy to get past native defences. Catholic or Protestant and irrespective of nationality, the European missionary’s strategies are broadly the same: convince natives of their cultural and educational backwardness and offer them salvation in some form of Christianity. This is a crude way of describing Pillai’s nuanced writing on missionary activity. The same themes play out again and again. European deviousness and ruthlessness and arrogance versus Indian adaptability and accommodation.
Pillai attempts a chronological narrative but in India the linear curves in all directions. Thoughts, ideas and opinions were spreading, mutating, fusing. Pillai uses a gossamer net and captures all of them. Everything, of course, is footnoted, authenticated.
One must remember that missionaries made up only a small portion of the westerners who came to India. The rest were people in every imaginable sphere. Few of them were focused on religion. Some were administrators whose curiosity and interest in the land they found themselves in resulted in seminal discoveries. William Jones and James Prinsep are just two in a long list of those whose work threw light on India and its past.
Amartya Sen’s schema of three foreign attitudes to India—the magisterial, the exoticist and the curatorial—helped clear the fog Edward Said’s concept of orientalism had spread. A.K. Ramanujan’s brilliant insight into Indian ways of thinking as being nuanced and context sensitive is a very helpful tool to clear a lot of clutter.
On the topic of nationalism important thinkers are not part of Pillai’s project: not even Perry Anderson’s analysis of “the Indian ideology”. This shows great intellectual self-confidence. One can only speculate how the book would have turned out if he had looked over his shoulders at the work of the more empirically oriented scholars who have worked in this area.
The book speaks from the heart of mainstream India. Authorial intent notwithstanding, the fingerprint of contemporary identity politics can be discerned often. The omissions are more significant than the inclusions. The Constitution of India, the document on which modern India rests, is never mentioned. Modern knowledge in the form of post Enlightenment schools of thought is also absent.
Pillai’s use of the term philosophy, most often preceded by the words Hindu or Brahmin, is not to philosophy as understood by contemporary academic philosophers outside India. They are to ideology and metaphysics, the sense in which 19th century Indians used it. In Indian terms they deal with darshana, not anvikshiki. From Ajitha Kesakambala in pre-Buddhist times to the robust but neglected schools of Charvakas and Buddhist logicians, India made enormous contributions to epistemology and knowledge. Brahminical Hinduism was hostile to all of them. Pillai’s writing, perfectly aligned with mainstream Hinduism today, ignores them.
So we are left with the aggressive neo-Hinduism of Tilak and Savarkar, shaped as much by its classical Brahminical and Vedic core as by influences from early 20th century Italy and Germany.
How this ideology prospered after Independence, how it bulldozed its way via the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, Babri Masjid, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the near normalisation of majoritarian violence since then is left untouched. Pillai’s survey ends with the departure of the British, so he has a good reason not to enter that fraught territory.
I admit that it is unfair to blame a book for what it does not include but the absences merit mention. The importance of this book will grow. Indians outnumber all other peoples and they form the largest migrant community in the world. As they move into other nations their hosts would do well to understand the attitudes they come with. Pillai’s ‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries’ would make a good beginning.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
17/Nov/2024
Note: This review was carried in Frontline, the magazine run by the Hindu Group.
The review was extremely generous to a truly horrendous work. At that point, the man in question had been a personal friend for some nine years or so. He was an unknown internee working for Dr Shashi Tharoor when my wife and I took him under our wing. He stayed at our flat near Kamalalayam for over a month, alone. He is meticulously clean and, when he department, the apartment looked as clean as when it was handed over to him.
He would drop in occasionally, eat the delicious food cooked by my beautiful wife, Khyrunnisa and take some delicious chicken cutlets back to the apartment.
There was an early warning sign I was too obtuse to notice. His obsession with photographs and, particularly, how he looked in the photos. He would actually go through our cameras and delete any photo he did not like. He was so narcissistic the original Narcissus of Greek mythology would have blushed on seeing him.
And the Pillai would pose. Wherever he went. At Anjengo Fort, at the nearby beach, at our home in Kamalalayam where most visitors posed in front of our wall to wall book shelves. The irony was that next to his book there were the very works that would have annihilated his arguments about Hinduism.
But he was too self-absorbed to notice anything other than himself.
I repeatedly told him about Agehananda Bharati. I don’t think he even made an effort to get the books I mentioned.
He could speak Malayalam but could not read or write his first language. He was, he told us, fluent in Marati, Hindi and English. His English was top-class. Great accent, good diction, correct grammar and usage. The privileges of a wealthy upper middle class Indian. He was as voluble and could be, never at a loss for words. A sort of verbal diarrhoea appeared a permanent ailment. I suppose he, in that sense, even shat in his sleep.
I helped him in many, many ways. Ferried him around though it has to be said, he had the grace to refuse any such help unless he was forced to accept.
I had translated Asan’s ‘The Alchemy of Religious Conversion’ (1923) translated by a friend S Vinaya Kumar and mailed it to him. He knew little or nothing about Ayyankali, the ur-revolutionary from 19th century Kerala who not just preached but practised revolutionary action well before the Russian Revolution came up with similar and later, much bloodier actions.
I mailed him a copy of Meena Kandasmay’s ‘Ayyankali: A Dalit Leader of Organic Protest’ (2007) so he could have some idea about Travancore history and its revolutionary roots.
I ensured that he got all the publicity I thought he deserved. My wife and I would invite all our friends to his meetings. One or two of them, at the Alliance Francais, were not too well attended.
I put him on a reading list at IISER, Trivandrum, where I was doing two courses in the humanities. One was in a module titled ‘Pen Protraits’ where I squeezed in his long-winded but historically not inaccurate ‘The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore’ (2015). One of my dear professors at University College, Trivandrum, Prof Moothathu was one of the recipients of ‘The Ivory Throne’ that I gifted to several people. After reading it, some six months after he had accepted the book from me he told me, in his hesitant, soft, cultured voice. “But your Manu Pillai’s book is only tales I picked up as a child while growing up in my ‘illam’ at Arammula. I heard them in the kitchen or the ‘oottupura’ or dining ares”. Prof Moothathu’s subtle comment had a sting hidden it. He meant that it was not even gossip you picked up from the men in the house, who discussed all sorts of things, from Vedic verses to contemporary politics. The conversations would have been replete with “Namboodirii jokes / Namboodiri falithamgal”, subtle barbs at everything under the sun, from jokes about food to gentle ones about women and their many charms.
The rest of his books followed. Long, anecdote filled tomes on, mostly, Maratha history and culture, where he was at home. He came from Poona, the second home of the RSS, complimenting it by supplying its hate-filled ideology and huge recruits for its bloody deeds.
I recall laboring through them, only because he was a friend.
And then came ‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries’ (2024). After the review, when he was too obtuse to read what I had said between the lines or, more likely, too self-absorbed to notice how critical I had been, he still insisted that I should be in conversation with him at the Mathrubhumi Literary Festival in Trivandrum during the second week of February.
I had wasted three weeks of my time reading, making notes, rereading and preparing for the session with the big heartthrob of the festival Manu S Pillai. I had made over 20 pages of notes. From these I culled and sieved and came up with two sets of 10 questions each. One set dealt with the details of the book and another with general questions on Hinduism, religion and so on. Those three weeks were among the most miserable and painful in my life. Reading his execrable prose, making notes, re-reading the book to ensure I had not misquoted him and so on.
The session was in a large hall in the evening. Manu and I spoke before the session at the Speakers’ Lounge. I asked him if he wanted me to show him the questions. No, he smiled, I can handle anything, I am so familiar with the book.
The session, for me, was painful. There were large fans at the back trying to blow some air into the hot stuffy people filled temporary structure. I had to practically shout, which made my voice, never a great asset, sound nasal and querulous. His deep baritone was impressive and delighted the audience.
At the end, Manu the Pillai emerged bathed in sweat, saying with his slick smile “You made me swept”.
I stood beside him and directed traffic, so to speak, as men, women, kids and others queued to get his signature on his book and then be photographed with him. He took great care with the photographs, getting the angles and lighting right. People were charmed at this boyish celebrity who was obviously at ease with them.
The last I saw him was when he hugged me just before he was driven to the Trivandrum airport departing probably for another session at some other event.
Khyru, who had travelled to be at some literary event, returned and asked me if there was anything “wrong” between Manu and I. I said no, everything had been fine. And then I realized that he had “cancelled” me, obviously hurt I had not joined his bandwagon of admirers. No more emails, no more phone calls, no smses. Nothing.
The idiot had ignored all the signs I gave him about my reactions to the book. They were, of course, much more refined than what I had noted in my notebook in which I have been jotting down details of all the books I read from cover to cover. I have been doing this since 1996 and have, at present, about 600 card indexes or notes in diaries I maintain for this. They are meant to aid my memory.
Here are excerpts from what I jotted down in November 2024 after I had completed his shitty piece work.
“Tedious, repetitive chronicle of opinions and behavior of Hindus, Muslims and Christians from colonial times to today.”
“Locked into today’s identity politics. A study of how we reached 21st century Hindutva, one that stops with independence. Nothing about Babri Masjid and the period after 1992.”
“It is clear that the vision of Tilak is what now drives Hindutva – filled with hatred for all non-Hindus and condescension for all non-brahmins.”
“Hindu exceptionalism is accepted, as is the Hindu “genius” for adapting and growing.”
“Untouched by modern knowledge from any field, particularly analytical philosophy, cognitive science and evolutionary biology.”
“For Pillai the Enlightenment has not happened, except in its initial phase when Europeans moved from Deism and theism; nothing since.”
“Describes contemporary India, a theocratic, electoral system. Sad.”
After 45 years of nearly idyllic married life, made possible largely by my modern, liberal and caring parents, who looked after Khyrunnisa as if she were their own daughter, a bugger had made a rent in the lovely fabric of my married life.
Khyru was angry and still carries a grudge against me.
The interesting part, for me, is that if anyone criticizes her, I jump to defend her. She, on the other hand, is eager to join anyone who criticizes me. I am too intolerant, too illiberal, too self-absorbed etc. etc. goes her litany.
But I will have my revenge. My book, tentatively titled ‘A Willing Suspension of Belief: Kumaran Asan, Kerala and Modernity’ presents an entirely different picture of Kerala and how modernity transformed this wonderful land. It has detailed chapters of Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who visited Kerala on at least seven occasions in the early 15th century, sailing past with a fleet of dozens of ships, some holding two to five hundred men.
It ends with chapters of some of the people who are exemplars of modernity in today’s Kerala, including E P Unny, the famed writer and political cartoonist from Palakkad, Liza Chandran, a world class architect, winner of the Updike Award for architecture in 2004, P K Uthaman, one of Kerala’s best naturalist after K K Neelaknatan or Induchoodan and others. My ingrate mentee is also there, as a ‘sign of hope’. I did not change it while going through the last edits of my book because I do not think anyone should take away from the values of her early work. I was hurt, but I do not bear a grudge.
My book has also been endorsed by some luminaries as Meera Nanda, cultural critic, historian and author of books that sell only in the hundreds but which are worth their weight in gold. She is a one-woman army that has taken on the intellectually incoherent, pretentious, bullshitting brigade of cow worshipping sycophants of Bada Bhai and his Bigger Bhai. Both from Gujarat, where they came of age, massacring poor, hard-working Muslims before floating to the top on a lake of blood. First in Gujrat and later in Delhi.
Robin Jeffrey, anthropologist, political scientist and at one time Dean of La Throbe University and the Australian National University is one. Assa Doron, professor of anthropology at Jerusalem University is another.
Dr. Parakala Prabhakaran, economist and political commentator and wit, of JNU and LSE is a third.
Namit Arora, techie turned writer, author of ‘The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequlities’ (2017) is the fourth.
I hope readers of my book will realize that there is much more to Kerala than coconut trees, the politics of the “left”, cartoons, beautiful beaches, corrupt politicians, greenery and the usual tropes the tourism industry relies on.
I hope that intelligent and receptive readers will comprehend the nuances I have included and are charmed by its humour and wit and style, which I think is graceful, and its range, which I believe is very broad and fascinating.
I hope to show the “thankless Nair” his place. It is more resonant in its native Malayalam: “nandiketta Nair”. Manu the Pillai is the perfect example of the cheating, conniving, cruel Nair of myth. And, in this case, reality.
When me first met, the Pillai claimed that he was led to the social sciences by Meera Nanda, India’s contribution to the world. Her books, few and far in between, are like precise arrows hurled by some champion Arjuna at nonsense, bull shit, fake news and all other forms of nonsense, including fashionable nonsense. The Pillai never lingers at the Mathrubhumi Lit Fest in Trivandrum. He does not want to listen to others, only to his own throaty voice. He is clever, making sure no fresh breeze blows in to his brains even by accident. Or maybe he hurries off to another literary meet, for he is the darling of festival organizers and festival goers.
There is one thing I deeply regret. Right from the first appearance of Manu the Pillai here in Trivandrum, by former student and close friend Dr Jayathilak had warned me that the Pilla is was a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He is out and out an RSS man, he told me. Don’t encourage him. I was too stupid and naïve to trust his judgement. I regret it.
I feel humbled by Jayathilak’s wisdom and charm and his incredible character. Born to an Ezhava father from Attingal and a Nair lady from Mavelikkara, Jayathilak is at heart an Ezhava. A proud Ezhava and one who, I think, Ezhavas should be proud of. Not for being an Ezhava but as one representing the best Kerala has to offer, which is the best one can get anywhere in the world. Reader, traveler, raconteur and wit, the extremely intelligent and knowledgeable and personable and eternally genial Jayathilak reminds me of the old ICS officers one read about. Knowledgeable, sensitive, compassionate, fair and meticulous in everything he does. He is, like me, married to a Muslim, Souda from Calicut, a perfect home maker and a superb cook. They make a perfect couple. His boyish good looks and natty dresses add to the charm. I watched him during the swearing in of the new ministry. Great bonding with the CM, V D Satheesan. Everyone knows he was close to Pinarayi, the rouge CM. Now the CM and the CS will form a great partnership and Kerala will gain.
I don’t think there will be another Chief Secretary like Jayathilak. Not in Kerala or perhaps, any other part of India.
The polar opposite is the Pillai. Petty, narcissistic, hatred filled, envious – this Nair from Chengannur is a blot on the earth. The “literature” he has produced should be, I think called ‘Kannadi Sahityam’ or ‘The Literature of the Self-absorbed’.
May be I should just say: “Bugger off, you a-hole.” That is the hole he is searching for all the time, anyway.
Watch this space, please. I will soon write about another Nair who cancelled me. This time it is an ugly woman whom I mentored for some 15 years before she broke off. From calling me ‘ad-da’, short for adopted father, to calling me a blot on her life was the work of just three messages in the course of one day. She was only ugly in appearance. She had a beautiful mind, subtle, capable of great compassion and sympathy and of incredible hard work, often putting in, I was made to understand, up to 18 hours of work in a day.
I hope she gets buggered by the Pillai one day. It should make both very happy. She is a serial substance abuser and a sexual adventurer. Not that mattered to me. What I found endearing in her was her mind, sophisticated, subtle and deep, and passionate about the causes she believed in. Helping the poor, especially women. Representing a Netherlands based funding agency as their Asia – Pacific coordinator while based in Trivandrum to which she really had no deep connection.
She is now in a limbo. Her lady psychiatrist, in whom she had great confidence, had offered a glimpse of hope that she would return to normal. Her live-in partner, probably equally sozzled, does not appear to care. Or perhaps he has not noticed anything amiss. Great are the uses of alcohol and the stronger substances these children of our brave new world imbibe.
Ms Sreejaya, the name she shares with her mother, is better than the Pillai in many ways. She accepted a book from me which I left for her at Modern Books, where we used to meet often. Gratitude in her is a sign of hope. Not that I want a reconciliation with that churlish, ingrate Nair.
That is one thing the two avarnas have, I think, in common. A deep seated, hidden, perhaps unconscious, hatred of the “low caste”, the “Kotti Vijayan”. Not just hatred, but contempt too at these parochial patriarchs think are upstarts who have risen above the levels medieval Kerala had prescribed for such folk.
Should I ever run into this Pilla or appi, as we say in Trivandrum Malayalam and he tries to greet me, I suspect I know what he will do. He might dodge me and seek a quick getaway. If, on the other hand, he tries to make up and smiles and tries to hug me – he is a great hugger – I know what I will do. I will shout at the top of my voice: “Away, you thankless Nair or Nandiketta Nayare”, a proverbial saying in Malayalam. “Don’t touch me. Not from front, certainly not from behind. Look for your catamite or “kundan” elsewhere”.
What do you do when you see some “appi”? In Trivandrum lingo “appi” has two meanings. One an endearment suggesting tenderness and love. The second meaning is a piece of ordure, left uncovered after someone has been caught short in the open. What do you do when you find some “appi” on the road? You close your nose and step over it or sidestep it. And hope you will not find another such blot on the road.
A middle finger to both of them, the Pilla and the detestable ex-mentee. I can get along just fine without such skunks in my life. Let them stay in the Middle Ages. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.
A final word. My very dear student and friend, Sridhar Radhakrishnan, who I think is a national treasure, told me that the Pilla will never forgive me. The reason he said was simple. I showed him up, exposed him. It was as if, I inferred from Sridhar’s words, I had shown him up for what he really was, a shallow, narcissistic, thumb-sucking, callow chaser after poor catamites, here in India and, I am sure, in places like Europe and the USA, where gay bars and the gay club scene is very lively.
Here buggers of the world unite, to have multiple partners multiple times every day. Good for them, I think. I have nothing against buggers of buggery.
The “appi’ / Pilla reminds me of Foucault, the famed postmodernist French “thinker” and “philosopher” who, when warmed about a new disease, then called ‘GRID’ or ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’ sweeping through those who frequented bars and bath-houses for gays, gave a carefree and self-indulgent answer — “It is a beautiful thing to die for the beauty of a child”, or something similar.
How callous of the “philosopher” purveyor of impenetrable prose and a lousy form of libertarianism. What about the catamites, probably buggered into AIDS and an early and extremely miserable death.
It was as if I had told the world that Manu the Prince was naked and all the ornate clothes he wore was just like cellophane.
Thank you.
PVK on 25/May/2026
PVK's Book mark 