PANAJI
Historian Manu Pillai identified the first community census initiated by the British government in the early 19th century as the trigger for communal tensions in our country.
Pillai was discussing his latest book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of a Modern Hindu Identity, with Goan scholar Kaustubh Naik at the 13th Goa Arts and Literature Festival at the International Centre, Dona Paula, on Friday.
“It was the first time that a census divided the population along community lines, and we suddenly had ‘Muslims’ and ‘Hindus’ being identified this way,” he said.
Explaining how India had emerged from a mere shared geographical space with people speaking different languages to military invasions and eventually religious conversions carried out by missionaries, Pillai said, “When the first European missionaries came to India, they likened the Hindu community’s worship of deities to ‘devil worship’ as they could not understand symbols like an angry goddess Kali or an aggressive Narasimha inside our temples.”
Pillai referred to the Portuguese invasion of Goa and said that the Portuguese first collaborated with the Hindu Brahmins but soon brought in Catholic priests to carry out religious conversions supported by their military.
Pillai also explained how the British adopted a different approach by first supporting temples and Hinduism and only much later allowing their Protestant missionaries to carry out conversions. Referring to both Lokmanya Tilak and Veer Savarkar, Pillai explained how Tilak advocated cow worship and the study of the Vedas to promote Hinduism, while Savarkar advocated a more political form of Hinduism.
