The Hindu Lit for Life | Manu Pillai on religion, Hindu nationalism and taking a break

Historian and author Manu Pillai is clear. He has chosen a path towards interpreting Hindu nationalism but has done so with 230 pages of notes and research backing his latest book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries

I have been thinking about this book [Gods, Guns and Missionaries] since 2011 when I did my masters dissertation on Hindu nationalism. It was in 2019 that I finally had my own views on the subject. When you are young, you are often led by what you are reading. Once you get older, you want to nuance these conclusions in a different way.

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I wrote four chapters but I realised it required more work. The project was briefly suspended. It took me another three-and-a-half years to finish the book and it finally came out now. In a sense, this is a 13-year project. The (good and healthy) challenge was to condense the research in the form of a 350-page book that would keep the reader turning the pages. The idea was to not lose nuance and communicate complicated ideas without losing the essence.

My session [at The Hindu Lit for Life] is in the usual area of history and writing. I am bored of the usual [Travancore books]. This is my fifth book and it is, in some ways, the most ambitious. It talks about religion, identity and the impact of one religion on another. It is both ways. Not just one over the other, making it a simultaneous, equal process. It also talks about how political identities take form.  

It is about the Hindu identity but not through the usual prism of the Hindu-Muslim relations but through the Hindu interactions with the Colonial state. I think it is relatively understudied and underrated. It was not that missionaries were visible in a dramatic way. Their disproportionate intellectual impact on Hindu society because the British were in power has not been written about as much. There are different ways to look at the emergence of Hindu nationalism. This is the path I have pursued because it explains in many ways, how nationalism was generated. 

Today, if you breathe in the wrong direction, someone gets offended. That is the world we live in. When you are making a statement, it is important to make your sources visible so that nobody can come after you saying you have an ‘agenda’. Everybody has their areas of sensitivity. Sometimes, stupid and without any logic. Because they are ideologically so committed, they cannot stand any reading that is different. This is between a rock and a hard place.

I am quite happy with my state of being. I am a boring person with no grand plans. I do not intend to start a new book this year. This one almost squeezed the life out of me. I do not want any book-length writing this year. I might do some other interesting stuff but this book’s promotions will keep me busy until April.

I used to be able to understand music at some point but now I cannot hum a tune. Nor can I read sheet music even though I once played the piano. The idea is to revive that at some point. Whether it is this year or not, remains to be seen.