Gods, Guns and Missionaries The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
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- Hardcover
- Taschenbuch
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Form:Einzelkauf Download
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Sprache:Englisch
12,99 €
inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Format
ePUB
Kopierschutz
Ja
Family Sharing
Nein
Text-to-Speech
Ja
Erscheinungsdatum
23.01.2025
Verlag
Penguin Books LtdSeitenzahl
624 (Printausgabe)
Dateigröße
146520 KB
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9780141993508
**A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 **
'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
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.
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