Ep 405: The Forces That Shaped Hinduism

What is Hinduism? You can describe it as a religion, way of life, civilisation, cultural package, all of these are right. It can get a bit fuzzy and that's a good thing. Hinduism contains multitudes. The moment you spin one narrative around it, it rings false. Now there are simple narratives floating around which I don't entirely wipe with. One tells the story of a glorious Hindu past interrupted by invaders and are needing to reclaim that past and build a Hindu rastra. This kind of narrative is muscular, political and reductive. Another narrative coming out of academia is that Hinduism is a recent construct. It didn't exist till a while ago. The word Hinduism was first coined in the late 18th century and was an umbrella term for most beliefs in the geographic region which contained many different localised belief systems. The British tried to make sense of it through their Brahman interlocutors who sold them one particular story of what Hinduism was putting themselves at the centre of it. Then we ended up believing the story the British told us about ourselves. But this is also not all true. It's a convincing narrative. It made sense to me once but it doesn't explain the full story. Hinduism is too complex to pin down to one narrative, especially if it is a top down narrative. What we think of as Hinduism evolved across centuries from the bottom up constantly changing and shifting. I call Hinduism an open source religion. For the longest time it was a loose tapestry of undefined beliefs but then a series of events took it into certain specific directions over the last 400 years. If we look closely at what happened we can better understand these present times and the society we live in and what we call Hinduism. Welcome to the scene and the unseen. Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host Amit Varma. My guest today is Manu Pillai who has just released a new book. God's guns and missionaries making of the modern Hindu identity. Manu's written other excellent books he's been on the show four times before but I feel this book is special. It's introductory chapter a brief history of Hinduism is a masterpiece. It's a brilliant ported history that covers centuries and has much insight on how Hinduism evolved and adapted to the times. I haven't seen this combination of consistent clarity in other writings on the subject. Manu packs in a lot. The bulk of the book after this examines at different directions Hinduism took in response to colonialism and missionary activity. The fundamental truth about humanity comes from economics. People respond to incentives Hinduism and Indian society responded to the changing times and the way they viewed themselves and shaped themselves has a lot to do with the colonial experience. Different strands of Hinduism came about because of the times leaders like Ramohan Raya and the Anand Saraswati and Jyothira Fule and Bal Gangadhar Thilurkin Vinayak Savalkar had different responses for a set of different reasons. In my reading on Manu's book we had to invent a nationalism to combat colonial oppression and one way of doing that was to use religion and to construct a narrative that would resonate with everyone. It's a fascinating story and while I knew many of the separate pieces of this story, Manu's synthesis of it and his interpretation is both original and comprehensive and convincing. God's guns and monsters is a great book full of nuance and insight. It's ironic that when Manu wrote to me a few weeks back and offered to come on the show, he said he was worried this book would get in cancelled and he wanted a chance to have a deep discussion on it first on this show and the very fact that it's nuanced means that it can piss off people on both the left and the right. Though I think that anyone on any side who reads a book carefully will feel enlightened by it and grateful that Manu wrote it. Wonderful, wonderful book, do pick it up and do listen to this conversation. But first let's take a quick commercial break. Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit. This means that I read more books but I also read more long form articles and I say there's a world of knowledge available through the internet but the problem be all faces how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put the right incentives in place? Well I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQ Compounds.com which aims to help people uplevel themselves by reading more. A few months ago I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader. Every day for six months they sent me a long form article to read. The subjects covered when from machine learning to mythology to mental models and momma lat. This helped me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day I understood the world a little better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit head on over to CTQ Compounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called Future Stack which helps you stay up to date with ideas, skills and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches start every Saturday. What's more you get at the scoundrel for whopping 2500 rupees, 2500 if you use the discount code Unseen. So head on over to CTQ Compounds at CTQ Compounds.com and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself. On the way to Stores. Otherwise life in general going on, plotting through, nothing fresh to report outside of work and a PhD I suppose. You know the last time we spoke or it might have been the time before that actually you said that you had this target to I think write three books before you're 30 and good Lord. No, that was my publisher's marketing thing. I never said it. They said it that three books before 30 because my third book came out in 2019 when I was 29. So they said that they were going to use this line three books before 30. I don't think I came up with the idea. I vaguely remember it. I mean I'm sure it's a record. If it's not on record I'm imagining it. But yeah, the way it was a thing. It was a thing. But I think I sort of sort of talked too much about that. Yeah. But you know there's a thing that I think when you and we've of course spoken about your journey in terms of becoming a historian before. So I won't you know, be labored at. But I wondered that you know when you first got into writing history as a much younger person. It was a two way door. Have you heard of Jeff B sources concepts of two way door and one way door. So he came up with this interesting frame in an episode with Lex Friedman and his funder was that look every decision is either a two way door or a one way door and a two way door is you go through the door and then you can come back. It's not a big deal. It's reversible in some way or the other. A one way door is basically it you have gone all in that is what it is. And I am guessing that when you decided to do this in your early 20s or even your late teens I forget or even when you were approaching puberty. It would have been a two way door like it would have been like this is really interesting let me do this and who knows I might be good at it and let's just go for it. There's nothing to lose. I'm young at this stage while you in your 30s I'm guessing that in a sense you've gone all in and your sense of yourself is much more fixed as it were. So can you tell me a little bit about that process of how you think about yourself and so on. I think it was a two way door until about 2017 in that I was still before that I used to work with Chashitaroore. So I had that business going on as well. I had this whole interest in foreign policy international relations even now I go for some of those seminars and annual reunions for these fellowships I've done. So I have like I suppose I still have a little toe in that business but the you know the rest of it is all history now. 2017 is when I started my PhD and I think that PhD phase was a nice sort of cushy period where I was able to transition from a full-time job to becoming a full-time writer and historian including getting the degree that everybody put so much like importance on. But yeah I think since then it's become clearer that this is what I want to do. I've made it work so far with this book I don't know if I'll get cancelled if I do then my backup plan is to go back to my village in Kerala and become a farmer. My grandfather is a farmer so I suppose somewhere I'll have the genetic gift to maybe pick it up again so that's the backup plan but yeah otherwise the self-image now is very much history person slash writer. These are the two things I wear as my hats. Can you get cancelled? Yeah I mean these days it doesn't take much to get no no no I mean they'll try to cancel you but like I am uncancelable because who do I work for right so but can you get cancelled because if you were a traditional PhD and an academic historian you're on the ten-year track at a university etc etc maybe there's a reason to worry but the way I see it you're kind of a popular historian to begin with in a good way and then you chose to do a PhD also and you don't really need this you don't at one level I understand why you got it but you know so how do you think about that like you're not an academic historian in the sense that you can be cancelled and most of your readers will ignore the rubbish. I don't know because social media you know on the one hand it gives you a sense of what people are saying but it can also give you a warped sense of what people are saying so sometimes you I've seen I've been cancelled over Reels where I seem to be saying the wrong thing it's because a Reel is taken out of a much longer conversation and you don't have the rest of the context it seems like you're saying something that's very dramatic or very very unusual and then people have made like stories about it and you know there's this whole like fuss that happens and then people send me my friends send me messages saying I hope you're okay and I didn't even know that I was being cancelled but then this sort of thing happens. So that sometimes gives you a sense of panic saying, oh my God, you know, what if like people are hating you, even though you're just trying to put a point across sometimes maybe when you're communicating it ultimately in a book you have all the space to put your words very carefully onto the page. But when you're speaking sometimes and you're mashing all this thought from your mind, you know, it's a very different process, right? And you may not necessarily always use the right words. And that some people sort of latch on to and think that that is the sum totality of who you are and how you think. And that sometimes gives me a bit of stress saying, you know, how do people think about this? So how will what do people think I am all about that? That sort of comes up every now and then. But yeah, I suppose rationally speaking, you're right, I don't depend on anybody else as such. I don't depend on an institution for my work. I suppose publishers, if there's a huge orchestrated social media campaign, your publishers could drop you. But I don't think in today's world that's too much of a hassle either because there are people who self-ablished their way to glory. So that's that. And there's also other media now, right? Like I've been thinking about this about how ultimately books in many ways, even if you are a popular historian and your books are best sellers officially speaking and thousands of people are reading them. It's still a relatively small market. Like your podcast reaches more people and my discussion about the book on your podcast would reach more people than the actual people who end up buying the book because you've got some 200,000 people or whatever and books don't sell in those quantities. So I've been thinking a lot also about other formats, other media using technology in order to communicate interesting well-researched history and not just books. Books are always important because I enjoy writing. So in that sense, even if you do get cancelled as a writer, I suppose there are other ways one can use one's voice quite literally to get on with it and see what can be done. Yeah, I mean, it's a point I've been making for a really long time that my generation grew up really thinking about books as a top of the hierarchy of intellectual production that you've really arrived as a creator or a writer when you have a book out. And I think that doesn't make sense anymore because the books with the floor and the ceiling that they have are, is almost an artifact as a form. It emerged because of constraints that no longer matter. So I wouldn't really think of it like that. I think Reels are great. I think YouTube is great. Whatever way you get. I'm sensing something in the way books sell. So one thing I've noticed is we've got digital media. You've got online websites. You've got social media. And then you've got traditional print media. And often what I've noticed is if you have an interview or a feature in print media, your book sales immediately spike up. And social media, of course, there is an impact but it isn't such a big deal. And that makes me wonder because clearly I think print media is to consume by a certain generation. And that's also money generation. I think they're established in life. They have the pockets to afford books. Books have become more expensive. This one is 999. And I fought with my publishers trying to reduce it offered them back the final tranche of my advance saying, can you please like lower the price somehow? Just take my advance back, but lower the price because I want younger people to read to be able to afford these books. But I don't think that works that way. But the point is making about newspapers and digital is because I think newspapers tend to somehow reflect immediate advance sales that clearly means that there's a generational difference as to who's consuming information way. But that doesn't mean that social media doesn't matter. It's just that kids are now consuming information outside of books. I remember meeting someone I know I met their son who's about 20 very bright kid now at university in America. And he said that look, I consume most of my information on YouTube. And he doesn't mean these like WhatsApp history type people on YouTube. He actually looks out for interesting people, longer shows, longer form content on digital media and consumes that because that's just how that their generation is being shaped up. And I understand that I don't think you can romanticize books beyond the point. I think books will always have value and I will continue writing them. But I think we also need to be creative in the ways in which we communicate, you know, our knowledge as it were to large audiences and different generations. If there is clearly a generational gap, it makes sense to try and target or reach out to both generations, all the generations that are available in different ways. I think we need to have that sort of dexterity. No, I can agree with that more. And you know, like I got turned on to podcasts because of Dan Collins hardcore history, but I can imagine people getting turned on to history by something like that. And also these media are all different. They're not replacements for each other. Like people will often say that, you know, printed book versus audio book, what do you think? And I'm like, they are so different because of use cases are different. You may not have time in your busy life to take a to read for an hour every day, but you are commuting and you can listen. You are working out, hopefully you certainly are and can listen. I'll come back to you working out. But here's a question following on from what you were saying. One, you know, when you spoke about the occasional outrage that happens, I think it's outraged by it's outraged by a vocal minority. Most the salient majority out there doesn't care. I'm sure they love your books. I'm sure you meet them quite often. And you know that, but a thought struck me while you were speaking is that I would imagine that your books have more readers and other books in the sense that many books are bought just for the heck of it. You feel like buying it. You like the cover. It's one of prize. You buy it and you put it there. I would imagine that your books actually have more actual readers, partly of course, because of your very entertaining game of thrones style, which is entirely true to the history you're always writing about. But so you start a sense that you get also and that by the way, makes me mad that it's going to cost $1.99. You of course sent me your free copy. But I mean, I would buy it anyway, but I was looking at Amazon today and it's not on Kindle either. And to me like, what the fuck, what are you doing? It'll come on Kindle after the official release, which is the 21st of November, we're recording 10 days in advance. So once that date is crossed, the Kindle version will come. But yes, what you're saying, I've noticed as well in that kids do read my books. I know this because in Kerala, I know that a lot of kids send me messages on social media and they say, we borrowed the book from my cousin or I took it from this library, which means that they're actually going out and seeking the book. These are kids who can't necessarily afford it because again, even my first book now is priced at some 899 or 799. Now, urban kids in Bombay, Pune, Delhi, perhaps have the, wherewithal in the pocket money in order to be able to buy books that are worth this much, or have this kind of price. But in Kerala, these are small town kids. And I speak a lot in Malayalam on Kerala, like YouTube shows and stuff like that. They don't have, these are kids from smaller towns. They don't have the money and their families don't have the money to do it. But then they're still making the effort to read it by going out to libraries or by, you know, borrowing it from a cousin or an aunt or something. I keep hearing this at a literature festival that I got this from my cousin or I borrowed it from somebody else or a friend of mine. Sometimes I've made to sign copies to two, three people and I'm like, are you all like siblings? They say, no, we're friends. And then one of us, we sort of want to circulate the book, you know, once each of us is done finished, finished reading it. So I think, you know, that's interesting. I think clearly it shows people are reading the books. But yeah, I think I also need to make an effort to try and reach new people through new platforms because ultimately, I think I have an incentive and reaching as many people as possible and to build my audience. And that to me matters. It's not merely a case of putting information into a book and being self-satisfied about it. There are people who are satisfied with it and that's perfectly fine. It's just that I want an audience. I enjoy the storytelling side of it of being able to get other people to take an interest in it. And again, there, one of the things that causes me a lot of pride is I've got several dozen emails now over the years from kids saying that we've chosen to study history because we read your books. And that makes me happy. Even though it doesn't hundreds or thousands, even though several dozen, there's a certain satisfaction because even when I was growing up studying history wasn't that much of an option, unless you were perhaps at St. Stephen's or one of the best colleges in the country. Otherwise, most departments for history were considered mediocre in India at least. So I had to do economics and history as a minor and not as my major. And then of course later, abroad, PhD in history, whatever, whatever. But this kid's choosing now at an undergrad level to go and do history because they've been motivated by something I wrote that is weirdly satisfying, not weirdly. I think it is quite satisfying. No, it's a very big day. And I imagine if 10 people write to you, that means a thousand people felt that way. It's only the 10 who actually wrote to you and kind of hopefully told you and so on. I've probably said this to you before but I'd fully encourage you to do a YouTube channel or a podcast or a YouTube channel perhaps the best way and in Malayalam, why not? Is your Malayalam, your Malayalam is good? I'm, I have, so it's very interesting. My vocabulary isn't very sophisticated, but with the vocabulary I have, I'm quite effective. And I think people find that also quite interesting because I have essentially a functional home-based Malayalam, not literally Malayalam, but I'm somehow able to communicate using that very functional Malayalam. And I think people are partly entertained by it, but they also find it, you know, quite useful. So yeah, maybe let's see, I haven't quite fixed what and how I'm, I want to do this. Should it be an audio podcast like yours? In some ways, I think it's less stressful because nobody can cut out a snippet out of context and then make it viral on social media and then attack you for it. You have to listen to the whole thing and idiots don't necessarily come and listen to audio podcasts. It's generally a certain audience and I think that audience is the audience ultimately addressing. But all the same, YouTube seems to be where you can get more people to take an interest and therefore I'm not quite sure which of these two to do. YouTube also seems to be more effort, more production, like more time, cameras, more expensive, all of that. But yeah, it is a challenge I want to take up maybe next year, once promotions for this book are done. Yeah, I mean, I have three things to say to this and one of them is that please, please, please don't create from a defensive position where you're thinking of how people can attack you or take you out of context because I think that gets in the way of everything. I am, of course, lucky that the kind of people who are out right on Twitter and not the kind of people who will listen to something for eight hours. So my audience is literally the opposite of the Twitter vocal audience as it were, but even then I would, but even then I've kind of accepted that I don't care. I'm not going to, you know, do things from a position of defensiveness and I think neither should you and you don't need to. It's just a few people. We don't care about them. I think many more people love you than that. The other sort of point about like it's something that I think about a lot. So I'll just sink a loud and perhaps you've thought about it too. Is a distinction between deep and shallow engagement like at one point I used to say that okay, I'd rather have 100,000 people listen to an episode of mine than 10 million people watch a YouTube video of mine. And I used to say this before I got on YouTube with everything is everything because the YouTube engagement can be very shallow. It can be average 15 seconds or whatever. The podcast engagement is truly deep at one point I had average session time being 40 minutes average, which is mind blowing, but which is true of long form podcast. You get that kind of engagement. So at one level, there is a thing that if you want to want people to engage deeply in field at personal connection audio podcasts really serve that purpose. People are listening, you know, it's a one hour commute. They're listening on double speed. That's two hours of you in their head, but equally I think that, you know, like for our YouTube show, everything is everything which my friend Ajay Shah and I do the comments are incredible. I used to think YouTube comments are the drugs, you know, it's like read if comments used to be back in the day. But for us, or the comments are incredible. Those kind of readers are coming who want to have a good dialogue, you want to, you know, and it's growing over time. So I think there is something there and just the fact that it reaches more people is great and yeah, I'd encourage you to number one, have a bias for action. And number two, if you need help meeting people who can help you with the visual side of it, I can help there. Right. So before we actually, you know, get to the subject of the book, dear listeners, I was telling one of this amusing story about this person who shall go unnamed, who once complained to me that, you know, I saw, I saw that Manu, I saw him topless on Instagram. So I was like, okay, which Manu because Manu Joseph was also a friend of mine, you know, has a kind of body that he could go to a place. So I thought he must be meaning a Manu Joseph, he said, no, Manu Pillay. And then his thing was that Manu Pillay went topless on Instagram and he got so many views. And I post important things about, you know, square brackets, red acted subject, and no one gives a shit for me. So, but, you know, so then I went to Instagram to see your topless, and I have to say that I admire what I saw not in terms of your body itself. But the fact that you're disciplined about it, like it's, you know, you, it's one thing to be disciplined in one area, which is writing history, etc, etc, which obviously you are, you know, three books before 30, 50, books before 50, whatever it will be. But, you know, give me a sense of your sort of, your good of conduct for yourself and the ethic out of which all of this arises that I will look after myself, I will be disciplined, etc, etc. So one, and this is, it might be a strange explanation. I did make two attempts to go to the gym earlier when I was younger. One was when I was around 24 or 25, because I lost a lot of weight writing my first book, 12 kgs, I lost. Wow. Finishing the ivory throne. So I was 56 kilos by the end of that book. And to gain weight, I remember going to the gym in date 2015, early 2015, but I didn't have a trainer. I was just going there doing God knows what, and within two, three months, I got bored and that was the end of that. Then pre-COVID 2019, I went. That's when I got slightly more serious about it and strangely, the trigger was my father's death, because he died suddenly in a way that he would have been happy about. He always wanted to go suddenly, so he got what he wanted, but he was only 69 had no issues health wise. He used to exercise regularly, no BP, no sugar, none of those issues. But here in annualism, and he suddenly passed away in about, in a gap of 15 minutes, woke up with a backache and then collapsed and passed away in 15 minutes. And after that, I realized that with me, my mother, my sister, my grandmother, the family, and then you started realizing that you only have each other for yourself, as a unit. And although he had lots of students, my father, lots of people came and supported us. As a family, we somehow became closer and more aware of our own mortality in that moment. And that's when I was like, okay, I have to take care of myself, because through your 20s, you think you're in many ways invincible, right? You can eat whatever you want. You can drink whatever you want. You can burn the midnight oil and I've definitely screwed up my sleep writing my first book itself. And I started realizing that hold on, it's not worth it at that level, because it's not just for me. If I dropped it tomorrow, I wouldn't particularly mind because I've written five books now. So I know I've achieved something in life. I didn't just come here and leave a vacuum behind. But other people, they will feel grief and I don't think I, so you know, it creates a weird sense of responsibility that you need to be there for them as well. And you need to be strong enough to sort of live well and be there for them and they need your support and help and so on. That's when I started getting slightly more serious. Then of course, COVID happened and then I started working out at home. And then I got an online trainer and he was the best thing that happened to me in that time. Because firstly, none of these rubbish he diets. I've seen people on Instagram where like yesterday I saw one where someone had basically protein powder thrown into oats in this ugly dubba and some 10 egg whites next to it. And I was like, this is disgusting. Who wants to eat this for breakfast? That's the breakfast. Like I couldn't swallow the idea of that being breakfast. Luckily, I had a trainer who inculcated a very healthy relationship with food, which is that food should taste good. Just focus on portions, protein and your general sort of nutrient nutrition as part of the food. I thought that was perfectly fine because you're still eating home cooked food, chapatis, your dal, your subsie, a certain amount of oil is okay, cake. I'm a big consumer of cake even now. So I will never have the manu joes of kind of hard fit body because I still value my cake. So every three, four days I need a slice of cake, whatever happens. So that little bit of fatal always be on me no matter how how fit otherwise I am. And he was perfectly okay with it because he said the point is to have sustainable fitness. And that really helped. The other thing is I don't think discipline was ever much of a problem with me because again, in the process of writing my first book at a relatively young age, and I'm saying this in retrospect now almost like I'm looking at a different person from a different time, I think I learned a lot of discipline through that process because I had to first study and then go to my research. Then I was working and I had to manage my research alongside that. So even on during before weekends Friday night in London, for example, as a student or later, when I was working, we'd all go out maybe drinking or whatever. Others could have the luxury of staying in and staying in bed till 12th and next day, but I would wake up at 8 and then head off to the archives, the very next morning, even if I was hungover or whatever. So I think that compartmentalizing habits sort of developed quite early in my 20s. And since then I've been able to stick to that. So I'm very good with sticking to routines. I'm very good with to once I form a habit, it's very easy for me to then go along. Sometimes it's tough to push me into a new habit, but once I'm there, then I make it work. And that way this works out for me. The other thing is also that as a full-time writer now, I basically have my own office. I've created a separate apartment where I go so that there's a space I go to every day because if I sit at home, then there's too many distractions. There's, you know, things happening all over noise, this, that. So I have a separate place I go to, I go there at 8.30 in the morning, I have breakfast, worked about 12.30. That's when I take a break and go to the gym. So I don't go in the morning, I don't go in the evening, I go in the middle of the day. Because otherwise I'm sitting at a desk for 10, 12 hours, that doesn't make sense. So I've done three hours of work or three or four hours of work. Then I go to the gym, I come back, I've lunch, shower again, all of those things happen. Then I work again till about 7.30. And then you know, another, you know, dinner, whatever. And then I wind up no more work after 8 o'clock or so. Earlier, it used to be nine. You know, these things keep shifting. But that, that time in the middle of the day where I go to the gym really is important to me because that's when I stretch my legs. And in many ways, that's when I listen to your podcast, for example. So even though your podcast is getting longer and longer, it works out well for me because the entire week has covered. Then I can pause every day, the end of the workout and resume the next day. That's when I also think so I've written something. And then in the gym, sometimes I'm having conversations with myself. And does this make sense? Does the argument hold? You know, and then ideas will come to me there, which I'll quickly note down on my phone. So that chunk in the middle of the day helps. And yeah, have disciplines just become a part of, you know, my general personality, I guess. And I'm able to make it work again as a full-time writer. There's no option but to be disciplined and to do as much as possible and to work hard. Because again, I don't have institutional support. I have to live off this, which means that I can't drop the ball myself. I can't get too self-assured and too self-satisfied. So I need to put in the effort and work. So there also discipline helps. It keeps me motivated. And I enjoy it. I like being a disciplined person. My father was a disciplined person. And finally, I would say, and this is getting a very long answer. But I've said this maybe once before in your podcast, I'm not sure. But there's also a sense of where I come from myself. So all of my mother grew up in relative comfort. And so my father grew up in a village. His father was an illiterate farmer in Kerala. And there was every chance my father would not have gotten education after class 12. Because his, you know, his one brother has a shop, another's in electrician. They live very, very modest lives. My father took the opportunity to leave. I think he initially went and worked in the house of some distant relative where in Bangalore. And then he was washing their clothes and things. And then he managed to get into the Air Force, used his, whatever 90 something, Rupi salary to start his education. Did his BA, MA, Amasters and public administration and MBA. started a PhD, dropped out, but he got that far and then he got good jobs, you know, built a career for himself, married my mother who came from a better, a better encodes, kind of family and background and so on. And I think, I, therefore always, I think he, without having to say it, he was always the sort of example in front of my eyes is to where he came from and how determination can get you to achieve things and to actually transform your lives because, you know, if he hadn't left, he would have been in the village doing something over there, but he made the effort and he had to work very hard to get there. So by the time I was born, I grew up in comfort. I had no issues or difficulties, but I was always aware that this comfort had just come into my father's hands and therefore it shouldn't be taken for granted. So with the opportunities I have with the privilege that he was able to give me, which he didn't have, but he was able to supply to his children, it feels almost unfair to drop the ball. So there is, I think some, I don't know if it's healthy or not, but there is that burden or weight that, you know, this is not just a life that I can squander doing what I want to do. I think there is some sense of responsibility that somebody else had to sacrifice a lot and to work very hard to get me to this point. And therefore I need to sort of walk the next mile and and do my bit and and make something of myself almost as a vindication of everything they went through. It's a very strange in my head, but I think that also plays some kind of emotional, you know, you need not just intellectual stimulus, but there's also emotional stimulus to you, to who you are and you know the kind of person you become. There's a friend of mine who's also an on-fiction writer who was talking the other day about how he's reoriented his approach to his writing because what he said was that by now I've realized that with my rhythm it takes me about five or six years to write a book. So therefore and also I'm getting older. He's in his forties and so it's like I know that, you know, there aren't that many books left in me and that kind of, you know, affects what he does and what he chooses and there's more kind of intentionality and purpose. And I wonder how that's affected you on your journey. Like first of all, that sounds like an awesome man. So sorry to hear of this, but when you start confronting mortality, you know, surely that shifts the needle a little bit in terms of just thinking about what is left of your life, young as you are because when you're in your early twenties, I guess it's this great adventure you're embarking upon. But at this stage, I wonder if there is sort of an accounting of what you do and why, you know, maybe a sense of purpose and the kind of work that you do, you know, and for you, how do you define to use a term loosely and you mentioned before this, you were listening to the episode and you know, when we discussed Dharma, he was kind of taking me into the multitudes of that word, but I mean it as a kind of duty. Like how do you view your Dharma as a kind of writer, you are or however you define yourself like, where is the purpose? Is it our goal still a part of it that I will write a book or so many books or whatever? Or is it more a question of just understanding that when you are in that flow of that routine, that work is worship in a kind of manner and so give me a sense of how you're thinking is evolved around these. So at one level, I think there's this is something I enjoy very much and therefore I'm very happy that I have this overlap between what I want to do and I'm able to do it. Not everybody is able to sort of construct that kind of professional life for themselves. So I'm happy I've done it. I've put in the effort, but I'm happy that all about where I am. The other thing is yes, mortality does and it's not just like I'm in my 30s or technically, I'm still young, right? But if you look up the COVID, it's just all these people around 40s and 50s, just dropping dead every now and then and it makes you also realize that you never really know, you know, when your time will come and my father also went suddenly overnight. So there is that sense that look our time here is finite and already in my 30s, I can sense it. Intellectually, another thing that's happened is that perhaps in my 20s and some ways I had in many ways a more definite idea of lots of things as opposed to now right now I'm filled with greater self doubt and greater questions and I think in a good way because even with the history that I'm researching and studying, I'm asking even of myself, I'm asking more interesting questions and challenging some of my own preconceived notions. I'm trying to sort of, you know, mix things up a little bit more because I feel that there's so much that needs to be done. There isn't goals in terms of I need to get so many books done by such a milestone, such a milestone. That doesn't exist. I want to keep producing books. I want them to get better and better in terms of their general quality. I also want to build audiences, which means that maybe I need to think outside of books, but not in a fixed rigid kind of way and it's not an ego thing anymore. In that, you know, I have to get things done. There are three books before 30, for example, when that third book came out, I remember somebody I was in at the launch in Bangalore and I said something about how, you know, you're free till you're about 30 after that, you know, you age starts catching up with you and somebody in the audience grown because they were older and they thought, what are you complaining about about being 30? But that wasn't it. My father had died already by then and what I meant was that as you get older life also weighs down on you. You have other responsibilities. As you were saying, your body doesn't cooperate necessarily. In my 20s, I could eat anything. Now I've got the most sensitive stomach in the world. Things change and when things change, the way you approach your work also changes. I want to keep doing my books. I want to keep doing history. I want to do research. It gives me a lot of joy and happiness. But in many ways, it's not the only thing I'm looking for. You know, there are other people I want to sort of take care of. There are other interests in life. My sleep, I value more than, you know, ever before in my 20s, I would sacrifice sleep to work. Now I will still sacrifice lots of other things for work, but sleep I cannot compromise on. I need to try and get those eight hours of sleep every day because otherwise, I myself don't feel like a completely alive person. It's not even about being functional for work. It is about feeling like, you know, you're living an interesting, good, happy, full-filled life. So your priorities change a little bit in that sense. So on the whole, I'm trying to get everything together. I'm continuing on the pattern that I followed earlier, but I think there's a lot of reorientation as to where, how much, you know, to what extent, how quickly, how rapidly, all of those things. So I'm not in a rush anymore to do anything. No, I'll underscore the importance of sleep. It's something I have also realized. So no matter what happens, I just try to get my eight hours and I track my sleep and REM is important and so on and so forth. Tell me about when you started thinking about this book because some of the themes in this, we've kind of discussed earlier also. Obviously, you know, you're reading for it doesn't just consist of the time in the gap between the last book and this one, but you could say that you've been reading for it all your life pretty much, right? And so tell me how you started thinking about this like your introductory essay, brief history of Hinduism. I've already WhatsApp different friends of mine and said you have to buy the book and pick it up because it's just a masterpiece. It's such a, it's a beautiful, potted history of Hinduism that is subtle and deep and magnificently written and maybe it's a sign of my poor reading that I think it's so great, but I haven't really read a potted history that captures a new and quite as good as this. And while reading it, I was constantly going to the footnotes and checking out the books and kind of making notes. So what I need to read next, it's such a deep subject, you know, and what you've done kind of beautifully is that there's just a lot of reading there like the notes are, you know, I was showing the physical book to a friend yesterday and saying I'm reading this and she was like, oh my god, it's such a big book. And I said, no, no, then I opened the notes and I said like almost a third of it is a note, if not more than that. Give me a sense, both of how you started, you know, thinking about the subject and then once you start thinking about it, how do narratives form because all of these books have a lot of narrative in them and so on and so forth. Like do you use any particular kind of knowledge management system when you start building a narrative, how do you do it? Do you do it by theme? Do you do it by chronology? How does everything fall into place? So the title of the book is God's Guns and Missionaries, making of the modern Hindu identity. Yes, the book, the main text is only about 350 pages, although on Amazon, et cetera, it'll say 600 and something pages is 350 pages of main text and about 230 or 40 pages of notes. And the notes are very important to me in this book because you're dealing with a very, very complicated subject. And you're thinking aloud in the notes, it's in some parts, which is so great. And some of them are really like me trying to make sense of things in the notes so that people understand why I'm connecting the dots in this way. So the notes and for me, the readers who read the notes are my favorite readers because otherwise there is a kind of reader, I don't not judging, there is a kind of reader who reads the main text and they move on. Like that's enough for them, but there is a more engaged reader who loves the notes. And then they're the ones who I love it because they come back to me complaining saying, you know, it's very painful to keep going back and forth like this, you should number the pages this way or do something else. So why don't you have them as footnotes. And although it comes to me as a grievance, I really like it because it makes, it gives, it's proof that people are reading the notes. So I like that complaint that people send me. But I started thinking about this, I should say around 2011 because when I was a master student, I'd done my PhD, my sorry, my master's dissertation on the Hindu identity, actually Hindu nationalism, but a lot of it was about the modern Hindu identity. But I was 21, right? And 21, your you think of yourself as a relatively intelligent compared to others of your cohort, your very well-read compared to others of your cohort. You're also led a lot by what you're reading. So you want to flaunt your knowledge, you want to flaunt the number of things you've read. So I don't think that in that, in that dissertation that I wrote at 21, I think I made a strong argument. It got me, I think, a distinction, which is not easy in the British system to get a distinction for a dissitation, got me a distinction, but in many ways is I was sort of reflecting arguments that existed already. And that played on my mind. It was there. I had a preconceived idea from that reading from the existing literature of how the modern Hindu identity evolved. And then I kept reading on and off. Like, this was a book I always wanted to do. And even when I worked with Chachita Roo, he is somebody who is a devout Hindu, a big fan of Ganapati has got hundreds of Ganapati's in his house, has written his own book on Hinduism and so on. So there were these conversations happening even in that work in the environment occasionally. And I kept reading, reading, reading. But it was, I felt I was too young to chew on a topic of this nature. Now, this book isn't about Hinduism in terms of its philosophy. It's not about the Vedas. It's not about abstract ideas. It's not about theology. I think at the end of the introduction, I say it's about action and reaction in a time of political domination. That is colonial period. How does the encounter with Christian missionaries end up affecting and reshaping and reformulating Hinduism? Under Hindu's own agency and control. So it's a very limited sort of canvas that I've chosen. But getting to that canvas took me almost a decade of reading and generally researching. With this book, I wrote the first half of this book in 2020 that COVID gap that everybody got, right? That everybody was certainly productive because you got three months sitting at home. That's when I wrote the first four or five chapters of this book, first four chapters of this book. And then I let it rest because something wasn't fitting yet. It felt like I was still not able to do my best and able to articulate things as I wanted to. Then I let it be. Then I finished my book, "Falls Allies," which came out in 2021, finished my PhD. All throughout, I was also reading up on this, continuing my research and so on. And then I came back to this book. After my PhD was done in 2022 and with fresher eyes and greater confidence by then, I was able to put together the rest of it. So it's been a good 12-year journey in that sense. It began when I was much younger. And in many ways, the conclusions I reached in my master's dissertation, I've revised here. I've changed my own opinion on lots of things. And that also made me happy because one thing I fear is that sometimes we read certain conclusions, especially with a topic like history. And I think this happens a lot with very ideological people because you've got your ideology as your primary instinct and then the rest of it in many ways you arrange around the ideology. And that to me is always something I panic about because I think that's not the healthy way to go about history. So being able to revise some of my own conclusions from my youth from my early 20s, now in my 30s, at one level it felt like I was also evolving and I was maturing and I was able to see, look at the same material with the new lens. And that ultimately ends up reflecting in this book. And even if I were to compare this book and my first book, the lot is changed in the way I write. A lot has changed in the length. My first book was 700 pages this. I'm never going to write a book of that length. Again, I got really lucky that people bought that book. This is much more tight. I've tried to condense things as much as possible. I've tried to really create as tight an additive as possible. I still think I failed. I still think parts of the book are a bit dense and I should have been made slightly more tighter, you know, more crisp. But I think even as a writer, I've evolved. My research instincts have become sharper. My ability to analyze things have shifted. And I think in this book, that's why I said, I might get cancer for this book is because I've also, I'm also prepared to be bolder in the way I articulate certain things. Although it gives me some stress at the back of my mind, it doesn't prevent me from saying what I think needs to be said. A very senior writer who read this and scholar, read this and recently sent me a WhatsApp saying, loved it, I think it's your best. And but you're also very brave to put this out there. I don't know what to make of it. It is a compliment in many ways because I think, especially at this juncture in our country, where there is this polarizing nonsense, always you can't say anything. Even in your podcast with Dave that I think you had a segment exactly on this, but how one can't open on anything because in somebody or the others going to end up getting offended or whatever. So this is my way of also pushing back against that, saying that no, I have a point to make. The point may not make you happy, but I think the point has a value of its own. And if you're intelligent and open minded, you'll see what I'm trying to communicate. But dancing around that other people's fragile ego as it doesn't make sense anymore. And I'm happy as a writer that I'm in that position to now attempt it. It gives me some anxiety in terms of how it will be received and what will happen. See, right now I'm saying this with confidence. God knows what will come for me next year. In the next 12 months after the book is out, how the world will receive it, etc is a different question. And I might be crushed if it's not received well or if it gets bad reviews or academics tear it apart and that kind of thing happens. And yet I'm prepared to take the risk, which makes me happy, which shows that I am also getting stronger and more confident in my own position and in my own skills and abilities as a historian and researcher. Though feedback you mentioned is interesting. Indiret it included the word brave. And one of my favorite quotes is the opposite of courage is not covered is its conformity. And it's such a sad thing that a historian should have to be brave. It's such a sad thing that you know, to put your view of the world or the truth as you see it out there actually requires courage. It shouldn't freaking require courage. It should be kind of default in that sense. Can you reflect a bit on that in the sense that, you know, when you said that you've changed your mind from what you thought, you know, in your early 20s when you wrote your dissertation, at one level you would have changed your view on what you wrote in terms of facts or interpretation. But at another level, you know, those facts in that interpretation would have been chosen or driven by ideology as you mentioned or the frame through which you looked at the world is not called ideology, but the frame through which you looked at the world in that particular problem and that history. What was wrong with that frame? Like in that sense, wherever you're wrong earlier. And is correcting yourself a question of taking another frame or abandoning these narrow frames and taking a broader view? - I think it is the, it is realizing that frames can be limiting and that frames are also straight jacketing in many ways. I think many of us, especially those of us who fashion ourselves as well-read and intellectually inclined, et cetera, and already from our younger age. I think already in your teens, if you're reading and all you have this self image almost subconsciously that you are an interesting person. And a lot of us tend to lean left at that age and in that time because you want to change the world and you see injustice and there is the oppression lens that really takes over. And that guides everything you see. Where does now I realize oppression is one of many lenses? It is an important lens because you can understand the world through that. It matters, but it's not the only lens. And viewing it only that way actually limits your historical understanding. To give you an example, when my last book came out, false allies, several people in Kerala said, oh, you're sort of glorifying these marajas in the princely states, which means you've gone slightly right. And I was like, well, then read my first book because it's now the same princely state of travel call that I cover in my first book. When I'm looking at it from within, when I'm looking at from within, there is castism. It is a feudal structure. There are lots of issues around that whole conceptualization of a monarchy and a princely state. But when I'm looking at the same state and the same characters in their engagements with the British and colonialism versus this emerging nationalistic idea, the same rajas end up looking slightly better. It's simply because I've changed the prism through which I'm examining the people. When I'm looking at the internal world, yes, there are lots of flaws. But when I'm looking at it as a British colonialism versus Indian nationalism kind of narrative, you see a very different dynamic. And both are equally true. It's just that in two different contexts, the same story appears to have a different form. And you're focusing on different aspects of the same story. That makes you realize that both those lenses matter and being able to sort of zoom back and look at historical subjects with multiple lenses is what gives you something resembling the truth. None of us were there anyway. But to even attempt to frame a picture of what it might have been like back in the day, you need to be able to look at it from different angles and different perspectives. So I think that reaching that wisdom, I think, is important. And surprisingly, many people don't seem to do it. I've seen very talented scholars, much older, very accomplished in terms of academia and their positions and so on. But still essentially arguing from an ideological position as opposed to being led by the evidence and being willing to look at something beyond the ideology. And again, in your last podcast with Dev that you were talking about activist historians, right? And that makes me a bit uncomfortable. It is, I mean, as an individual, I have lots of issues with society and where we are at the moment. I have an individual and with the personal philosophy, I don't like the way the things are in the world. I have strong feelings about injustice and all of those issues. But when I'm starting the past, somewhere I think that has to be left at the door. And when I enter my study to do my work, I should be able to be a little more dispassionate. You can never be fully dispassionate. But that attempt, I think that effort to try and be dispassionate matters. And that dispassionate matters not just in terms of leaving out religion or caste, but sometimes also this feeling that everything has to be oriented towards justice or the repression lens or whatever. So I think the realizing that has been helpful to me because I found history itself far more interesting. I found far more interesting stories and interesting conclusions that you're able to reach because you've liberated yourself from frameworks that otherwise can push you into narrow field of vision. - Has being an academy or turn from a feature to a bug? Like at one point, if you think about the knowledge society as it were, the site where knowledge is produced, disseminated, digested, easy academy and that's kind of the only place. But in the modern world, the academy has just become this circle-jure game. where these dominant ideological fashions blind you more than they illuminate the truth. And is that really a problem? And then I wonder how you think about the larger production of knowledge, you know, like whenever I say at the job of producing knowledge or ideas and all of that, it can't be left to the academy. It is thankfully a lot of it is happening outside the academy and people will say, "Oh, but the academy teaches you rigor or whatever." And I'm like like 95% of everything is crap. Eventually the crap goes out. You know, the rigorous people are appreciated among popular historians. You know, you wrote a bunch of your books before you got a PhD. Ram Guha was frowned upon by so many people as a popular historian, but look how he's regarded today. So, you know, is it therefore one has being an academy actually become something that holds you back and you are irrelevant? And you as an individual may be more sensitive to what those people say, but I can tell you as an outsider, I don't give a shit. If an academy is saying something, I am likely to discount it by default and, you know, be extremely skeptical about it. So, what do you think of that? And what do you think of this knowledge society that at one level people might well say, "Rathe, why should I look to YouTubers?" Which is, you know, used often in a pejorative way for opinions of facts or whatever. But on the other hand, I would say, look at the YouTubers that I follow, and they are great. Robert Sipol's case biology lectures, or if you start a YouTube channel, ensure it will be mind-blowing and it will do far more for the study of history than all of the academy I combined in India. So, what is your sense? It's fun you ask this now because Billion Daltonville got into trouble. I don't know if he follows after recently. After he spoke at the Indian Express Arda and evidently he said that academic historians in India, several generations are partly responsible for the rise of WhatsApp history. And lots of people have been flipping out since then on social media. The first thing for me is, and some people ask me for a response and I am hesitant to even respond because firstly this is a paraphrased version of what he said in a newspaper. Any of us who've been interviewed by newspapers, etc, know that when something is recorded and then edited to fit a certain fixed real estate on the page, the editor and the editorial team decides how it's edited. So, I'm not even aware of what exactly he said. Secondly, yes, if he has said that, you know, his academic historians are to be blamed for the rise of WhatsApp history, there is a flattening of it, but I think his larger point he's trying to communicate is that there isn't been enough communication in that in a changing world. Now, until the 80s, Romila Thapa wrote very accessible books, right? And you can read them, anybody can read them. But following the 90s, liberalization, more people getting on to social media, the internet, etc. in the last 20, 25 years, so much has changed. And since then, we've found that academia still stuck perhaps in that 80s format, whereas, you know, the world seems to be moving forward and there's a communication gap. And that, I think it's very tough to argue against because there is a lot of fine research being done in academic spaces that isn't reaching the mass audience. And then WhatsApp history is of course rising not because of this because it's there's a whole machine funding it, there's a whole other social political phenomenon behind it, but you can't really combat it if you don't, if you're not able to communicate. And then the worst thing is when you complain about WhatsApp history, but make no effort to communicate something good, even though you have access to it. And it's interesting because some of the responses I found puzzling and amusing and some very condescending and self-righteous also. For example, you know, one response on social media that I saw was, "Oh, academics work on the lots of structural constraints. It's the pace, bad, if you teach, you can do this, you can do that." And I say, it's not like we like popular historians are working in, like it's not like we wake up and all lying on silk sheets and then get out of bed and walk into some large hall and sit under a chandelier and write, "We have our structural constraints as well, right? I had to work full jobs, then go to the archive, then stay up till three o'clock at night to do my first book." So I don't think structural constraints is an argument that you can say that this particular lot of people are subject to it and this lot of people are somehow feel like if anything, they have structural support because, you know, they've got a, you get access to J store and libraries and so many things because you have an academic pass, whereas people like me, we have to pay for, you know, a large membership fees for these things, which means you also have to earn the money to pay that your institution isn't buying it for you. So there's that. Then there was what I thought was slightly condescending where one side of people said, "Oh, popular historians just synthesize what academic historians do and put it in engaging language." And they meant it as a positive thing, but I was like, "That's not actually true." You know, my first book, I was able to resurrect a lost historical figure, found documents and nobody had touched in decades, analyzed them, sit with them for six years and then do my work, and then published the book. It's written in an engaging style, people like reading it, that doesn't make the research any easier, the research was still just a stuff, just as rigorous and so on. Does the book have errors show? Every book has errors. Academic books also have errors. Similarly, you can't say that popular historians are the ones behind populous history and academics are somehow fighting it. The academic so-so-so-populous history. Among popular historians, there are some who are supporting populous others who are standing up to populousism. So these binaries are extremely useless when it comes to that. So I think that we sometimes get lost in some of these things, and I think in this time, and there's so much opportunity to be creative, there's so much opportunity to work with technology. For the first time, we have platforms that are available to really put material out there if we just make the effort and get out of our own boxes. And this romanticizing of the classroom, that was the other thing I read in an op-ed, and I think the person meant it well, that was a well- argued piece in general. But it basically said that ultimately to teach people to think historically, you still need the classroom, which was the argument they made, and understand where they come from, because you need that kind of sustained engagement to get people to think, that when students are at that age where they can be molded to think historically. But I think public historians also do the same thing. So every time you go and give a talk, you are also illustrating the past in a way that gets people to challenge their preconceived notions. You're not standing there and entertaining them by doing a dance to the masher and giving them funny stories that they can giggle at. Through that, you're also trying to make the point that the past is not what you necessarily think of it. And how can you think of the past? These are questions that often happen. I've been asked really interesting questions at literature festivals by young kids precisely because they are there to ask these very questions. So the classroom is not the only avenue in today's world. Back in the day when the world was more structured a certain way, everybody went through a certain machine in a certain format. Maybe you could make that argument. In today's world, the entire world is a classroom. Like there's so much happening, there are so many platforms. People are learning a lot on your top podcast, which they would not necessarily have access to. Again, going back to what we were discussing earlier when books are so expensive, you've got authors coming and it's essentially giving you five hour episodes, practically telling you what's in the book in a single episode. So there are people who may not be able to consume the book for various reasons. Can't afford them. Don't have the patience. Don't have the attention. Whatever it is because there is this platform, they are still able to communicate with them and reach them and they're able to learn from these conversations as well. Whether they agree or not, the point is they're able to get something out of it. So I think the idea of the classroom itself has been widened in today's world. So there is a romanticization of the old that always happens. One of the reasons I think is also academia is also slightly under siege, funding issues, less jobs than there are scholars. Lots of issues of that nature. That also leads to certain problems. But this whole politics between popular historians and academic historians, I think is overstated. I think both sides with a little humility and understanding. We can work together as opposed to turning this into a binary. Well said. And a final sort of personal question before we get to talking about the book itself and about Hinduism itself is that you know, you mentioned people getting a lot of the knowledge, getting often getting to know a book from the podcast and it's going to them for free. And the way that I think of it is that all of the work I put in behind the podcast are used to think of it as a labor of love. But over time, I've realized that I have been lucky enough that I can now in hindsight say it was an investment and I make money through other ways and I do quite well. But for me, the main point of doing all of this is I just love to get this stuff out there. And I'm lucky that I've made you know, other avenues work for earning money. In your case, my sense is that you would be absolutely delighted if the everything that you're writing reached as many people as possible, even if it went out there for free. Because the whole point is, you know, the work leading to the knowledge, leading to more people knowing about it, needing to you being leading to you being able to tell those stories. At the same time, there is a imperative that you do want to make money, especially since you don't have, you know, the backup of the academy and a tenured job and all of that. So how does one sort of balances because I would imagine that your early success of course means that these haven't come into conflict yet. But at some point in the future, they might, at some point in the future, for example, someone might say right here, why are you putting so much of your stuff out there on free on YouTube, for example, you know, and so how does how do you think about it? Yeah, and I think because for me, that storytelling side of it, getting to people, conveying something is equally important. I enjoy the research, but I enjoy being on stage also. Both things are, are, are a value to me. You know, there's this website called LibGenerate where you can download books for free. And often people sending me emails, "Oh, your books are available on it, your earlier books, none of the new ones." And in ugly formats, if you download it, it's an e-pub, then you have to convert into PDF, it's horrible to read. But I was like, if a person is that anxious to read my book and they can't afford it or whatever reason they don't want to pay for it and they're willing to read it in this ugly format, I'm okay with with it to be honest I'm not going to hold my publishers over. over the cold saying that, "Oh, how is my book being pirated?" This is that fine, like no big deal. Like it's ultimately, how much can you police knowledge and access to knowledge? Even when it's sitting in a library, it's not like each reader's paying me a royalty. Every people are boring, one copy's reaching hundreds of people, I think of it that way. So I'm okay with that. At the same time, I'm not going to not want sales because I'm also competitive in a weird way, which is that I like my publishers to make money because I don't want them to feel that they invested in a book and it didn't earn a profit. I think this partly comes from having worked outside of history and academics and research. I've worked in an office, I've run a team and all of that. So I think having that one foot in the real world as it were because sometimes if you're only in academics, I think you have realized that can also narrow your world because you lose touch with the pragmatic, what is possible, the art of the possible is also something we need to factor in. But having worked in an office, having seen the pros and cons, the compromises you have to make, the kind of, here you give some, there you take some, all of those dynamics. I've been sort of okay with it. In terms of drawing an income, I think you can be creative about it. In those early years, I really had to spend, I was earning, but all the money I was earning was pumping into my own research, getting documents from abroad, paying membership fees, this, that, all of that, cost me a fair bit. But in the long term, it panned out. Because I was able to make those books work, now I'm able to earn money. One thing that people do is people invite me for talks and I charge them a stout fee. So, you know, I can earn a substantial chunk, essentially by going on stage, using my voice as opposed to the page and the book, and sort of commercializing that. And it's not something where I have to dumb it down or anything. These are people who are interested in interesting conversations, but they're willing to pay for it. And that's why I said, classrooms are also no longer just the traditional classroom, you know, an organization like YPO, one of these, these are CEOs of companies. These are people who are in positions of great influence. They affect policy, they're dealing with politicians, they affect corporate policy, all of these things. These are people who have power and resources. When a room full of them invites you to address them, you're also aware that you're in a way educating them. And they're aware of that as well, that they're also here to try and get a different perspective. Each one may not take back the same thing, but something goes on in their mind also at the end of the program. So I think that also helps, right? You're also reaching out to different people who have a very different impact on society in different spaces. It's not an academics, it's not a student, but in their fields, somehow they go back better informed and somewhere it'll perhaps impact the way they operate in those fields. So I think that helps. So I've so far managed to sort of balance the two, but yes, I'm, and as I said, my feud with publishers about prices is partly because of this, because, you know, for me, sacrificing that profit a little bit is okay. If we can get the book priced in a way that more people can consume the book, but that, you know, it's a losing battle. Papers become more expensive. La la la, this book you'll have noticed there are no glossy sheets with color images because that adds to the price. So I said, no need for that. We'll just carry the images in black and white. Initially, the book was coming to some 700 pages. I made them reduce the font because I wanted less page length because you don't want to intimidate readers, but equally production costs go down when your page lengths are lower. So in that sense, I've made a real effort with this book to try and minimize the price, but still it's 99.99. So yeah, it's a, these are conversations I have with myself and my publishers as well as to how to, you know, condense knowledge in a way that it's accessible. And for those who can pay, they can pay, but at least give them a reasonable rate. Yeah, no, and, but 99, if you actually, you know, if you shift the frame a little bit, what is it? It's once we give order. You're ordering in once for, you know, that's what my editor said. She said, you're, you're, I've never heard an author of us so much about the price because most people who buy books in general in this country are of a certain, and books of this type, heart back, then they won't, they won't wait till the paper, they'll buy the heart back and so on. They have the resources to spend 1000 rupees on a book because they, they'll go out and spend 3000 at dinner one night and then, you know, you don't want them fussing about, oh, 99 is too much for a book. Yeah, but people think of books somewhat differently and also, you know, elites like us can say, oh, it's once we give order, but that's not it's some kid in a small town who's really hungry for knowledge won't say that. And I, I put that kid first and I think you'd get more volumes. There I should mention there with my, with this new book, there's this platform. So usually author, share the Amazon link for pre-orders. With this book, I've been sharing a website called Padhega India, which is an Indian, Indie sort of book selling platform because they were offering a 40% discount. So my cover price went from 999 to 599. And every other day for the last several weeks, I've been pushing it, saying all you students who can't afford 999, this is like the best deal you can get, 599 is a good price. Paperbacks don't come for 599 anymore in this country for non-fiction books like this. So you're getting essentially paperback or less than paperback value for a full hardback new book. Please take the thing. And the people on that platform were also very happy because they said authors don't usually promote, or think that much about the price point, but for me, it matters a great deal. And because it was an Indian company also felt that, okay, at least it's not Amazon, the same old thing that sells multiple products and books happen to be one more product on it. This is dedicated to books and they did a good job of it. - Yeah, everyone, you've read hardback, softback, paperback, frame is also outdated and artifact. So let's start talking about the book. And actually, I want to talk about that, introductory chapter, a brief history of Hinduism, a fair bit because I thought it's brilliant in doing the kind of potted history. Like you spoke about how you're not writing 700 page books anymore, you've managed to condense a lot of that, but you haven't dumbed it down. You've actually just, while keeping the language clear, you've the density of the ideas and the information is just fantastic and works really well. So let's talk a bit about that because I think that most people don't really have a sense of what Hinduism quote unquote is. The one view of Hinduism might be the politically muscular Hindu thought that you see another view might well say right, hey, there was nothing called Hinduism before the 19th century, the British came and they took one view of Hinduism from the Brahman interlocutors and then it became a feedback loop and that's another view. And actually, you're the way you have laid out the history, it's much more complex, it's much deeper. I found myself like nodding throughout a lot of stuff made sense and it really begins with that process of Hindu Aryan culture kind of fanning out as you put it across the subcontinent. So tell me a bit about that process. Tell me a bit about the landscape. Like if I go back 3000 years, 4000 years into the of the Patnaik territory as it were, what is a landscape? What are people believing? Where do they get their worlds from? Is it a bunch of fractured kind of beliefs? And how does it begin to change when that fanning out as it were begins to happen? So it really is a culture of encounters rather than a fixed solid thing. Now depending on the background of the person writing on Hinduism, the definition of Hinduism could also change. I found for example that a lot of the traditional old books are very polyradicrishn, all of them. The old 20th century masters as it were who wrote about Hinduism were often Brahmins and it was a very Brahminized, almost orientalist reading of Hinduism. First there were the Vedas, then there were the Puranas. This happened. That happened. It's a very textual reading of Hinduism. My own experience of Hinduism comes from my village in Kerala, which was a very different kind of experience. There was no talk of the Vedas. We are not a Brahmin community. At the same time, we are a Savarana land-owning caste. So you're sort of on the spectrum, on the privileged side, but you're also not the textually adept kind of people. So our Hinduism, if I look at my own family temple, the private family temple that we have, we have one goddess, the main goddess, who is a Vanadurga. Vanadurga is the goddess of the grove of the forest. Even now, although they build, if you go to Vanadurga temples in Kerala, they have a sanctum. The roof of the sanctum has a gap, there's a hole. Because the goddess has to be exposed to the elements. She has to be exposed to rain and thunder and the leaves and all of that. Essentially, at one point, this was an open goddess of the forest. And in all likelihood, a tribal goddess, that's the general consensus. Vanadurga, forest goddess. Next to her, we have a Bhadrakali. The Bhadrakali was originally worshipped as a sword. She needs a sanctum with a roof. And in many ways, it's slightly more Brahminized. She has a very different kind of pedigree. Alongside them, we have a separate grove, which is where the serpent gods used to be kept, the Nagadevata. And they were not originally in the main temple, later they were moved into the main temple. That was a full one acre. Left is wilderness. The rule was you don't cut anything in the grove. It has to be left wild for the serpents. So that that patch, while you do the rest of the land, the rest of your properties, fields, and you're using it for agriculture, that one and a half acres, you do not touch. It is wild. It's a forest. That's where the Nagadevata is kept. Then there was another smaller grove where the Dalit community is linked to our family. And it isn't, again, purely a story of oppressed and oppression. There was, of course, the Kasupiri certainly had the advantage side of the relationship. But there was something also in terms of ritual links between the two communities. In that particular grove, they used to worship a deity. They simply called Murthy. We now interpret Murthy as a form of Shiva. They did not originally say that. They called him just Murthy. And Murthy was worshiped with alcohol, blood sacrifices, and so on. Eventually, as sanskriticization worked through the 20th century and these Dalit communities, themselves started going into the mainstream Hindu temple, they abandoned Murthy. And then Murthy's pooja stopped with the blood sacrifices. [BLANK_AUDIO] And at that point our priest, the Brahmin priest took Murthy into the main temple and now he also receives very Brahmanized rituals in the main temple. So the God is also transformed. From a blood-consuming God has now become a milk and sugar-consuming, honey-consuming deity. This guy is coming. Then there's another tribal God called Ayurveda-Ily Munnoti who is apparently linked to the Kauravata tribe. In Kerala somehow that one is also sitting in our temple, in this private temple we have. And there's a stone to an ancestor who got bit by a dog and died of rabies. The spirit has been caught and trapped in a round stone. She's also there. Another one venerates another ancestor. Then there's one that, where, a shrine that venerates a Brahmin who died in a bad death or something. A Brahma Raksha says they call it in Kerala. So in that one temple I'm seeing tribal God, forest God, Brahmanized God, Brahmanized ritual but not all of them, originally Brahminical in their ways of worship. All of that has been accommodated in this one space. There is an order in which you service each of these deities but they all need to be attended to. And I still remember in my teens it, I saw it only happen once and it was happening in a very harsh, harsh way where I saw some older uncles handing over in this newspaper sort of thing, a bottle of booze to somebody. And I was like what is happening? And my grandmother told me in confidence that basically because Murthy was worshipped at one point with alcohol. Although now we don't do it, you still have to give alcohol to somebody to sort of tick that box. That ritual has to be continued. It's possible by now our cousins in the village have stopped it but I've seen it happen in front of my own eyes. So my experience of Hinduism was something that was, as I said, a culture of encounters, different things coming together and being placed in a common explanatory framework. And this is where the fundamental difference I think with religions of the books of the book comes, which is that there you have a book or a court text. And then of course you have lots of schisms and different factions and groups and churches that vary about interpreting these texts of what within the text is valuable and what is not. Here it's not necessarily text. It is this encountering and it is the creation of a common framework. So it's not an ism but it is something that has its own internal logic and its own internal patterns of working. This is what you mentioned when you said the Hinduarians fanning out. In many ways, I have the sentence where I say that although Hindus had lots of backgrounds and Hindus came and lots of different founds in terms of the origins of their religion, Hinduism as we know it or that one common framework in many ways depended on Brahminism or Brahmin's because what you see is essentially people migrating across the subcontinent. Look at the idea of the Mlechadeisha. You know, originally you have the core home territory of the Aryans or the other Brahmin's as it were, which is originally around the Indus and then moves to the Gangesetic belt. Everything else is Mlechadeisha, Babar in country, Bengal, Sindh, South India, everything else is just bad country. You shouldn't even go there to these places. Over a period of time this evolves. They say no, no, Mlechadeisha is where the four Vedas are not followed. It's not a geographical concept anymore. So now you can go into Bengal, you can go into other places. Even so, even into the modern period, a lot of these taboos continued in the 19th century, there was this writer, Bolana Chandar, who wrote about how Patna, you could still not die on that side of the river because Brahmin's did not think you went to heaven if you died on that side of the river. You had to cross and come on to this side. It's some echo of that original concept of the Mlechadeisha, which is that side of this Mlechadeisha. This is the pure territory. So you still have to come to this side of the river and die and you can't die on that side or you'll be reborn as a donkey or something. That's the logic. So echoes of that have continued even into modern times. Now as you're fanning out, this is not through conquest necessarily. You threw out history right down to the 18th century. You find kings inviting Brahmin to come in central. Krishmadevaraya Vijayanagara sends Madhava Brahmin's out and sets sets up these mutas. The mutas, the sponsor, Kanals, irrigation, agriculture, all of that build up whole communities around them and a village culture evolves. So it's a slow process that's sort of taking place. And as these Brahmin communities are migrating into different places, not only are they encountering other groups, other groups and their cultures also encountering is also affecting Brahminism. That's why Brahmin's are not one category. And again, they've that mentioned this on his podcast as well. There is no one uniform Indian Brahmin community. Throughout this Indian history, you find Brahmin's fighting with other Brahmin's as to whether they are Brahmin's at all. One set of Brahmin will say, we are the pure Brahmin's. You guys are just pretenders. Another will say, no, no, you guys are not even vegetarian. We vegetarian ones are the actual Brahmin's. A third set will say, oh, you bury your dead. Cremation is the right way. Therefore, you're not good Brahmin's. Within Brahmin ranks, funeral priests are looked down on. They have no access to the Vedas. So the idea that the Brahmin uniformly has access to the Vedas is not true. Most Brahmin's often did not have access to the Vedas. In Kerala, we have two bifurcations. The other is the ones who have the Vedas. The other is the Vedas. Temple priests are frowned on. We think the pujari in the temple is that emblematic Brahmin. When you think of a Brahmin, you think of the priest. But within orthodox Brahmin society, the priest actually occupies a lower position. The traditional ideal Brahmin is someone who studies the Vedas and is willing to do only Vedic sacrifices will not do murti puja, especially not for the public. Again, you've got a public facing side, which means you're dealing with all kinds of people. Therefore, you're considered less pure. So a lot in Kerala, again when the Nambudri's first came, initially they even accepted the local form of matrilineal succession. Later it was stopped. It's only one set of Nambudri's and one geographical part of North Kerala, who still follow the matrilineal system. The rest all move to patriarchy, when packed to their original system. It's all clouded in myth and legend. So the myth is that Parisharama brought the Brahmin's and to reconcile to his own sin of killing his mother, he said, "Oh, you must all become matrilineal." That's just myth, papering over a much more interesting historical dynamic that took place. So as Brahmin's moved into different places, they encountered different practices. Now we often also say that there was a Vedic Hinduism and then Puranic Hinduism. The way I see though based on my reading and the evidence is that there was the Vedic religion, which the Brahmin's followed. But then they encountered all kinds of other religious systems. Not just Buddhism and Genism, there were tribal cults which were shifting groves, there were people already worshipping idols. You often find in Maharashtra itself you go to temples, you'll find a carved deity, but if you look closely at the bottom you'll find a more rugged stone because that was the original deity. And then as time moved on as the temple got bigger, the carved deity took the main position and the other deity was sort of pushed down a little bit because it's cruder. So you find that this encounter is constantly happening and both sides are getting affected by it and it is in that field where the Vedic religion of the Brahmin's through adaptation and what's marvelous here is the capacity of these Brahmin's of that time to not just adapt, but in many cases absorb the features of their own enemies in order to adapt. So you initially come to a new territory and you don't appreciate it, but over a period of time you actually accept parts of it, not all of it, parts of it, reframe yourself and you're able to survive and maintain, in many ways maintain your dominance as well. You know, the thing about Brahminism is you're willing to accept everything, but everything has a hierarchy. What you're very comfortable with, you accept what you're less comfortable, you'll say, okay, I accept it, but it's lower in status. So that tribal God I will accept, but I will say it's a lower God. Whereas my Shiva or Vishnu is the higher God. But where Hinduism as we know it, I think takes form is the puranic period because the purana has reflect this culture of encounters. In the Vedic religion, that is the religion of one set of people. The puranas where you find that common explanatory framework emerge where everything there is an attempt to fit it into this master narrative. It's not one narrative necessarily, but there is an attempt to fit it into one worldview to create space for everything like a tapestry which has no borders. That is really what is happening is expanding constantly different weaves are coming in, different colors are coming in. Everything is given place within it and there's no fixed shape to it yet. And that's why the book essentially ultimately, this is the introduction, right? The crux of the book is what when did the outer borders get drawn? That is really in the modern period when Hindu Thva emerges encounter with colonialism, with missionaries. That is when you get defensive and you start stitching up the outer borders saying this phi s beyond the snow. But through most of history, especially after the rise of the puranic religion, it was about absorbing on very specific terms and not always in the most linear or predictable way, but trying to place everything within a framework. And that framework really is what is Hinduism, not something that comes out of a book, that creation of the framework matters. And there, although Brahmin's always attempted to keep themselves supreme and maintain their dominance, I think there's also this creative genius in the process where you're able to adapt and bring even your enemies into the fold, even rival faiths into the fold. And before the rival faiths realize that they've become part of this fabric and they also can't be extricated thereafter. Something as striking as Veerashivism or Lingayatism begins with a very anti Brahminic ritual tone around the 12th century. Very, very, if you look at the early texts, the Basava Purana, very militant in their anti-veidism, they don't particularly value the Brahmin, don't value the Brahmin scriptures, none of that. But a few centuries later, even Veerashivism has been given a space within the Brahminic world view and accepted, not to say they're not other Brahmin criticizing it. But still, for many Brahmin, they've created the space to accept even something as anti-Brahminic rule as Veerashivism. So it's actually an interesting fascinating dynamic and what you see is not a text but history unfolding and a cultural system taking place which you can encapsulate under the name Hinduism. So before I go on to the next scene, I want to talk about, I think, for our listeners, we should clarify that what you mean by Hindu, Aryan culture because I think what often happens is there is a strain of WhatsApp history who just say that there was no Aryan invasion and we were always here and this is our land and etc. And the thing is maybe there wasn't an Aryan invasion, there certainly wasn't Aryan migration, can be. say it so confidently because genetic evidence actually shows that David Reich has a great book who we are and how we got here Tony Joseph as a book called early Indians have an episode with him. So please read that for yourself don't take my word for it we should not get into an ideological battle and throw dogmatic positions at each other just read those books Peggy Mohan has a masterpiece on language where she uses linguistic evidence to show how that even parts of Sanskrit were actually shaped by the local language and you know that process was taking place. What I truly loved about the chapter really more than just the narrative about Hinduism is that to me it you know illustrates a fundamental principle and a fundamental truth of the world that what we see here in a sense is Hinduism being formed and adapting in a bottom up way too often we think of it in a top down way that oh the Vedas are the books and everything is stopped down or the Brahmanas are imposing whatever and everything is stopped down and you know top down thinking is reflexive to us we are hardwired to think in top down ways but actually everything meaningful and complex has to happen bottom up you know matrily has a great book I think all the evolution of everything where you know we look at spontaneous order how natural selection is spontaneous order societies economies all of them are bottom up and when I was reading your book at one point it struck me that what is really happening here through all of these centuries is religious curation by spontaneous order that sure the Indo-Aryan culture you know it fans out it won't it would love to impose its view of the world on everyone but it simply cannot do that and therefore what happens is the Vedas are in the past but when the puranas are emerging they are really emerging out of contingency that they are constantly being added to you speak about how the longest purana the Skanda purana is you know described as a scrap bag when did onigur's yeah description and you know if I may quote you you write the puranas of works of genius they acquired their fluid form not to meet present day scholarly standards but to tie the local with the pan-Indian and the evolving with the stable to universalize what was provincial while seeding the parochial with the universal stop quote and an example of how you you know combined christmas and density and you know so you know very well said and at this point I was also thinking that what's really happening here is that you know the puranas are constantly fluid it's like this is an open source religion and the puranas are kind of taking everything in at one point I even remembered a comment made about what might be a modern day attempted religion the religion of the constitution which has been amended so many times and there used to be this cartoon there was a cartoon which once came where somebody goes to the parliament bookstore and he asked for the constitution and the person says I'm sorry we don't stock periodicals here and that's kind of sort of the literature there is and you speak about how you know puranic culture is sort of like like an ocean almost and but Brahminism is a river that you speak about how it's you know quote unquote conquered by multitude so it is a dominant river and Brahmin's are kind of surviving and the way they are rationalizing it is also is also just such a fantastic argument where they say that you know typically in a golden era we would impose our values but we this is Kalyug so Kalyug we just have to kind of deal with the you know that's for Kalyug is a very useful fiction for adaptation which is that because it is Kalyug what to do you know we have to deal deal with the world as it is as opposed to how we would want to deal with it and that I think makes Kalyug that's a Kalyug also if you look at the scholars of studied Kalyug it's duration keeps getting extended over the period of history because you realize that it's actually a fiction that is created in order to justify how you're adapting in the real world well is it created when is the concept come that I can't really say I think it's pretty old but we see it being used a lot from the puranic period as a way to explain why things are changing so you have this like sort of ringing your this thing saying oh my god you know I this is Kalyug there for such terrible things are happening and then you adapt and allow those terrible things to happen because that's the way of the world that's how it actually happens even the Brahmin cast itself right it's so interesting that tribal communities and tribal priests could be turned into Brahmin's communities that came from elsewhere could be adapted and sort of absorbed into the Brahmin fold because that itself is still poorest to a certain degree to about 1500 or 2000 years ago it was still possible to create new Brahmin's as it were and then of course it continues the puranas also emerged largely the last 1000 1500 to 2000 years at most beoffense it was in the Gupta period that the puranas get codified in this way and then of course a lot of the later puranas continue even even later into the last 1000 years as well and they really are works of genius because their their job isn't necessarily to give you one text it is to give you a way to understand why things are the way they are and where and why they occupy the slots that they occupy and there's lots of inconsistency is also right like different puranas exalt different gods they sometimes speak in different tongues because they're not necessarily addressing the same audience each one emerged to justify or to satisfy certain questions and those questions may have been replaced by another set of questions in another part of India at a different time to answer which a different set of texts also emerged in that particular context so for me therefore that dynamism matters it's an Hinduism therefore cannot be put down to a book that was frozen in time it is put down to a text or a series of texts and concepts that are dynamic until a certain juncture that juncture is interesting and but you know this is 19th century Brahmin called Naragavaya who writes a defense of the Hindus in the early 19th century and I've cited him in this chapter and later as well where he essentially says that our ancestors gave us this opening you know based on the vicissitudes of time we could reform any aspect of our religion because our ancestors have left it open ended in a certain way so so that we are able to adapt based on historical changes and contingencies and that I think owning up to that is essentially where the magic of Hinduism itself lies that capability to adapt and if you look at the long arc even you know at one point the term Hindu did not encapsulate people of lower caste communities when you said Hindu it usually meant upper caste groups so there's this wonderful scholar called Divya Charyan who's done a research largely based on Rajputana where she says that they're determining who was Hindu and not was based on untouchability so it wasn't just the Muslim who was not Hindu that Dalit was also not considered Hindu but through the 19th century with censuses coming in the majority of impulse coming in it became important to make sure that the Dalit stayed within the Hindu fold as it were so there the idea of the Hindu was expanded in order to make sure that this particular segment on the peripheries was firmly kept within the boundary as opposed to allow to sort of flow into other religions and so on and again I'm not saying good or bad but again there you see an adaptation taking place where even a saverker comes out and you know has these has these ceremonies where he has brahmin and Dalits eating together where he gives Dalits the sacred thread again one can read again brahminism into it but the point is again there's a capability to adapt your based on your political and historical contingencies you're willing to change and that change I think is really quite fascinating in the evolution of Hinduism it is really a history of change yeah yeah and just to again quote some examples from your book your right quote to change you tribe and Andhra territory became part of the great narrative after a myth invented a union between an avatar of Vishnu and a changeu woman in Assam the home kings of southeesthesia Asian Thai descent were hinduised from the 14th century the process requiring hundreds of years meanwhile emerging the local goddess cult with the sanskriti it's left handed mode of worship featuring liquor and meat was not only endorsed but adopted even for brahmin deities who ordinarily receive flowers and milk in Tamil country your leading god iron r was transformed into shivas sun born of a bigiling female form of Vishnu horrifying a touchy european who felt Vishnu could hardly be respectable if he committed uncleaneless with a man and I'm also interested in how people looked at themselves right on one hand what is happening is these are different peoples coming together they don't see themselves as one people in the sense that today we'd have the unifying identity of indian or Hindu or whatever there is nothing like that and the word Hindu of course you know as we'll probably talk about later comes about much much later so how do they think of themselves like if quoted Manu Devadevan in the context of Kannataka saying that you know worshipping a deity was before this simply a part of everyday life not a marker of identity just is wearing cotton clothes reciting in a tashthot or making love never produced identities like cotton wear a tashthot dweller or love maker and so also the worshipping of shiva or Vishnu is a case maybe did not confer identity stop code and I'm sort of then fascinated by that okay these are the things that I do you like sushi I like paratha's fine there is no sushi ism or paratha ism as it were though she would not put anything past anyone so how did they think of themselves how do they what is the sense you get of how they are looking at themselves and the assimilation that they are having to do you know tell me a little bit about it I think because we had cast in this country often your identity was mediated through that so that was the length through which everything else was refracted so your family would have a kola deva or your tribe would have a certain deity that you followed or you went to and prayed to a sacrifice to your cast would have a certain identity and usually that was the prism through which people operated now for all religions where Whether it's a crest, Christianity, whether it's Islam, whether it's Judaism, religion start defining themselves when they're confronted with another, with something unusual, something different. And in India's case, I think there are more and more scholarly studies showing that the encounter with Islam is really when you start seeing not only the word Hindu being, not only that the word Hindu appears in Islamic texts, but the word Hindu starting to be appropriated by Hindus to define something that they recognize. At that time, it's still a bit vague and loose. The word Hindu is being used for multiple things and multiple ways of articulating identity, not just one religious format, but there is a usage of that word. There is an appropriation of that word starting in one of the oldest is the Vijayanagara Emperor, calling themselves Hinduraya Surat-Rana. Sultan's among Hindu kings in 1347. That's one of the earliest sources we have. Because they've now confronted another. Now Islam originally came to South India through peaceful embassies of commerce. There in many ways Islam was indigenized, you know, in Kerala, in Tamil Nadu, up the coast in Karnataka, Islam was added to the platter. It was very normal for people in India to go to different gods for different purposes. Similarly, this became one more option on the menu, essentially. What happens though is from the North once you have Islamic power coming in, where it is not just religion, but religion backed by state power, by monarchy, by authority and influence and military. That is when you really confront the other. And I think that's when the Hindu identity as such, which is again not all Hindus, standing up and waking up one morning and saying, we are now all Hindus. No. But that framework that we discussed earlier, that explanatory framework of the world starts to define itself as something. These people are not. This new idea and this new conceptualization of the world that has come in backed by a book, backed by a different language to a certain extent, a different sacred language, a different set of practices. All of that comes in and then you start assessing, okay, that is that. What are we? And that's where I think this broad sense of being Hindu emerges at a very faint sort of way. Hinduism is still a composite religion. When we use the word sect, usually it means that there is an original found and then there are different branching ways and that's how the sects emerge. The Protestants, the Catholics, these are like sects under Christianity. With Hinduism, it's actually the other way around. Shaivism, Vaishnavism in many ways evolved on their own and then sort of came together under the Hindu, under what we now call the Hindu umbrella. They sort of became a composite later. So it's slightly Ulta. As you said, bottom up. That's how the system works here. Yet when you're faced with a new and very powerful ideology, you suddenly realize there's something that separates all of you from that. Now within this also, they be worshippers, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, the three big sort of traditions in India, Shaqta, Shaivas, Vaishnavas. Already before the coming of Islam, they could recognize that there was something different between them and Buddhism and them and Janism. So in the oldest poet, and I have this in that introductory chapter as well, the Jain in Tamil Nadu, the Jain is this big enemy for the longest time. There's lots of violence that's sort of cited in these old Tamil texts, including breaking Jain temples in Karnataka in Tamil Nadu, melting down the statues. A lot of it is exaggeration. There's even a reference to how in Tamil Nadu in temple processions, even in the 20th century, they would have an image that representing a Jain impaled on a stake because these are parts elements of history. So there was already some sense that certain traditions even though Shiva and Vishnu compete us, some people say Shiva, Supira, Vishnu, Supira, Devi is Supira, they'll compete among each other. Yet there is an understanding that something they share puts them broadly under one category versus the Buddhist and the Jain. So already you have the seeds that impulse towards unity is present over there. And Brahmins remember, as they are creating this common explanatory framework, they are also essentially channelizing an impulse to unity. To trying to put all of this into one frame is to try and put it under one umbrella and say, this is such and such a thing, even though it doesn't have a name. Now even when I used the word Hindu in this book or Hinduism, in many ways it's an acronistic, right? Because Hinduism appears for the first time in the late 18th century as a word used by a man called Charles Grant. It's very quickly appropriated by Rajarav Muramon Roy within a few, within a couple of decades. Because as a Hindu thinker, he recognized value there. That's when people say that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century. It's the persuasive argument. I myself was persuaded of it at one stage in my life. But then I realized that it eclipses the agency of the person being invented, right? When you're saying an identity is invented, it doesn't add up fully. It was invented by other Hindus only. Ramohan Roy and other Hindus and Hinduism caught on so easily because Hindus themselves recognize that word as encapsulating something they already had. To give you another example, nobody in India called themselves Indians or the subcontinent India. But all the way back to Alexander's time. We have Alexander's informants telling him that our homeland is basically from the Himalayas to the sea and from the Indus to the Eastern sea. This is our homeland. So they had a conception of what their homeland was even if they didn't call it India. So when the word India came, it was easy for us to appropriate it because it was just useful. We already knew what it meant. And that's signifying that word signifying what it meant could be borrowed therefore with great ease. That's what happens with the term Hindu also when you come face to face with the other. Now I give another example towards the end of the book about how five brown people in a room. We're all five different shades of brown. We're even fighting among each other about God. Where is things? At that point, we're not aware of our brownness as a unifying factor. But when a white person enters the room and if the white person is also backed with a danda and he's standing there in an ominous sort of way, then that brownness can become a manner in which to articulate a shade and joined and unified response. You may still fight with each other, but confronted with the white, you end up being able to assert something because now you recognize brownness as a value that you can invest in. That's what happens essentially here. Although they were Hindus in terms of people, part who are part of this common explanatory world and this common explanatory and religious framework. Their assertion of that identity as one thing begins when they come face to face with something else. Initially, that is Islam to a certain extent, but that is still porous at that point. It's not as totalizing as Hindu Tvavadi's would claim. They would say that as soon as Islam came, Hindus were already sort of one people and one nation and all of that. That's not true. But you see the germination. You see the origins of that impulse over there of the modern of the Hindu identity as we put it today. But then in the colonial period with the coming of new technologies, with the coming of Christian Evangelicalism, missionaries and all of that and the growth of communication. That's when this becomes more and more real. That doesn't mean it was invented. It simply means that an older tradition is reinvented as it adapts to a new situation. That's why when in that initial introductory chapter where I talk about how Brahmins and the Hindu are in culture as it fans across the subcontinent, it appropriates as much as it seeds its own values into these local societies and places. Sometimes assuming even the look of someone that would originally have been an enemy. Here also you have the same thing. You have other rival faiths coming in and you feel threatened. Not only do you adapt in that adaptation, you seize on aspects of that enemy to redefine yourself. And that's what essentially happens with the story of modern Hinduism. While talking about the word Hinduism, you said quite beautifully. The name is modern the river is old stop code, which seems to me to be a beautiful way to sum it up. In fact, that earlier interpretation is something you and I chatted about on this show at some point or the other. And I also agreed with you. That was the sort of impression I had. But you think about it a little deeper. It's like all of that is there, but it's not defined in the word plays a part in defining it. And I think about how, you know, and that's a great metaphor about five brown people in a room. Philip Larkin might say their brownness is a kind of grief. But you know, when and it's really interesting that therefore what we call Hinduism, the river not the name is something that is getting defined and getting its shape and getting its trajectory and getting its momentum by the other by the enemy, right? So you've vividly described how there are sort of so many internecine wars happening within what we would retrospectively call Hinduism. You know, you have, you know, Shaiwa scene saying, I have killed 32,000 Jans. You talk of the 17th century account which says that once a JAN gave it dressing down to his Brahman rivals, there was so hopelessly emasculated that it was a surprise that towns people did not last after them. That's the court of the Brahman. Yeah, that's a quote. And that's absolutely hilarious. And it wasn't that at one level you've said that, you know, when Islam comes for the first time, there's a separate culture/community. And you know, it's a white person coming into the room in a sense and to go back to the metaphor, not literally white. And therefore you see that, hey, all the Weshnavites and the Shaiwites and the Jans might think that, oh, we have something in common against those guys. But it wasn't exactly, you know, a linear story like that like Islam came in a different way in the South before this. You've chatted about that in various ways. It was kind of blending in beautifully which you've described and the invasions from the North, Marked departure because it was political power. But it wasn't just one simplistic story that, oh, we are coming in. We're destroying temples. So something much more sophisticated is playing out. So give me a sense of, you know, that you see both impulses in the evidence, right? Now, even for people who say that Hinduism or the Hindu identities are modern thing, then, you know, why is Aiknath talking about in his poetry centuries before? Kabir is talking about Turks and Hindus as two categories because already by the medieval late medieval period, people then on the ground could recognize that there is some difference between these two groups of people. Just as there's a difference between the Brahmin and the Liddh, so too, you can view from another purge, you can see a difference between the Taurushka or the Turk and the Hindu. So there is clearly that kind of a thing happening. Similarly, you find lots of engagement, you you find. And Muslim prince in the Bahamini South and wanting to become a Brahmin and he's called Brithun Jaya, Muntogji Bahamini and he becomes a sannyasi for all practical purposes, master of the Vedas, etc. Kabir in many ways represents a certain kind of syncretic synthesis that's taking place. Even Chhatrapati Shivaji, I got trolled once for saying this and people say, "No, this is not true." But his father and uncle are according to Maratha tradition itself named after a Muslim Sufi saint. And the same Chhatrapati and this appears in the Chitnas Bakkar, Shaitka, Bakkar, 91 Kalmi Bakkar. These Maratha Bakkar is actually talk about this story about how his grandmother couldn't have children. So she went to Shah Sharif, the Sufi saint, was blessed. Two sons were born, she named the older one Shahadji, the younger one, Sharifji, after the Muslim Sufi saint. But the same Shivaji as a king, as somebody exercising political power, frames his king ship in very Hindu terms against the Muslim. So it's interesting that both impulses were always present. You have Vidya Pati's poetry, which I've quoted in that in that introductory chapter where he does talk about how the Taurushkas are pressing the Hindus and so on. Just and similarly, you have lots of evidence of Hindus attacking mosques in Hariyana on each day once in the 14th century, I think, in Kerala because a mosque tiled its roof. The mosque is allowed to exist, but you cannot tile your roof and claim parity with the temple. So awareness, so capacity to live together because everybody was diverse was there, but awareness for feuding and fighting was also there. Both impulses existed together. So it's a complicated story, but it's not, sometimes in reading nuance, we try to also like read too much nuance into things. I think the evidence is pretty clear that that tendency towards fighting and aggression was also there in the past as much as the syncretic side was there. And in some ways, I think the way I would see it is that on an everyday basis, people got along with each other. They had their patterns and their habits, but when power came into the equation, it was possible to use religion as a weapon. And their Hindu kings and muslim kings did often channel religion to assert not only their separate identities, but to use that assertion in political and military ways. So yeah, that's how I would frame it. Yeah, and you know, what you've illustrated also in a chapter is that the divide between quote unquote Hindus and Muslims is not a colonial invention as some narratives go, but it was very much visible. And also there, even in the north, even in the political expansion of Islam through the north, you know, you have pointed out that how first when the invaders would come, they'd just smash all the temples and these barbarians and they destroy the idols and etc, etc. But later on as they gradually settle down, you know, that began to change. They did this lesson less. I think you quote, uh, uh, Eaton talking about, you know, how it was happening at the cutting edge of the moving frontier as it were that when they would conquer, they might do that. But once they've a settle, they wouldn't end at reminded me of this great frame I learned from the economist, man, Carlson of roving bandits and stationary bandits. You must be familiar with it. Well, yeah, where the idea is that, uh, let's say you have people living somewhere, if there are roving bandits, so come and they go, they don't have any incentive to leave anything standing or to build a relationship, they destroy everything. But if you decide as a bandit to come and live there and exploit the people or whatever, then you become a stationary bandit and your incentive change. You don't want to necessarily piss off the local people. You won't plan sort of maybe even look after them like every state essentially is a roving bandit that became a stationary bandit. Because you have an interest now in the land, right? Once you form an interest, then you don't want to just plunder mindlessly because you have an interest now. In fact, there's an example in the chapter about how under Aurangzeb, uh, even when he sent his Mughal governor in Ori Sa and order to, I think, break the idols at Jagannath, uh, the temple in Puri, uh, the Mughal governor basically said, okay, fine, I will do it, but actually didn't do it because the pilgrim economy is so lucrative. He didn't want to lose a source of revenue by plundering, by breaking down the temple. And this is, I thought it was a wonderful story, you know, so the emperor was giving you a, a dictate from, from the capital saying, destroy this, but the governor was like, hmm, if I destroyed, then what about revenue here, you know, the revenue from this temple is something that matters to me. So you have cases like that also happening because once you have an interest in the land, and that's true of everybody, right? But the point on the other also, this is not just an Indian phenomenon. Even within Christianity, the Protestant defines himself as the other to the Catholic church. Now before the Protestant church emerged, you didn't necessarily use the term Catholic church, Catholic church constantly because at that time, there was just the Roman church. And it had a certain value system. It had certain traditions that were followed. Once there was a break and the Protestants emerged with a different interpretation, with a different way of arranging the Bible, you know, sort of celebrating only the Bible, but not so much church traditions came up with a different format of Christianity. Suddenly, you had this distinction between the Catholics and the Protestants. You each needs the other to define who they are. That's essentially what you're seeing in India as well. Bhai Shnavay's need chaiwars to defy what makes them Bhai Shnava versus chaiwais. But together, they also look at the Muslim or the Jain and say, "Okay, we are also not that, but we have something in common and that is what ultimately gets framed under the term Hindu." You know, just taking the thread aside, at one level, you can see the state responding to incentives. The invaders responding to incentives and, you know, when they become stationary bandits, but also, the people are assimilating out of self-interest. They're not assimilating because there's some larger mystical principle. They're assimilating out of self-interest. You want to trade, you want to survive, you want to, you know, become prosperous, which is also why if you just look at self-interest, how it works from the bottom up, which is also why cities will discriminate relatively less compared to rural areas because your incentives have changed. You're part of a larger economic network. Discrimination becomes costly, you know, othering becomes costly. And therefore, just in that, you know, that bottom up, positive some flow, you know, assimilation happens and quote and quote, "toleration happens." And all of those values kind of come from there. You see that bit in the way Brahmins and Chattryas essentially create each other and sort of support each other, right? Now a lot of Orthodox Brahmins will say there are no Chattryas in the Kaliyuga. There are only Shudra kings. And now Shudras, or warlords who are off Shudra or peasant backgrounds would reach a certain level of power and then they'd want to be recognized as official good Chattryas, descended from the sun or the moon or whatever it was. And then what would they do? They would find Brahmins and they would essentially perform these very grand, expensive ceremonies from which the Brahmins also benefited and the king would also benefit. Then the king to burnish and show off his actually authentic Chattryas will build more temples, will sponsor more Brahmins, will build more Vedic part of Shalas. So the Brahmins also benefits by recognizing Himajas Chattryas and the king also in turn continues to patronize the Brahmins at an even grander scale to prove his own Chattryas credentials even though at the beginning the two didn't necessarily think this was possible. So as you said there are incentives that people have other than some kind of lofty, mystical thing. And that's essentially the role of history, right? History is about these twists and turns and often these accidents that end up having lasting consequences and repercussions. And there's a logic question that comes up here which is also relevant for modern times, which is, you know, when you think about top down in position of a worldview versus bottom up assimilation of a way of living, right? And you, you know, one could argue and have discusses before with perhaps you as well. And if you look at the constitution, you know, the the framing of the constitution by an unelected liberal elite could could could feel like an imposition to a society which is marching toward a different kind of beat entirely. And for a moment, leave aside the normative aspect of it and the value judgments, you know, Ambedkar argued absolutely correctly that we are villages at that time were sinks of localism and dens of ignorance and whatever. And that rational is absolutely right. Gandhi argued also correctly that true change can only happen from the bottom up in society can only be changed from within. And this is a fundamental tension which, you know, happens throughout your book and happens in fact, even throughout the centuries that you describe in your introduction that there is a sense by some people of trying to impose either a top down narrative that is necessarily simplistic and that kind of unites all of this or to impose their worldview like in the in your opening chapters of the book, you talk about, you know, how the colonialists first adjezuates and then the protestants and so on. They come with their own view of how all of this is barbarism and they must believe what we believe. And it simply doesn't work beyond the point until political power comes into the picture. So how should we think about this in a fundamental way because I think at one level the liberal impulse in modern times is to arrogantly say that our values are great and you must live by them and etc. etc. And the conservative pushback against that would be that, you know, society is formed in this slow bottom up churning over centuries. You can't change anything by top down dictat that simply doesn't end well. And for this reason, the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle that I admire the most like go clay and agar kar and rana day are people I think of as people with liberal ends and conservative means. But how do we reconcile this because when it comes to for example, like there are certain cases which are pretty obvious like the right to life is important. If you're the state, you want to protect your citizens or something like sati has to be outlawed. That's a fairly obvious case. You don't want to cup and chayat to tell someone that he you can kill your daughter because she married in the wrong caste. But apart from that, how do we think about it? Like you've got chapters which talk about the conflict of, you know, the colonizers trying to improve. pose that law on a Hindu society, which has evolved its own code of laws over centuries across different ways. And you can sense the argument both ways. So how does one think about this and has your thinking on this, you know, also changed over time and as you've been reading all of this literature? I think the question to ask is whether these things can be reconciled or whether all of social change and history is about that tension is that ultimately, especially as we look at states, right, and states getting bigger and bigger and states getting more and more centralized power over a period of time. No society in the world is this centralized in history. So we are in that sense looking at a very strange, you know, unique phenomenon where it's not just centralized, technology, communication, everything is now at its peak efficiency, right? We've never had this level of efficiency, this level of communication, instant feedback, all of this happening, you know, things used to be. Even if you look at the fourth chapter of this book, East India Company, right, when they come into India to conquer for orders to go to London or communications to go to London and come back to it sometimes take an entire year. So where was the question of even asking for permission to start a war because you can't wait for a year. You've got an animated door or you intend to invade someplace. You write to London saying, okay, this is the lay of the land at the moment. This is what we're planning to do. By the time London gets it four months have passed. Then London would write back saying, no, no, no, no, we don't want any more wars. By the then the war is done over the kingdom has been annexed and then London's like, oh, well, if you were next to it, hold on to it. And London often said don't annex. Do not fight wars in India. We don't want wars, but the people on the ground were doing whatever they wanted. So we are now living at a time when all of this has changed. So I don't think, you know, there's any comparison to an earlier period of time in earlier times. I think even then that tension was there constantly between what was actually bubbling up from below and the attempt to create order from above. You know, in the time of the Mughal emperors, why was the death of every emperor such a crisis? Because while the emperors alive, there's a certain stability because a certain order has been imposed under that man. Akbar, for example, is a prime example created a new order, a new way of structuring the empire, a new communications, all of that. But when he dies, when an emperor dies, you don't know firstly who's going to succeed. There's no easy transition to power. You don't know the attitude of the person who's coming in. That's why you have these stories of merchants betting their treasure, people wailing in the streets, you know, anxiety and tension in the cities and the big trading centers. Not because people are missing the king, not because they loyal to the idea of the king. It's because stability has vanished overnight and then a new order has to appear and you don't know who's going to win and what that order will look like. Often what happens is Vijayanagara, when Vijayanagara was defeated in the Battle of Thalikota 1565 and the rulers fled on their elephants with the treasure. It's not like this invading Sultan's came and they were the only ones to plunder the place. Bandits and others living around the place also descend on cities that have fallen because order has vanished. So you know, this tension in society is a constant between preserving order and then something else happening on the ground. And on the ground when people are divided by caste, tribe and other loyalties, you're only looking out for those things, you're only looking out for your interest within a narrow confine, not necessarily some kind of larger thing. This is why if you read Savarkar's histories, one thing that comes through is that Savarkar's always frustrated with the ways with the way Hindus actually behaved versus the way he thinks they ought to have behaved. We have a lot of Hindu historians who would argue that you know, when the first invasions happened from the northwestern frontier, why didn't the kings of South India, the Cholas, etc. rise to the occasion and go and defend their Hindus in the North. Frankly, because they had no interest at that time in those days, they hardly saw it as something that would come and eventually affect them. We now think that that is how they should have perceived it, but that's not how they actually perceived it back in the day. So histories really about tension and I think society even now is about those tensions and how we manage those tensions. Tensions are never going to go away and I don't think we can reconcile them ever, even in some ideal prestige and future where things get even better with technology and all that. They will always be tensions, they will always be competing worldviews, they will be competing ideas of order. And I think there is some validity to the point that you cannot, especially on with so much technology and the capacity to enforce things back in the day. As I said, Aurangzebko order for a temple to be destroyed, but the guy on the ground may not destroy it and the Emperor is not the wiser because where does he know what is actually happening. Today you have the full feedback loop and you have the resources to actually enforce your order and to actually enforce your vision of society or order on society, but society is not prepared for it. Every other change has happened over longer stretches of time. It has taken its time for things to evolve over a period of time. Even when mistakes have been made for people to reconcile with the mistake, it's taken several generations. The constitution, we've got a constitution that on the face of it is perfect. It has all the perfect ideas encapsulated in paper. In practice, it has to operate in a society based on caste. So people vote their caste rather than just casting their vote for the best candidate. Because from bottom up, the constitution isn't, I wouldn't use the word corrupted, but the constitution is being affected by dynamics beyond its control. You can have a book, the book enshrines all the ideals, but reality has its own way of tempering that book of how that book actually ends up being enacted and executed on the ground. The constitution says, untouchability is bad, but untouchability continues in practice sometimes by people who are actually engaged to protect the constitution. So many stories of cops not taking cases that Dalits file, right? They're supposed to guard everybody's rights and protect everybody's rights, but they themselves up creatures of society. No matter what the book says, they are not going to go by what they've been conditioned to believe rather than what a manual that has come in some objective way to them in their office, they're not going to follow those orders, right? So I think it's always this push and pull and the magic of things is really in how that push and pull is managed by society. And right now we're not, I think, doing a terribly good job of it. I'd actually argue that much as a constitution may have been more liberal than society itself, it's a deeply flawed book in the sense that one, it centralizes power too much. It puts state coercion on a pedestal. It effectively makes us subjects and not citizens. There is no protection of free speech, etc, etc. You know, a lot of the things that the state does that we complain about is stuff the state does because the constitution allows it to do that. The constitution should protect the people from the state here at protects the state from the people. But I entirely get the larger point. But they're also, you know, I'm looking at the US now, right? Like even with a long democratic tradition and all of that, you have this whole abortion debate happening in the US, right? Off the back of your head 20 years ago, anybody sitting in the Supreme Court in the US, you would think that they would interpret a constitutional right of this nature in a certain way. But the same justices now have actually come up with a completely different interpretation. It's the same document, but people are interpreting it. Every generation is reinterpreting it to suit their own social dynamics of that particular time. And I think that's that also matters, which is that no matter how good a book is, no matter how perfect a constitution is, ultimately, we are the ones doing the interpretation of it. And therefore, each generation is going to toy along with it in ways that we can't really predict. So a good constitution would be one that somehow has the space to allow that also despite interpretation coming into the picture, they would still manage to hold on to certain fundamentals. That would be the mark of a good constitution beyond that I'm not entirely convinced any constitution can be perfect because it is all dependent. It's all dependent on how people interpret the document. I mean, the point Superchej Bhadra made in his book in his episode with me is that constitutions are circumstantial. So you look at the American constitution, it arises out of a particular ferment. And therefore, it is, you know, super strong on individual rights and federalism, right? Whereas we arise at a time when the country is basically falling apart. Of course, we centralize power and what we basically do is we adopt the colonial state more or less the same apparatus. And you just instead of white rulers, you have brown rulers now, but they're still kind of rulers. And where I would push back a little bit is I think the American constitution is actually incredibly robust. And you see signs of this in the fact that even though, you know, even in the Trump presidency, which people worried about 2016 to 2020, he couldn't actually do any damage because the institutions are mind blowing. And as far as the abortion debate is concerned, I think what the Supreme Court has done now, much as both of us bemoan it, but what it has done now is not outlaw abortion. It's just said that federalism is rooted in our constitution. And this is a matter of the states to decide. We will not decide at a central level. As far as that core principle is concerned, they've been true to the original spirit of the constitution. So, you know, wherever we fall on the particular, like both of us, I'm sure, approach choice, but that that a part if you think of the nation should the states decide. And I think both of us would agree more federalism is a good thing and not a bad thing. And their constitution does work in that regard and ours doesn't before we go in for a break after which we'll, you know, really dig into the rest of your book. I also have a question about those times parked by what you were saying. Like, for example, you pointed out the ridiculous criticism some people have that when the invaders came, why didn't the chola Kings fight because the chola Kings didn't see the country, the way that you see it. These lines on a map didn't exist. And perhaps it didn't even know that some some invasion was happening in the north. How will they know? There's no internet. There's no telegraph. Similarly, when you talk about Orang Zayp telling someone, you know, he destroyed a temple or whatever, how does he know if it's been done or not? He doesn't know. And I'm interested in that kind of self knowledge of the people of that period that there are basically no reliable maps. There is no communication. Everything is vague. You don't know who your people are. You don't really even know what your territory is. You know, everything is kind of up in the air, even at an individual level where you talk about how, when I earlier asked how people see themselves, but even there they are seeing themselves in a very impressionistic, localized kind of way. There's no broader narrative yet within which they'll see themselves. So give me a sense of how over time you've, you know, looked at how, how do people look at themselves? How can we figure this out? What's going on? So, you know, I'd mentioned earlier how even an Alexander's time there was this motion that the land between the Himalayas and the seas is essentially India, right? So people had a sense that this was one cultural zone. This was the center of their world as it were, but it wasn't like they saw it as one country. It was still made up of many kingdoms, of many languages, of many types of people and people were aware also of that diversity and that broad sense that just because this is our homeland in a broad cultural or civilizational sense, it doesn't mean that this is one country where we'll all rise to the occasion and go stand at the borders with our swords. That isn't what existed at that time. So there is some awareness of a shared civilizational space, but not necessarily a shared political frontier that somehow demarcates this from everything else. So there's that one important way in which people, people sense of self-evales is also technology, right? As times pass with increased communication, you have armies moving, look at, and it's not just modernity, look at the the marathas, the Mughal Empire, Ashoka, all the big imperial formations allow for major highways. Highways and movements allow people to sort of traverse large distances in ways that earlier would not be possible. Pilgrim routes, you know, there are these grand Pilgrim routes that develop. In fact, one of these 17th century missionaries in Tamil Nadu was told of a sacred geography of Tamil Nadu, Rameshwaram Sri Rangam, all the local temples, but also wider sacred geography going all the way to Dvaraka, Kashi, other places in the subcontinent as a whole. Because there was in general awareness that these Pilgrim networks also exist. Again, that doesn't mean one united uniform homogenized identity, but it means some sense of awareness of the wholeness within which there are smaller granular pieces, like a mosaic, you know, you have the smaller pieces, but together they form some kind of a picture. Nobody's really zoomed out and looked at the big picture fully, but they're aware that they has to be a big picture, even though they occupy the smaller sort of zones. So it's not as if they were completely oblivious, but at the same time this was not their definitive way of defining identity to again go back to their Manu, they were they even caught just because you were living in India, did not mean you were Indian, you would define yourself in other ways. Again, there I would say face to face. Now technology comes into the picture, which means movement becomes easy. Already under the Marathas, you find the Marathas are fanning out across India, right? And by the by the 18th century, so that you have them in Thanja, you have them in Banaras, by the 19th century, I think the most dominant and the strongest and perhaps even the numerically largest group of Brahmins in Banaras from Harashjan Brahmins, because generations move, a go people move there and their families continue to live there. They still Marathjan Brahmins, but they enjoyed a lot of hold and control in Banaras. So it was possible for communities and people to move around in that in that particular format. But then again faced with an other is when you really have the national idea emerging. Because the British have come in, technology now gives you railways, etc. So you can move around, you have a clear sense of the boundaries, you're studying the English language, you're getting textbooks, which have maps drawn in them. Now suddenly you're able to look at the big picture, but there again, it's not to say that the British invented India. It is to say that the British now created this way of looking at India as conquerors because they needed to have a sense of India to be able to control this place. And Indians not only appropriated it, but used it to turn it against the British and in the process assert their own identity as one people. That is very much a modern phenomenon in the 19th century. That can't be denied. Before that, you have a general civilizational sense of being part of one broader, as I said, explanatory framework, a one broader culture. But it's transition into nationalistic identities is very much a modern 19th century phenomenon in many ways. Riding off the back of colonialism, technology and things that the colonial state introduced, which Indians appropriate and use against the colonial state. Let's try a quick break and more on the other side. Many of the things I have learnt in my life, I had to learn on my own. I think you'll agree with me that our education system doesn't teach us so many things that we need to make the most of ourselves in this world. I learned my lessons when life happened to me and I happened to be paying attention. For many years now, I've been thinking, what are the essential life lessons that everyone should learn to be able to live a complete life? I invited my friend Ajay Shah to join me on the intellectual challenge of figuring this out and then we decided to put together a course where we would actually teach this stuff. So we created life lessons which you can check out at lifelessons.co.in. In this 5 week course running across 5 Saturdays, we have put together 15 webinars that are intended to help launch you down journeys of discovery. We will speak about learning how to learn, learning how to think, mindsets, mental models, clear writing, how to communicate better, quantitative intuition, probabilistic thinking, the history of thought, the foundations of economics, and even practical matters like how to think about personal finance and how to think about personal health. People who do the course also get to be part of a larger community that will have in-person meetups once a year. Basically, while we've always been sharing what we have learned in a piecemeal way in our show and our writings here and there diffused, this is an effort to synthesize our knowledge for you. So please head on over to check out life lessons at lifelessons.co.in. Never stop learning. Welcome back to the scene on the on scene. We are still in the middle ages, Manu is still here with me. And let's sort of, so far in the narrative, we've reached this place where this syncretic land is assimilating everything, including perhaps Islam though there are the stirrings of a unified Hindu identity, but there are only stirrings right now and by and large, it is still okay, but it begins and by the way there is a there are one or two Hindu texts which try to give even Islam a puranic origin which Shiva Vishnu sponsor the creation of Islam. So these are late texts, but yeah, we do have attempts to even try and put force Islam into this framework. No, I love the open sourcing of this and it is in fact quite possible that had the West not come and had given a little more time, it might solidify into something. But tell me about what happens when colonization begins in a sense and what you've done in your wonderful chapter where you talk about the Portuguese and what they do and go on elsewhere is the you know is a fundamental point about how unlike the East India company right at the start later on these guys haven't come as peaceful traders. There is an intent here which is an imperial intent. So tell me a little bit about that and then we'll talk about how they kind of look at you know the natives. You know one of the things I've done in this book is to not just look at what the white man did here but also why they were doing it and sometimes this was because of dynamics in their own home countries. So in the Portuguese also you find that their rulers themselves were motivated by an imperial motive and they had this sense of God being sort of backing their guns. It was a guns and it was God behind the guns sort of enabling them and sort of pushing them to go out and civilize the world or whatever it was and later in the fifth chapter you find the same thing you know in Britain there's the growth of an evangelical public and because of that you find evangelical motives coming into India as well and and affecting British policy in India. So the home country is also a matter but what I found very fascinating was and there's this scholar called Partha Mithar who you know originally in a very fine book called much maligned monsters brought this to light is is how when the first or the early Europeans started coming to India it's interesting how so many of them looked at these Hindu gods and temples and automatically wrote of them as monsters because they were like these have to be monsters because in their conception of the world there was God and that God had to be the Christian God and everything else was either paganism or some kind of representative of Satan or the devil and that's why all the Hindu gods were lumped under this sort of master category of monsters and devils so that you know they that one point there's there are a bunch of people who go to Calicut in Kerala where what you actually have is a Shiva temple and the the Calicut's Amaran also has a Devi in fact when Vasco dogma first goes into the Devi's temple he thinks it's a church and that's the virgin Mary because he's not yet got a negative picture in his mind but a lot of the but there's actually these other travelers who write about how the king of Calicut worships a devil the devil has the feet of a cock and he's wearing these crowns and he's got these fangs and this is the devil that the king of Calicut worships and the book actually has a picture a later depiction of this devil of Calicut called DioMus or DioMu and it's quite funny because DioMu actually comes from Devam and Devam is what we in Majalam called God so somewhere these these people heard the word Devam and they decided oh this is the name of this devil that is worshiped in Calicut by the king of Calicut so and and other places the Vijayanagara they see another Simha for example and and they'll be like oh what is this strange thing with fangs and ripping apart another human being this has to be another devil so in that initial phase you find a lot of these missionaries and European travelers coming in and first encountering Hindu society and they've already come in with a framework a mental framework in which there is God and Christianity as the religion there's no notion that there can be multiple religions or religious systems in the world there's only Christianity and everything else is pretension and here what you have a spagonism and often what would happen is even as Christianity spread through Europe right Europe was also originally under so-called pagans people there also had groves and images they worshiped and trees they circled and all of that and they often had this argument that oh inside these eyes are these sinister forces, there are stories about how idols are broken and flies and strange beasts jump out of them and all of that. So they are coming from that perspective and they assume that these idols are also ugly monsters and somehow Hindus have to be saved from them. What happens though is that the Portuguese of course come in. Initially of course there's a co-operation because the Portuguese are new in the land. But within a few decades you start seeing that Evangelic are very missionary motive affecting state policy. And the kings are fully supportive, there are these groups of missionaries, the Jesuits etc and three other orders who've come into Goa and who start seeing conversion and you're setting forced conversions. It's not pleasant to talk about it because I think people also fear that a lot of this can be hijacked for right wing politics today and today's world. But at the same time we also can't ignore the fact that there was a lot of forced conversion. You have cases so many temples the deities had to move because the original temples were salted or there was a threat of assault and the gods had to move back. Even now in Goa you have festivals by deities come back to their original seats, spend a certain number of days there, there's a big festival and then they go back to their new homes. It's maintaining the connection to the old place but you actually had to vacate that old place completely. One of my first vices to go was to Deva Ryland and I remember church there right on top of the hill which I think was originally a gunpatty temple or something and was broken down and converted into a church. You have scholars who've written about how images or idols of gods were broken down and converted into chandeliers and other objects that were used in churches. So there's clearly some kind of persecution taking place. People convert, some of them convert out of relatively let's say materialistic or selfish motives, they see opportunity, they see that this is the way to get in with the new power in the land whatever it is. Sometimes people convert for very personal reasons. We have one case where a Brahmin wanted to marry a woman of lower caste as it were and since they couldn't do it in the Hindu order they both converted to Christianity and they could get married. But there was a lot of forced conversion, whole communities had to flee, gods had to flee and this exodus of gods is a phenomenon in its own right and a lot of these communities that played still have those memories like they kept those oral narratives alive of their having to depart go in this period. So what you see again here is not just religion but religion backing state power and becoming something else. So you're not really saying Christianity is bad but when Christianity and state or Christianity has a totalizing concept saying that this is the only right way, marries itself with state power and the state power state is also convinced that this is the only way and you try to get people to or force people into that into that particular mold. That's what initially happens in places like Goa. So of course when missionaries of this period start going out into parts of India where the Portuguese are not in power where it's Hindu Rajas naturally that tone shifts and their own understanding of religion starts to change. They start realizing that maybe it's not just Christianity that's the religion in the world. Maybe there are other religious systems. Then how do you convert then how do you reconcile to your own idea of self as Christians and your original framework and the fact that you're looking at a different framework here. So basically it's this what happens is there is a realization that okay while in Goa we might be able to convert people because there is support from the state in other places in the subcontinent if you actually want to sell a new religion that strategy is not going to work because you simply don't have the fire power. You have to come up with new creative strategies. What I'm also struck by is you know just thinking from an economics lens I'm struck by the incentives of the Jesuit missionaries as it were who are here because I'll take a modern analog and I'll talk about NGOs see if you say anything bad about NGOs will get cancelled again. So this is not going to be a very happy episode for you man who many reasons to cancel you most of them yet to come. But if you look at the incentive of an NGO the primary incentive of an NGO is not to solve the problem which it is putatively solving but to raise funding and it can only raise funding by pretending that the problem that it is trying to solve is much worse than it is. And therefore you have extreme narratives emerging now even though for example take climate change climate change is real we are causing it with our actions and we need to do something about it. But I always discount the most alarmist stories because every NGO in this field is incentivized to paint a bleaker picture then otherwise is a case because that's where the funding comes from and I'm taking a modern example but this is basically if you just follow the incentives basically been this way. And similarly the Jesuit priests as it were the Jesuit missionaries there incentive is to paint as bleaker picture of the Hindu religion or the local religion as possible and therefore you have exaggeration upon exaggeration and some of them are nuts and I'll go through some of them because it's so entertaining you're you know for anyone who anyone who's read Manu knows he's not entertaining but for those who haven't this is like game of thrones within the pages of the world. Within the pages of a book you speak of one guy called from the past called Odorek Mati Osi who in the early 14th century described an idol which is half man and half ox and give it responses out of its mouth and consume the blood of exactly 40 versions on a regular basis suggest as Christians give their children to church service you know in India mothers and flowers pledge their sort of offsprings heads and you know some of the stuff that they talk about are kind of almost like littorotic like erotic fantasies are coming out there you speak about her john owington writes in the 17th century that quote in Surat women possess clandestine networks to pick men of the streets to pleasure them in one case a lady discovered unhappy leader person so brought to bed was a lawfully varied husband right in another place after a grandson of a birds a skilled you know the there's a shrine built to the dead prince and you point out that you know there are stories about how this is a place where secluded ladies go they are track normally trapped and sexually staffed in her arms but they want to give their passion court the food for which it hungered stopcodes so they're choosing from a bouquet of male pilgrims as it were and you know there are another stories about how they was just naked holy man and you write quote many young married women came to see this holy man it was added and taking him in square brackets that is his member devoutly in the hands kissed him while his body owner stroke the silly heads muttering some fill the prayers which is kind of fascinating and it gives you a sense of how repressed these guys are because you know that's where the Victorian morality also comes from which we can talk about later and of course you have Indian versions later like one of how Jesuits eat children fried in butter which is a lovely one to come out of goa because hey you know butter garlic and all that I guess the fighting stereotypes of your own stereotypes yeah yeah so it's it's pretty magnificent so it seems like a sort of a fake news era but then there's a vicious cycle where there is no information so this information which is coming from your people almost therefore get sanctified and then it gets repeated and repeated and a future person who repeats the story will point to you as a source and eventually you won't know where the source is so tell me a little bit about these sort of interesting narrative battles that are going on where you begin with an instinctive distrust of a religion you can't grok because it doesn't fit into your Christian framework and then you exaggerate and exaggerate and it just becomes something ridiculously monstrous still the point at the later violence almost seems absolutely just afraid like these guys are savages yeah I mean the examples you just cited there all quotes and basically the one the man whose penis apparently was a sunny and as far as I know a lot of these these penis rings it's that and that's the other thing you know these people saw these penis rings in their like oh my God what is this strange thing but it was actually to repress desire it was a Mark of your repressed desire that you would you would pay us your penis that way and have a ring on it or whatever I have to say I don't know if they have that is that was the beyond the purview of this book but the point is that is a sunny ass but you can almost visualize this right because 17th century missionary or a traveler from Europe here seeing a naked man on the streets who's covered in bus mom or ash or whatever and all these women are going and talking to him freely but praying to him and taking blessings from him he's like wow these women must have something wrong with them if they're okay getting blessings from a naked man and clearly the naked man by his very nudity has something wrong with him that's the wish that's the gaze through which this guy is looking at them there is an internal logic for why the sadhus naked there is an internal logic for why even the Jane monk is naked right that there is an internal internal logic to it which is not with understandable or can't be grasped by a foreigner similarly you know the NGO analogy that you gave while I will steer clear of it so as not to be cancelled there is a point in in in this context which is that often titillating stuff like this and often literature that convinced readers back home in Europe that these are pagans barbaric terrible customs you know burning their women all the women are also actually unfettered and they have these naked sadhus this is their idea of religion and we are here to save them now how can we save them we put in the effort to put in the effort we need money so this kind of writing was also oriented to not only entertain people back in Europe but also to get sponsors to keep funding the missionary enterprise as it was so that's one thing that's happening what happens though is that sometimes you end up applying the wrong thing to wrong places so I found it very curious that even that odoro Matthew you mentioned he talks about passing through the carol a coast or something he talks about sati and how women are burned alive and that's the other thing right they come up with their own logic for sati why was sati invented because husbands feared the lust of their women And that's why and women because they were so lustful, they started poisoning their husbands and murdering them. So as a preventive to prevent being poisoned, men started burning women who became widows. Saying, "See, if you poison us and we die, you have to burn. So you better not poison us." This is the weirdest logic for Sati. Like Sati was invented, so women would not poison their husbands. That is the logic a lot of these Europeans gave to Sati. But what was curious was that he said that and he said this con, he spoke about Sati in the context of Kerala. Now Kerala is one place where Sati is actually outlawed traditionally. In the sense, most of the upper caste communities that would be prone to something like this were material in you. Kings were material in you. The Nairs and the landed communities were material in you. Even among the the the the the Averna or the non-cast communities like the Edervas, many of the families were material in you. They were Muslims were material in you. So the concept of Sati doesn't even arise because a woman can replace one husband with another. Sometimes they could have multiple husbands. So not a big deal. My own great-great-grandmother came out of the system. Her two husbands in the 1870s, one after the other. So no Sati in that context. That leaves the Brahmins. Now the Brahmins of Kerala are the Nambudri's. And the Nambudri's have water called 64 Anaracharams, apparently given by Parusharama, in which it is specifically said no Sati is possible. So as and in fact as late as the 19th century, when of outside I think a Tamil lady wanted to commit Sati in Kerala because she has a Tamilian believed in Sati. The queen of Travenko said no because Sati is not accepted in this part of India. I will escort you to the frontier in the border. You can cross into Tamil territory and commit Sati there but not within my territory. So the reality is that in Kerala you could not have committed Sati at the time. Odori Khmatusi was writing and yet he places Sati here. What happens is these guys had read earlier travelers. They had all mentioned Sati, this women poisoning, husbands, therefore husbands burning women. And that in order to look authentic you end up citing the same stories and feeding into that same loop again and again and again. And in this even the gods were not spared. You know one amusing story is about how Shiva had a, I don't know if you read that, where Shiva has this enormous penis and how because it's so he has a lady on his back and he says om and om is presented here as the words do you desire now anybody who's in India knows that om doesn't mean anything like this and she says um which means I desire but number she stuck to his back so he has to get her off the back and then when he gets her off the back his penis is too large and it has to be so therefore he cuts it down into pieces then he discovers that the goddess does not have genitals herself so the genitals have to be created and from the blood emerge you know the mountains and the and all kinds of natural phenomena whatever. And Shiva's penis is also used to sort of shape geographical details etc. These are all bizarre interpretations that a half-picked interpretations in that puranic stories do present gods having carnal instincts. So Shiva does for example lust for mohini that is a story from the puranas but here you have some outline of a story that has somehow reached this foreigner who has then added his own masala to it and created this you know geography creating penis and you know om and om given all kinds of bizarre meanings because they're not necessarily interpreting the sculpture for the sake of academic inquiry or to understand it they've already decided this is a barbaric culture they are therefore entertaining and amusing people back home and trying to get them to support this missionary venture that's what's going on and initially it works but as Europeans become more and more exposed to India as the trade routes open up more and more ships more and more fathers come they start going more and more into the interiors of the country they start realizing that a) this is not quite true hindus are slightly most sophisticated than what they were used and be nobody has any appetite to convert that's not just not happening when that happens is when they realize we need to start studying what these people's religion is what do they themselves think of God and then we'll try and beat them and compete with them for the religious for their religious allegiances you know and illustration of this kind of sort of simplistic thinking just hit me where I remember 15 years back a friend of mine in England said a friend of his British woman who is writing some crime novel part of which is in India and has an Indian character so can she please ask me a few questions to get some background and I said okay and it turned out that her character though she had named her character her version pill and I said that look this is not possible you cannot have a name like this you know her version comes from the North pill they comes to the South it's simply not possible and she didn't get it and I tried to tell her that you know it's like someone in Europe being called Jean-Louis Smith you know something like that which is still much more possible believable much more believable although after hearing this for all you know Harba Jansing might pop up somewhere on Twitter and accuse you of denying his version pill you mean Harba Jappal I should probably Google it before yeah yeah or Subramaniam Singh it's anyway so another sort of part I was fascinated by is that this is one strand of Christian thinking about India but it's not all like this that a similar to bottom up process we described earlier is also happening you have a fascinating section about this group of people called nasrani's who have assimilated in the sense that they call themselves Christian and they are descendant from one of the apostles or whatever and and yet they have a lot of the local customs and all of that and the Jesuit missionaries can't grog that they're completely mad at that and later on when the locals start rising up against the Christians they leave the nasrani's alone they know what are the nasrani's are among them because they are assimilating they are part of that kichri but these Jesuit beggars are not right so tell me a bit about the nasrani's and what what else is kind of happening because we see this with Islam also that you know there is this the if one may call it puranic there is this puranic spirit where okay come in put your stories here take our stories blend them you can be one of us and you know so are there these multiple processes playing out multiple so the nasrani's are primarily what we call Syrian Christians in Kerala and when the Portuguese first came they discovered that yes they had the cross they believed in Jesus and they had in a knowledge of the Bible and so on but everything else about them was in quotes pagan they sacrificed cocks to their saints on holy occasions they participated in temple rights and and you know their local leaders were often appointed and rat and ratified and sort of sorry confirmed in their positions by local Hindu Rajas they were very well entrenched in local society and very much behaved like an upper caste group within the broader social fabric of that place and not just some kind of separate community as it were so that was the nasrani's as they existed and the nasrani's claimed always that they were converted by St. Thomas one of Jesus' apostles who had come in 52 AD and so on the dates are not proved proven or proved I don't think you can even prove them ever but the point is that is the tradition in any way for at least well over a thousand years Christians had been present in Kerala now the Portuguese come here and they and that there is in fact a quote by a later Christian critic himself he says that the Portuguese didn't just try to convert people to Christianity they tried to convert them into becoming Portuguese that is it's not just your faith it is also your culture so they said your faith is also problematic because they thought it was corrupted and the nasrani's did not recognize the Pope they were they were you know allied to the Persian church and again within Christianity there are lots of like you know different groups and sects right so the Eastern churches are very different from Rome the language used is different the customs are different and the nasrani's had their own sort of very Hinduized religion and again I go back to your podcast with Dev that where he mentions this right when Islam comes and when Christianity comes into India it's no longer the commodity that came from the land where it originated it becomes something else in India it's still Christianity but it takes its own distinct shape and that's what essentially you see with the nasrani's and the Portuguese don't like it and just as they put a persecuted I suppose Hindu communities in goa in Kerala they persecute the nasrani's as well and one whole chunk of nasrani's does now move over to the Catholic faith and they sort of say okay fine we accept the book another another group actually rebels and even now you know the the Kerala church of the nasrani's has been split up into different groups and nasrani's are no I mean in one sense they are one group but in terms of their religious affiliations they they sort of scattered into different groups over the years partly because of this intervention by the Portuguese and there's this funny quote in fact 1806 for so one of the travenko rajas meets a missionary a British missionary and the guy says that oh yes you know I'm a Protestant and the the British that is my people and your nasrani's we all belong to the same faith and the rajas simply couldn't get his head around it is like how's that even possible you know yes you may have the cross and the Bible or whatever but to me you look like completely different people so you know even when people say that Hinduism wasn't one united uh is sort of phenomenon actually Hindus looking at Christianity or Islam in India would also not see Christianity or Islam as one united for phenomenon because that also had very local shapes and flavors in this particular country it's a very India sort of based thing and that I think they they struggled with as well some of the missionaries in trying to get their head around how easy it was even for their converts now even the the Jesuits who did convert people it was very difficult for them to get people to renounce caste converts would bring their caste into the church it is very difficult for them to get to get to get the persuade these people to give up polygamy because they were like no men can have multiple lives this is our culture whether you like it or not so we've come over to your side doesn't mean that we're going to give up these cultural attributes and over a period of time especially where these fathers are operating in Hindu rule territories or territories that are not under European control they have to make these compromises which also begs the question then is that still Christianity or is it a transformed something else you know a transformed variant or transformed descendant of that original Christianity from outside that takes root here where you have in South India you actually are fathers who were saffron groups and they were ticker because their Christianity is highly localized. And by the end of it, you even have grants being given to some churches in which it says that this grant is given by Sachin Satcha Hindu ruler in Tamil Nadu, for example, around Shiva Ganga, I think this example comes from. And if you upset this grant to this church, it's like killing the sacred cow, whereas maintaining the grant consistently in future times is like feeding Brahmins. So you have the motive of the Brahmins in the sacred cow used to actually shelter Christian interests because Christianity has been hinduized in these particular contexts, as opposed to in places like Goa, where state power came into the picture. So that's one of the themes above this book, which is that it's not really a clash of religions. Religions will always engage in debates and quarrels or whatever. But it is when power comes into the equation that identity formation becomes very important and identity formation becomes militant and aggressive on both sides. Power backing evangelicals and missionaries led to all kinds of cruelties. And similarly on the Hindu side, it was that quest to preserve power or maintain power or assert power that leads to Hindu identity paving the way to Hindu Thva as we know it today. And I guess that whole process, where the power game requires identity formation, identity depends on definition, definition requires on drawing lines like earlier you spoke and in your book you've spoken about how that beautiful open tapestry of what was Hinduism suddenly started getting defined outer borders. When once you started pinning those words down, Hinduism is this, it is not this. Similarly in the case of the Nassranis, the moment you start questioning them, are you Christian? It means you're defining the word Christian in a particular narrow way and you're limiting that tapestry as well, assuming there is, there's only one way to be Christian. That there's only one way to be that. And again, that's a top down process, fighting the bottom up assimilation, which otherwise happened and is limiting. I'm also interested in how during this period, the locals reacted like I can see different kinds of reactions that you've described. One kind of reaction is that you don't fight back overtly, but you kind of adjust to the situation. So for example, when there's an exodus of gods happening, you describe how people are hiding their deities under water or they're burying it underground. And in some cases, they're very creative use of decoy gods. That you put some other decoy idol, the Christian guy comes and takes away the decoy idol and then you put your original back or whatever you hide your original. That's one kind of response. Another kind of response is almost a kind of jugar that you tweak the rules a little bit. So even if someone leaves a religion, they can come back. You can repurify yourself by taking a bath or having conga jala or whatever. And that's a kind of jugar thing. And the third one is just outright violence. That you just cannot take it anymore. So you're going for it. Like the particular missionaries that you describe, they've just built a temple. They're over there at the site. They are kind of brutally killed. And one of them, because he doesn't do the equivalent of shouting Jashwira, is it worth? He's basically his head is smashed and the blood is smeared upon the idol. So give me a sense of what are the responses, taking shape at this point, which kind of also seem, in different ways, not organized, not formed. There's no Hindu nationalism yet. But there's a proto version of it taking place in these acts of resistance. Yeah, I mean, that's why I like the word impulse, because you can see that impulse emerging because of this. And so the response has two contexts. One is in places like Goa, where the Europeans are already in power. And the other is places like Cali-Kurt, Madurai, or other places in India, where these debates are happening or this encounter with missionaries is happening under Indian Hindu rulers itself. In places like Goa, exactly as you said, people came up with creative ways of response. Of course, one was to flee. You have people actually lock-stocking battle moving. The other was to hide their gods and to take their gods away. But they're also, even if you strip your god out of Goa, what you often found is that people would build even greater temples in the new spot. It was almost like you're taunting the Portuguese, but also reasserting your own identity and that commitment to that god, saying they're OK. We had to take you away from your original seat, not ideal. But in your new seat, we will build you something grander. And that is something the Portuguese hated. They hated the fact that these idols were being sort of saved from Goa and put up just outside the bowed borders in this very grand sort of form. A third way was people would earn money and go and pump that into temples outside. Another thing the Portuguese were not happy with. The Portuguese also tried to control and police what habits people had. You can't squat to urinate. You can't have this kind of music. You can't enter your house. We all take off our chappels when entering the houses. No, that shouldn't be done anymore. Habits were sort of policed because as that guy said, you have to convert change their culture itself. In these places, the resistance was more and more creative and sometimes very violent. Because of this, you have cases where a Padri visits the village and the villagers go out shouting, et cetera. And beat up one of his attendants, not him. One of his, I think, Indian attendants itself. But in response, some seven temples are demolished and they told you can't reconstruct them. So it is violent. It is painful. And I think it would be harsh to deny that these were violent episodes. And violence can also create communities. When you're persecuted, your sense of identity grows stronger because you are persecuted. Your internal difference is vanished because you're persecuted as a group. So even if you don't see yourself yet as a group, when you're all persecuted for being part of something, then that becomes your new identity. Or there's a germination there of a new identity. So that's happening in Portuguese rule territory. But what's happening outside? Now, that's actually quite interesting and sometimes very amusing because these fathers would go and debate Hindus. One thing that's consistent across centuries is that a lot of these Hindu discussions in their response would not deny Christianity. They would say, fine, we accept Christianity and we believe everything you're saying about Jesus. But this is how God opened up a way to heaven for you. For God has given us in our country a different way. So you had God's son in the form of Jesus. We had Vishnu take 10 avatars in our country, both are equally valid because God is like a spiritual shopkeeper. He's given different products to bring different people to his counter. He's got different products and he gives different people what they want. And the missionaries refuse to accept it. They said, this is not some buffet. God is only one, which means they can be only one way to God, which means they can only be one book of God. And that is what you have to come and pledge your loyalty to. And we will not therefore accept this idea that there are multiple paths to God, to which the Hindus of the counter say, "In that well, if God only intended one book and one religion to guide us, then why didn't he give it to everybody on the world? "In the world. Why only to you? And why do you have to now come and tell us? That doesn't make sense. God is omnipresent and omnipotent. He should be able to give this to everybody. Sometimes they'd have debates back and forth on this. The missionaries, I think in these Hindu territories, therefore realize they would have to learn something about Hindu ideas. In order to puncture Hindu claims and pretensions. So in Calicut, there's this guy called Father Finitio. I think in the court of the Xamarin of Calicut. And he's debating and he's looking at your gods. You have Krishna. What was Krishna's greatest thing? He was dancing around with gopis. His mother was beating him with the churn stuff and he was stealing butter. Is this really how God is to be conceived? Is God capable of such petty silly things? To which the Hindus in that court will say, "Well, that's okay. I'm impressed that you know so much about Krishna and you've done your homework and your research. But if Jesus was really divine, then how could somebody put him up on a cross? And how did he end up dying? Did God have no other way of saving humanity than making Jesus suffer like this?" So there are logical inconsistencies in your religion also. Then they would say that, "Oh, how can you worship God through an idol, like an idol, such as Rock and Stone and Wood and Metal? There's no God in there." And they would say, "That's okay. We understand that idols are not God. They're representations of God." And we use them as an emblematic of divinity, not as the divine presence itself. And if really idols are such a problem, why is it that you have images of the Virgin Mary that you take out in processions and so on? So both sides would bat each other's practices and try and figure out how to puncture each other's claims in Hindu territory. Is there it was still an academic debate? Where is it places like Goa? It became much more violent and much more real. And this whole, I think this whole demographic anxiety that Hindu Thva has today about numbers. You know, what is the total number of Hindus? And is the number of Muslims increasing? You can see some of that stemming from the same period because I think I gave the example of a Salat in Goa, which in one century, I think at the beginning, had I think eight, in the 15th century or something had, no, sorry, 16th century had some 8,000 Christians against a population of 100,000 people. But within a century that flips. It's over a lack of Christians and the rest of the population of the Hindu population is now a minority. And this affects the appearance of the place. The gods have to leave the culture of the place, changes the language changes, the clothing changes, a lot of these things change. And for people living there, now, we can always say these are dynamic events of history or whatever, but you can almost sense for a person living there, just as today we in our country now, those of us people who don't like Hindu nationalism or majoritarianism, and we often see lemons on Twitter. I don't recognize my country anymore, things are changing. And that is a genuine lament because you're seeing that. For these people also living in that time, seeing everything around them change and not being able to do something about it, is bound to have created certain grievances and a certain attitude towards what was happening. So I think that's also interesting. The sales at numbers you pointed out was in the late 16th century, there were 8,000 Christian converts against a population of 80,000. But by the 18th century, there were one lack Christians and barely 3,000 of other faith. So it's completely kind of decimated. I'm also interested. by this sense that is coming up over time. That actually this pagan religion, what we discussed as, you know, religion of monsters is a little more sophisticated than that. You know, what you were earlier saying about idols and God, they only symbolize God and you speak about how missionaries over a period of time got a more sophisticated view of Hindu ideas. And therefore, this was a problem to them because the earlier stereotype was gone, the rezor de etra was beginning to crumble at the edges. Sort of so tell me about this also because this process happens and the violence goes down, but nevertheless the demographics undergo that, you know, drastic change that you talk about. So knowledge can be empowering, but knowledge can also break your own prejudices, right? And when you're so convinced that you already have the answers and you're here to save everybody else, but here people are turning around and saying, why are you here? We don't want to be saved. We've already got our way to get saved. Our gods have shown us our own path. We don't need yours. That creates a crisis of identity for the missionaries also. They need to figure out how they can now sell their religion. And in many cases, it actually is selling their religion, you know, in this amended sort of context where people have to now be persuaded. You can't always use the danda. You have to now persuade them and show them why Christianity is better. So you have some missionaries like Robert O'Daynobili in Madurai who essentially Brahmanizes Christianity. You know, he starts wearing the Poonool of the sacred thread, wears the saffron robes, teaches the Bible as a way to learn Sanskrit, maintains caste, allows people who come, Brahmin's who've converted, he says, okay, you can continue to wear a sacred thread. I'll just put a cross on top of it. So he gives them a new sacred thread with a cross. If you're a non-Brahmin, then you're allowed into the church, but you have to sit separate from the Brahmin. So he creates a caste system. He creates a caste system with his own colleague because he says, okay, everybody associates the Jesuit fathers with, you know, some kind of crude foreign religion. I'm anyway now dressed like a Brahmin. So I have to maintain a caste system between you and me. So to white men now follow the caste system, one of them unwillingly, the other one quite willingly, you know, quite well, to the extent that he goes to go for a meeting and refuses to eat with his other, you know, compatriots and countrymen because he'll only eat food cooked by a Brahmin. That's the level to which he has to Hinduize his message in order to make it palatable to people in Madurai. So that's one response that's there. The other is of course just having more and more investigation into the ideas behind Hinduism itself. One thing what would happen is in conversations with Brahmin's the missionaries would realize that Hindus do not deny the idea of one God. You know, many of them would say, of course, there is only one God, but they believe that God can take different forms and manifest himself in different ways. And that is what we worship through our temples, etc. But the fundamental truth is that there is only one God. And this is various forms of that God. Now that creates a problem because you assumed that these were just blanket polytheists who had no conception of the one God. So but it's here they're saying, no, no, one God we accept. It's just that we still we also accept the all the other gods and juniors and subordinates. And the European polytheists, they are familiar with the pagans. Don't have any such sophisticated. Yeah, although they're also there are now studies showing that the ancient Greeks, etc. might also have had a notion of one God under whom there are all these other subordinate gods. So it here with more like a conglomerate, it's like a whole like family tree of of deities. And you know, you go to each based on what you want. And but ultimately everyone represents that one higher power. This then means you have to start studying these ideas more closely. So now there's a quest to find the sacred texts. What are the sacred texts of the Hindus? Now they read the puranas and they're confused because the puranas full of Krishna, Shiva, you know, all these stories. And some of them are not these stories. Some of them are confusing stories. There's mythology, there's legends. It's very tough for an outsider to make sense of it. So the best the outsider can do is to try and co-opt the Hindus by becoming Hinduized in many ways. And that's what happens in great measure in South India. And the Catholics especially in the post, like the initial flush of Portuguese anger, Ingoa, that is said, in a lot of other parts of South India, they do find a way to come to terms with local society. And their argument shifts the shifts to, okay, your religion is fine. We accept that it is one rung on the ladder to God, but ours is better. So then the argument is not that yours is paganism and devil worship and monster worship. It's fine. You have some notion of God, but your notion has been corrupted. And we are now here to teach you the correct thing. God has now sent us to get rid of the corruption and teach you the good thing. So that's essentially the argument shifts. The argument is no longer that the Hindus are completely ignorant. The argument is no, no, no, your ancestors knew. But what's happened is you've now lost your way. We will now bring you back to the correct way and the correct way leads towards the Bible. You know, speaking of Robert, the the nobili he also at one point says, quote, I shall become an Indian to save the Indian stop quote indicating that the whole thing is a tactical conversion that, you know, he's pragmatically recognizing that a Brahmin to give up the sacred thread is too much. So why don't I put a cross on it? Why don't I modify it? Why don't I dress up like them? Why don't I follow those customs? Similarly, you talk about his older contemporary Thomas Stephens, who composes something called the Christopher, or the Piranha of Christ in a blend of the Marathi and Konkani languages. And I'm assuming this would again be tactical that I want to achieve something. I want to convert these people. So let me kind of do this. And there is an intention here. And you also have another response that is not driven by intention, but I guess automatic assimilation, which is what we discussed earlier about the Nassranis. Is there also a third sort of questing, which is now intentional, but it's genuine questing to, you know, treat the local religions with respect and try and actually figure it out. Because I can imagine there might be Christians who go there and your first instinct is, oh my god, these are pagans. Your second instinct is here. You know, they actually good guys. Let me chat with them sometimes. And then you say, hey, actually what they're saying is making sense. Why was Christ run across, you know, and isn't there idea one God more sophisticated than mine, et cetera, et cetera. So were those journeys also taking place in these times at the same fact? In fact, some in the 18th century forget his name, none. He's not in the book, but there's another example of this father in North India. And he for one of these kings, one of these Hindu Rajas, he creates a text which is like a dialogue between a Hindu and a Christian. And he actually what removes very strategically certain aspects of Christianity, like the virgin Mary and her worship, the idea of the Trinity. Because because Hindus would sometimes counter saying that if God is one, as you're saying, why do you have the concept of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost? Because you're also then dividing God, God into three parts. How can you then say it's one God? So he he avoids those problem areas that the Hindus can catch him on. He gets rid of and he gives a much more sort of tone down simplistic kind of Christianity because his intention is very much to win the debate to win the argument. But yes, sometimes you find certain missionaries even getting into trouble for being too friendly and too open minded. And that the one of the best, the example I gave in chapter two is Batholumis Zieghenbach, this German guy who ends up coming. He's a Protestant missionary. And by the way, the Catholics hate that the Protestants are here now because again, both have two very different ideas of Christianity. They're feuding and at loggerheads in Europe. And now that battle comes into India as well. And of course, the converts are enjoying this because you convert and go to the Catholic faith. If you don't, if you're not happy there and you feel like, you know, you want to bargain for something better, you can then threaten to go off to the Protestant cap and then the Catholic fathers will be like, no, no, no, please don't go, we'll give you what you want. And you know, it's a the Hindus who've converted use that as a negotiating tactic. This divided house between the Christians, the Protestants and the Catholics. But Zieghenbach comes here and initially he's come here completely under the impression that these are a barbaric people. But within months of arrival, he realizes, no, actually, there's been a mistake, these people have sophisticated ideas. And again, we often use, even when we're friendly, right, we try to put things into the framework we know. So he'll find Tamil texts like the Therukhorel and compare it to say Aristotle's work. And he'll identify texts that Tamil people were studying and scholars, they're valued and trying to sort of give versions or sort of some parallel in Europe that Europeans can understand. And he tries to figure out, you know, what exactly this this cultural system is. And he realizes these people are not barbaric. The values ultimately are the same. What we consider good is what they consider good. What we think of as bad behavior, they also consider bad behavior. They're not fundamentally, congenitally, somehow wrong or primitive or whatever. You have all, it's a spectrum. Like in your opinions of society, everybody from the drunkard to the priest. Here also you have everybody from the drunkard to the priest. And there's a whole set of people. And he starts having debates and engagements with people. And in Zieghenbach's case, a lot of it happens through letters that he's exchanging with local people. And these letters are extremely fascinating to read because he's getting a picture, he's sending them question as to, why don't you accept Christianity? And some of the responses are amusing. One person responds saying that white people don't wash their bottoms after going to the toilet. And that's why we don't like white people. Then there's this whole children fried and butter kind of stereotype. You have this notion that you associate the white man with the Portuguese sailor who's seen as a rowdy, violent kind of figure. And therefore, who wants to get his religion? We already have a nice religion where we take 20 baths a day. Why should we come into this into this sort of unhygienic, seemingly unhygienic system that you have? But there's also discussions on ideas of God. What does it mean? In fact, in one letter, one person says that yes, there are many sects, but the religion is one, which I thought was very interesting. Somebody in the 18th century already saying that no matter what differences you see among Hindus, they stood belong to one broad category. Yet they are fragmented. And because we have so many traditions within, it's easy for you as a missionary to come and divide us. There's that kind of argument also taking place, but Zegenberg learns a lot. And he realizes that there is, he, of course, he and several other missionaries who encounter this, especially the idea that Hindus have their own notion of monotheism. They have their own idea that there is one supreme power. Sometimes some people define it in the abstract. Some people say that Supreme Shiva, some people say it's Devi, some people's Vishnu, but they had know that there is one Supreme. So they start placing it in Biblikr terms in that, oh, these people clearly were inspired by the Bible at some point and then God corrupted. So they say that if they have this idea of God, it must have come from the Bible. But Zigenberg is still more open-minded. He does a study. He has these engagements. He publishes these letters, sends them back to Europe and eventually writes a book called The Genealogy of the Indian Gods or the Hindu Gods, in which from the Almighty, the Supreme Power, he traces a family tree, Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Dechild, and they grandchildren, all the subordinate dots down to the village deities. These are village deities you sacrifice to spill blood for the village goddess of smallpox. Everybody's are accommodated in this and he creates this framework and he sends it back to Europe and he's of course immediately admonished by being told that your job is to spread Christianity there not to spread hedonish nonsense in Europe. So we know this is not a two-way traffic, it has to be a one-way traffic and he's ultimately condemned and dies and he even suspends when the final few years of his life, he stops writing and publishing or not publishing, writing and sending back reports on Hinduism because he's realized that his bosses in Europe are not interested and they are interested primarily in conversion. But conversions also not happening at the level at which these people are hoping for. So the understanding in some people like Francis Xavier went out and converted whole villages overnight. But some of them were just commercial transactions. They were just people who wanted to convert either to come under Portuguese protection and therefore they would convert without knowing really what it meant to become a Christian. And Francis Xavier would have to instruct them saying these are the things, these are the 10 commandments La La La. In some places people would just not convert because as Zegenberg was asked by one person, if I'm damned in your religion and bound to be damned in mine might as well stick to mine. Why should I convert and then go through the inconvenience of baptism to be damned anyway in your religion? I will just continue in my existing religion. So there were issues like that. Then there was caste in the sense that most of the people converting came from marginalized castes and the fathers were not happy about this because ultimately they were also operating in the society and they realized that if Christianity is seen as just the religion of the of the lower caste communities, then that taints Christianity as a whole. We want the elites. We want to pluck from the top. In fact, in Kerala at one point in the as late as the 19th century, the people used to I think there's one episode where somebody calls the Bible the Korava Reveda because the Korava community of Dalits, they've converted to Christianity. So their way them is the Bible and this missionaries used to hate this association of the Bible with the lower caste communities or as one particular person put it the "drugs of the populous". We don't want the "drugs of the populous". We want the Brahmins. We want the elites to convert and that was proving more and more to be a difficult proposition. That's where power comes into the picture ultimately and that's where the rise of the British and then eventually the evangelical component of British society that comes into the picture. And I was particularly struck by Ziegenwag's suggestion as you put it that Christians had no new message to deliver at all that within their traditions, Hinduism had stashed at a line with the best of the biblical teachings as you put it and that's fascinating and there is also a sense growing over a period of time of a higher Hinduism and a lower Hinduism of a distinction that you might be looking at a certain aspect of it but there are other aspects of it which are great and so on and so forth. So give me a sense of how those debates are shaping up both within our would-be colonizers and within our society. I think there are two things to consider them. One is that on the Hindu side because this was a culture and a religious system that was a conglomerate that was built by drawing in so many different groups, so many different ideas, so many different perspectives within the religious archive itself you could basically find justification for everything. So if you read the notes carefully you'll find that sometimes the Upanishads have contradictory statements being made even in our traditions you have the the Nirgun idea of God, the Sagan idea of God, you know God is a formless figure as a figure with the form. There's all kinds of ideas available so anytime if a missionary were to talk to say a scholarly Brahmin and they actually looked out for scholarly Brahmin's as just to post random people on the street they would find that yeah you know the Brahmin could easily agree with half the things the missionary was saying and then still stick to his own as they saw it prejudices in quotes without conceding the Christianity was new in any way because these ideas were sort of floating around in the Hindu tradition as well and that's interesting because later once British power or colonial power becomes you know a reality in India and the Western idea of religion becomes dominant and we have to reframe Hinduism in that Western mold we can again pick and choose from this religious archive to create that mold and to popular it that mold because we already have the ingredients and that's what people like Ramohan Roy end up doing. The other thing is this whole notion of higher and lower for the longest time even I thought that this might have come in as a European categorization where they came in and they said okay these are the higher precepts of Hinduism and then these are the lower precepts these are the higher better gods the more Brahminized ones and these are the lower blood consuming kind of deities but no you find that within the Hindu tradition also there were orthodox voices that did look down on certain deities. In fact in some of some of Zegenbach's correspondence who wrote to him even used words like devils now the problem is that this is Zegenbach writing for his western audience ultimately so these letters have also been translated by him before he transmits them to Europe so we don't know if these Indian intellectuals actually used the word devil but yes it's possible because even I am growing up in Kerala and all I've heard people refer to say Kutichathan or Chathan in general these local gods as sort of these sinister mischievous deities you're sort of afraid of that's the the kind of attitude you have to us words certain deities. So even some Indians were capable of describing certain so-called lower gods in a pejorative way but the difference is that there was still a continuum because you went to different gods for different purposes a Brahmin may not preside over the temple of one of these inferior gods as it were but if the Brahmin say needed a particular kind of favor something his child was ill and somebody a local non Brahmin village priest or a performer or a an oracle said look you need to comment you know bow your head before this such and such a deity even the Brahmin will do it the Brahmin may not support the deity or Pudu Pooja in that deity temple but even they are willing to accept that this particular deity represents something over there they were greed Mantrava dins etc who used to even marshal some of these inferior gods for various purposes so that existence of the hierarchy was there and on the one hand while we might see that now I mean sociologically you can see it as a Brahminical force right essentially categorizing and saying oh this is better and that is not a good thing because there was this range of options there it was also helpful in a way to address these missionary critiques saying yeah yeah we agree that some of the lower precepts of Hindus even we have a problem with but the higher precepts are so good that we don't need Christianity everything you're saying we already know through the higher precepts of our religion so it again became in a weird way in a topsy turvy way a source of strength in standing up to the foreigner in saying also that if I were to now look at all the actions of ordinary Christians then I would also be scandalized right but you never define Christianity based on what the Christian present does you define it on the basis of the higher ideas so to you can't judge his Hinduism based on what's happening on the ground with the random people you have to look at what I am saying in terms of the higher precepts so the Hindus also begin to learn how to sort of answer back how to speak back and how to engage with the missionary on these terms that the missionary has brought into the equation and they pretty much pick up on that game quite rapidly so that that initial surprise from the 16th century by the 18th century you find that more and more of them are prepared to deal with the missionary in a certain way. A couple of questions one you know as we will discuss when we talk about the 19th century and as you've made explicit in the later chapters of your book what really happens is that you know the view of our reformers of Hinduism is to a large part shaped by the frame that you know the British bring to it and we are definitely responding to that but even before that even in the 200 years you know before that happens in that explicit way as you've pointed out a similar process is happening not in a direct manner of adopting the frame but in creating narratives as a response to you know the British being there and what that is doing you you know you've spoken about how the Brahmins were providing narrative coherence during this part and that phrase kind of struck me because at one hand I get it that you know they are often the officers they are the interlocutors they are midway there so they are the people who are negotiating this interesting territory and every time there's a problem they can you know make up a Jagaru Paranick's story if they want to or they can you know they can give a justification that no no actually we are also monotheistic you have three you know you've split it into three but the the the curious thing I wonder about there is that is every interlocutor responding to whatever the incentives are in that moment in a in an impressionistic piecemeal way or is there a larger sense that you know are they unifying threads like it's a time before email and books and tv and all of that how does a Brahman in Kattak no how a Brahman in say Calicut is responding to a particular provocation so it strikes me that to a large extent you know a lot of the responses would be local and then it would be interesting to me that what are the commonalities in those responses because that would also be very revelatory so what's your sense of I don't think they were aware of what different Brahmin's and different parts of the country were saying but because these were often scholarly Brahmin's who came from similar traditions of study I think they were certain mechanisms through which their mind operated. And those perhaps had certain shared frameworks that they had inherited over generations of study. And that allowed them, therefore, to offer similar responses to these missionaries, although they were separated by so much territory and geography. It really didn't -- that's why you find that different parts of the -- you know, there's this guy called Francois Bernier, who is -- he meets a bunch of ramen, who I think taking a dip in the water every morning. You know, they do that. No, the morning, Sunday, and all of that. And he says, you know, this -- God couldn't have instituted all these rituals because, you know, your group is so cold, you'd probably like die or something of freeze to death if you had so many bats over there. And they're also the Brahmins alike, but, you know, God created this for us in our country. You -- we are not saying that you have to go and apply this in Europe. You find that pattern recurring in different parts of India. It doesn't mean that these were necessarily in communication, but somehow I think the way in which their way of thinking was shaped was already -- it had certain commonalities because of their own inherited traditions. And because I think even like somebody like Ziegunberg, they sought out scholarly Brahmins, I think that made it even more obvious that these people came out of certain educated, thoughtful sort of lines of tradition as opposed to just casually discussing something with the foreigner. Because you find that Ziegunberg, even when he contacts some non-Roman writers, some of them do say that, "Oh, I have not been in touch with Brahmins." So these are just my views. Or somebody you write back saying, "I'm sorry, it was so late to reply to you later because all the Brahmins were keeping away because it was bad weather." So you find that even some of his non-Roman correspondence are consulting scholarly Brahmins before they give responses, which means that these respondents had some sense that in order to answer these questions, we need to go to people we recognize as authorities on our religion. And that was these scholarly Brahmins. It wasn't your local pujari. It was some kind of local scholarly Brahmin across quite substantial Swede in Tamil Nadu, quite a distance all the way from Madras to several places in the South, etc. Which meant that people had some sense. There's even that story of Ziegunberg going into this arms house and he finds the teacher teaching students and he sort of poses them a question, "You know about God." And they say, "Yeah, God is Shiva." And he says, "Rabish, God is not married. He doesn't have a wife and all of that." So I will not tell you about God. The kids very cheekily say, "This is not our business. We are children. We have to study." If you have any such riddles, you can ask our master. And then later, there's I think a dancer over there, Devdas, he has put it now, who basically says, "You know, if you have these questions, stop harassing us, go ask Brahmins or something." So I think there was a recognition that there were certain people who would be able to answer such questions. Which means that maybe they were not in touch with each other, but I think there was a sense that there were people who were recognized as authorities. And I think those authorities had similar ways of addressing some of these questions, partly because I suspect these questions also emerged within the Hindu tradition. Right? As I said, because the Hindu archive is full of so many counter thoughts and thoughts, it's entirely possible a lot of these questions were asked by some of their own disciples. It's not possible that questions are on monotheism. If there is one God, how can there be so many deities? It's not possible that only Europeans ask these questions. Their own Indian disciples would have asked these questions and we have evidence. Indian traditions do pose a lot of these questions and there are ways in which these have been answered and I can say it in different traditions. So even if gurus come out of different schools of thinking, I think the questions would not have been all that unfamiliar to them. And this aspect of Hinduism which comes up in so many responses, like the response to banyar which you pointed out that, you know, this water thing is for us, it's not for your coal, European water. This sense of Hinduism being adaptive, is it just the way it is in lived reality or is that adaptiveness also spoken about in the Hindu text that that quality of adaptiveness is it a central part of Hinduism or is it just something that arises, you know, as a contingent and then, you know, you defend it in various ways. But so what is its own sense of choice? I'm not as college as the text, but I would look at it this way. As you said, because we're looking at it bottom up, what you're seeing is that he has a lot is emerging because of historical dynamics. So I think it is adaptive, you know, automatically because of that and a lot of the texts in many ways are playing catch up and they are reconciling a lot of these historical dynamics as they're happening. But in the text, it always feels like it's stopped down. That's what the texts do. They, although it's coming up from below, the texts will try to give it consistency and give it an additive and give it a completeness. Although we can now historicize it and say it's imperfect, the texts are attempting to build that sense of completeness. So that's how I would view that. Also, I'm interested by, you know, that encounter where you pointed out where first the students and then the Devdas, he says that, you know, go talk to a Brahmin, we're not interested, right? And that indicates to me also that, you know, the lift, reality of people, Hinduism as a Levite is a different thing from what the intellectual discourse of Brahmanas are in, where the head might as well be in the clouds. They almost sound like the academy of today. So when you use that phrase within the Hindu tradition, what is that thing within the Hindu tradition? Because one way of looking at it is the way people are living, which is still that glorious hodgepodge. And the other way is the discourse that is taking place in the Brahmin literature and among themselves. So which is it? I think it's all of it, right? Like even today, if you look at the average Hindu, like an average lady, a housewife, you know, in a middle class or lower middle class home, anywhere in the country. If you ask them what their religion is, it's actually the practices. You know, it is the rituals they keep, the fast they keep. Certain pujas they do on certain occasions, the temples they visit, that is their sense of Hinduism. They will be aware that there are such things as the Vedas. They will be aware there is the Gita. If you ask them, they will probably mention these things. It's possible they'll have a copy of the Gita in the house, but their actual practice of religion is not some esoteric idea. It is actually practice. It is what you actually do. It is the rituals. It is the everydayness of Hinduism, which is lived Hinduism even today. Even to this day, that is what for most people religion is. For me also, as I said, it is our ancestral home, the temple, what happens in that temple that is my Hinduism. But that's true in many ways of all religions. If you look at the Catholic faith also, it has its everyday rituals. It has church traditions, which are not necessarily backed by scripture, which was the big complaint the Protestants had. You know, the Catholic church has all these corruptions, which have nothing to do with the Bible. But that does not mean the religions do not have that esoteric or philosophical or theological side, where the ideas are also discussed. And I think both exist in their own compartments and both feed off each other. So there are temple rituals and temple mantras, etc., which come out of texts. And that are influenced and inspired by texts, Vedic mantras, etc., that are used in puja rituals, etc. Sometimes, you know, the very act of listening is important. So when they recite puranas, even if it's in Sanskrit and most people, they don't understand, the tradition is that hearing it alone is an act of religious piety and devotion. You don't need to understand just hearing that language and hearing it, the purana is being recited, adds something to your life. So people go and sit for these religious, you know, performances, even if they're not actually understanding what is being done. Then of course, there's all the vernacularized aspects of religion in the bhakti, the local songs and the local languages. So it really is a continuum, you know, one feeding into the other, feeding into the next and that kind of thing. And broadly, you can sort of compartmentalize it, saying these are the practices. This is the everydayness and these are the higher precepts of the pot. And both are part of the same tradition. I don't think you can separate and say one is and one is not. That's exactly why, you know, modern reformists sometimes struggle because they are tempted to get rid of the temple side of it, the images, the puja, saying no, no, the ritualism all came later. We are focusing only on the ideas because they were meeting, they were talking to people on the other side, rivals and competitors who are engaging on the terms of ideas and using everyday practice as a stick to beat people with saying, "Oh, your religion is bad." So we internalize that to a certain extent, but if you look back and if you take that out of the equation, I think religion is a composite of all of these things and can't be divided as purely this or purely that. So I'm reminded by a completely different context, actually not different contexts, but you are different contexts. Steven Landsberg in his book, The Big Questions, you know, poses the question that are, is everyone who claims to be a believer actually really a non-believer? That if you look at the reveal preferences, will they actually turn out to be believers? And I'm reminded of what we discussed earlier in the show about Manu Devan's observation about Karnataka for a long, you know, people did not ascribe identity or religion to a lot of these practices that they did, right? They just did those things. So like Ananthi's, but in the same way that I will, you know, not have breakfast, not for a religious reason, but intermittent fasting or I will have certain little rituals of my own, which are kind of different and they're not religious and there's no need to kind of put a name to them that, you know, I'll use a jet spray for example. And similarly, someone who is a believer will have certain rituals and some of them may have their origin and practices that we can in hindsight and for the purpose of easy categorization called Hindu, you know, like fasting on a particular day or etc. etc. But otherwise, you know, it's as much connected to religion as my fasting is or my any particular random ritual I might have would be. So I'm wondering about that aspect of it that then I do see like while I agree that this is Hinduism and certainly bottom up, yeah, and so is that. But there is a disconnect between the two and thinking aloud, I wonder that that disconnect really only closes and at top down vision of the Brahmins and the abstract thinkers really affects real life when political power comes into the picture. So what we think of as Hinduism today for example, it would only matter in a person life because every individual Hindu's life is slightly different from every others and it's you know, it's perfectly fine. But it only begins to matter at term begins to matter in the political largely. Political and I think also the presence of the other now to again stretch our analogy a little bit. Assume you're living in a you've moved into a building and it's full of like people who are all by habit vegetarians and they've never had a non-vegetarian around. So for them that is their reality. You start bringing home chicken and they start seeing that you're bringing home this black plastic bag with clearly has meat in it and then they make a big fuss about it saying you can't eat it here. If that feud if you don't give up and you do not go vegetarian you stick to you know, right to eat chicken. It eventually becomes not a question of just food and habit but also identity. They start now associating themselves as these pure vegetarians and look at you as this other who's brought this horrible thing called meat into the building where it's for you that chicken becomes you do become the chicken eater right they start calling you over that's the chicken eater. Every time I'm at walks through the lift lobby or whatever they say, oh that's the chicken eater and that other ring I think leads to the creation of identity. So although your religion may just be practices when power comes in of course and when the power comes in along with an other that's when I think you start thinking of oh this makes us one group of people and that brings something else to the table. Earlier you find that to a certain extent with jen's and both his and then later I think Islam comes into that into the picture and then with increasing technology the country itself coming closer because of better communication all of that under the British and the presence of the missionary it becomes even more stuck even more visible. So as you pointed out a unifying term of Hinduism is a response to others which is first you have the internet scene fighting the sharevites and the vashnavites and together they are fighting the jens and they're all having a fighting party as it were a fight club and then Islam comes in and it's kind of different and then you know these other non-Islamic sort of practices you're right against it and then of course as we speak through the rest of the episode you know the British come in and all of this happens but tell me also about sort of the clash which we see at different times between the merchants and the missionaries right you've described earlier that when missionaries land up in Trankhu bar for example and the Danish guys are like just fuck off here we are merchants we don't need this shit right and later on in the British period again that same clash occurs where initially Est India companies here look where we have to make money we don't want to piss off the local people and later on you know other incentives come into play when the administration is likely to taxing the temples we can't now tell them take temples are evil so there is a constant clash happening between merchants and the missionary impulse and all of that so how is that sort of playing itself out because Zenith strikes me that again to counter the job of countering the missionary zeal of the evangelist you know even before the 19th century which we'll come to is does not just fall to the locals and to the bramans as it were it also falls to the merchants who then have to figure out creative ways of saying he boss let us kind of make money don't don't mess around yeah because I think the as I said even the European is not a monolith right there are they've come here with two separate goals the merchants are here to make money and they want to trade and to trade you have to have decent relations with local people so you don't want flying the ornament in the form of religion and religious irritations coming into the picture the missionary is here to sell religion his merchandise is not you know physical goods his merchandise is spiritual transformation so the missionaries here very much to engage with local people and tell them why their religion is wrong and to sort of persuade them to accept his religion and sometimes to sort of quite aggressively do that as people like Zegenbagh also tend to do to the extent that Zegenbagh is even banned from going into Thanjavur's territory because the Rajav Thanjavur doesn't like missionaries after he heard of how they had they staged a play in which Hindu idols are broken and so on now clearly local merchants are not going to like it they want to deal with the Rajav Thanjavur they want trade with the Rajav Thanjav they want good relations with him so for missionaries going around or Christians are allowing you know European Christians are allowing Hindu idols to be broken and the Rajavs unhappy then that's going to be a problem but there again you find that power comes into the picture and that's when a lot of rulers don't like it so when when missionaries of the Jesuits go to Chandragiri where the Vijayanagara empires have moved after their loss of like the main capital in Hampi initially the the local Rajavs more than happy to let the missionary debate with the Brahmins they can call out idol worship whatever it is Brahmins are upset with the Rajavs open he's enjoying these debates but the moment there's a skirmish on the coast with Portuguese soldiers and some kind of trade related issue that's when he gets the missionaries also out so I think it's interesting that yes they were they were divided incentives here and divided motives and indeed all the way till the early 19th century you find that even under the British they were not always happy with missionaries coming and messing things up they wanted to rule by then they got territory they wanted to rule the country make it secure and in the middle of this they don't want religion coming in and aggravating people on the ground who are already resistant and unhappy with the idea that a foreign race was now ruling them and the moment you start ruling a country at one level you can say that keep the missionaries out of it let's just rule the country efficiently but at another level religion immediately comes into the picture because if you are ruling a country you're framing laws yeah and the laws will involve going up against local religions like there's a fascinating peacock murder incident that you describe in your book and the British approach to this as you have you know you've quoted Pushutam Agarwal saying that they did not cut the cloth to fit the body they cut the body to fit the cloth you know and incredibly sort of shortsighted approach so tell me a little bit about how those battles and how those debates played out and in a sense they even have an analog from a few decades ago right after independence where you're arguing against you know the Hindu court bill where the Hindu perspective is that like number one why should we go by your law you know instead of British law here it's a constitution but why should we go by that we have our own traditions and practices and number two of course which is a separate debate is saying that if you're bringing the Hindus under it bring everybody under it what are you talking about equality in the constitution completely different debate but that fundamental clash against a bottom of way of living versus a top-down kind of imposition you know that carries through so what were those battles like what were those debates like how did both the sides the rulers and the rule negotiate those tensions so you know in the book there's a picture of a couple of Brahmin priests blessing the British flag and they're putting sort of a mala on the flag at the end of it and all of that that was I think the initial stage of that encounter in that the British came in and initially there was a lot of anxiety because they were very aware that they were barely a handful of white men in a country dominated by brown people and they were now suddenly in the position of rulers so there was a great amount of caution for almost the first 50 years although the individual governor's governor's general could flip flop on in terms of their personal attitudes broadly there was a consensus that we have to ingratiate ourselves with the people and the people will also reciprocate if they realize that we are not here to be hostile to them so you find that you know British civil servants are you know patronizing temples I discussed this earlier also about how they are smashing coconuts at Tindu festivals they're showing their face at Tindu festivals in places like Travindko and Padnawasami has taken out for his bath in the sea it's British soldiers who are who are escorting him you know in that procession in that ceremony and there's an actual discussion between people like Thomas Monroe John John Malcolm Elfinston and Bombay all these guys essentially say that it is important that we make ourselves familiar to the Hindus in order to rule over them and what's interesting is in there are writings you find that they are quite aware that these are unnatural chains by which are foreign races controlling another race another group of people but the way you can't well neither like neither party can't do much about the politics of it even these guys for all their niceness of heart or whatever they know that they're not going to release the Indians from this chain but there is a feeling that the chain must be made as light as possible so that Indians can be lulled into ignoring it and into being loyal to their new rulers who are British or who are white and for this reason there is patronizing Hindu tradition so even when Pune I taken and the Peshwaz expelled local customs are preserved you know blackening the faces of convicts is continued Brahmins are continued to be given gifts and there's you know it's done consciously even the one of the reasons the Peshwaz even given a substantial pension and a lot of his associates and nobles are given pensions is to keep them happy is to say that look we've defeated him but we're not insulting him we're giving him a reasonable kind of existence thereafter as well we're treating him with respect they go and and bring out the you know the Chhatrapati from Sathara and sort of reinstate him and give him a district to rule saying look we've restored the original Maratha dynasty whose rule whose power had been usurped by the Peshwaz so they constantly trying to fit in they constantly trying to show that they are friends towards the Hindus and they don't have hostile intentions to the extent that in in Puri when you know the British East India company takes Puri from the Marathas you find that the Puri priests of the Jagannath temple even write this very grandalokun Sanskrit letter to the governor general praising him saying oh you are now a deliverance and we were so unhappy under the Marathas you come and saved us and so on so even on the Indian side they realize that okay whether we like it or not there are new rulers here let's try and see if we can do business with them where the law side comes in is essentially in Bengal in the 18th century itself you find underwater in Hastings there's a desire on his part one thing he doesn't want to do is he doesn't want too much supervision and influence from London where they're saying oh governor this under forms and and traditions and institutions that we are familiar with, he says that won't work. This is a country of primarily Hindus and Muslims. We have to rule as per their traditions. The problem though is that there is also this enlightenment idea that the core of all traditions can only be found in books. Some of it is linked to the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant say that over the Catholic Church has corrupted the Christian religion. The core of Christianity is in scripture. Is it in the written word? Is it in the Bible? That then filters down by the enlightenment. There is this romanticization and glorification of the written text. So what although Warren Hastings and these Europeans are keen to rule the Hindus, as per the Hindus own traditions, one way in which they do it is to look for Hindu texts and try and enact them in a very literal sense and place it on Hindu society. Now that for the Hindus is also a very strange experience because with the whole peacock murder, for example, that takes place, Hindu law doesn't come out of a book. Although we have the Manuswirti and so on. And often you find this on Twitter, people would quote segments of the Manuswirti saying, oh, if the Shudra listens to the Vedas, poor molten lead into his mouth, I don't think that was actually done because nobody actually followed the Manuswirti as a literal text. Later you find that there's this thing that adulterous women must be ripped apart or torn to pieces by dogs. Whereas if you actually look at the records of the Peshwa state, they were fined. In some cases, they imprisoned. Nobody was ripped apart by dogs. Because what is written in the text is not necessarily how things happened in practice. Similarly, a lot of actual practice and legal practice was based on your identity. So if you belong to a certain caste, it wasn't the king necessarily trying you. It was your caste council. You could belong to a guild. You could belong to a certain kind of group. And how law applied to you was determined on the basis of your identity. Now, drinking was a sin in the Hindu religion. But a drunk peasant, you can be okay with because he's a peasant. You are not holding him to the same highest standards of what is the ideal. But if you are priest to sin drunk, he's held to a much higher yadst. Because he's a priest. He's supposed to be in the temple, and supposed to be an example. And we're actually pure, et cetera. He can't be seen drinking alcohol. So the punishment's also very. It's not like there was one flat punishment for everybody caught drinking alcohol. So these things are mediated on the basis of caste, identity, location, et cetera. In the case of the peacock murder where this missionary and his Muslim attendant are traveling, and they catch hold of a peacock, and they kill the peacock, eat its flesh and bury the feathers. Because they realize it's a sacred bird to the Hindus. It's a Muslim ruler or governor. And the Mughal governor over there basically says that look in this district, which is a Hindu district, the peacock is sacred. Maybe in other districts, it may be different, but here the peacock is sacred. How could you kill a peacock here and eat the peacock? That's not possible. So even he's not applying sharia. He's not looking at some book. He's just saying the local custom here recognizes this bird as sacred. You should not have committed this such and such a crime. So it was all very localized, very regional. So even though these white men are here to please the Hindus and they say, oh, we must try and govern India. Like the Hindus would or like the Muslims would as per their traditions. What do they do? They don't have the cultural resources to actually understand these bases of caste, guilt, tribe, tradition, local customs, et cetera. They think you can fall back on classical texts in Sanskrit and somehow build Hindu law out of it, which simply doesn't make sense. Everybody is then confused. The Hindus are also confused. Because yes, in a sense, it's coming out of Sanskrit text, but nobody's ever dealt with this. And the British are also confused. Because they think they're flattening the Hindus by reviving and restoring their ancient codes. But the problem is society also evolves, right? Something because it happened 2000 years ago. Maybe 2000 years ago, they were pouring molten lead into people's mouths. But that doesn't mean in the 18th century, people are still doing it. Everything evolves. So it's like today's constitution from the 1950s that we have. Imagine someone restores a thousand years from now where everything has changed. Technology has changed. Life spans have changed. Social customs have changed. And someone says, no, no, no, your original tradition was in that constitution from the 1950s. And therefore, we are going to now apply that in a blanket sense on all of you. So it leads to all kinds of conclusions. And you find ultimately British judges themselves complaining that this Hindu law is a travesty. Nobody can make sense of it. Justice doesn't seem to be getting done. People are complaining about it. But it's been instituted because white men with good intentions have decided that, hey, we need to please the Hindus. Except in going about pleasing the Hindus, they've fallen back on a very European tradition out of the enlightenment of referring to books. I just, while you were saying all this, I just googled how to melt a lid. Because I'm just curious, right, 2000 years ago, how would they have gotten molten lid? What is a procedure? And why that particular thing? Why not something else? But again, this kind of goes back to the disconnect between a lived reality and what is happening up top in the sense that there are many laws which might exist, but they don't actually apply to the way people live their lives like the adultery thing that you pointed out that it doesn't matter if some book 2000 years ago said that allegedly said that adulterous women have to be mauled by mad dogs. But in practice, it is something completely different. But what can also happen that with brute political power and the passage of time, the laws can create a feedback loop where they can affect how a society sees itself and how it then behaves. Like the classic example is really the imposition of Victorian morality over a period of time on a people. We've already spoken about the mad erotic exaggerations of some of the colonialist partly because it's clickbait, it's sensational. They need to exaggerate as the incentives go. But the erotic nature of some of them also indicate that these are a repressed people. And they need some action. And the imagination is kind of flowing like that. Later on, you also point out about Shakuntala, how in the original Kalidas, she's all sweaty and she's excited and all of that. But it's completely sanitized in the English translations because the garden, the readers are gone or the publishers-- You can't describe her breasts. You can't talk of sweat. Yeah. And I think in a previous episode about Kerala, we've spoken about how that traditional woman being bare breasted was almost forcibly changed over time. So a lot of what we think about as sanskari, morals and sanskari at all, if you look at the true meaning of sanskara, they are British, they're colonial. We weren't always like this. And I'm interested in that process where my belief in a spontaneous order and the way things happen bottom up is my belief is that the way we live is very resistant to top down in position. However, if you do something with great power for a long period of time, then that belief reality can also change much in the same way as, you know, Indians, I would argue we still think of ourselves instinctively as subjects and not citizens, whatever we might say intellectually. And that is an instinct honed by years of an oppressive state centuries of it. So what is your sense of how it begins to play out and what happens? And when you look at the timelines, how much time does it take for a society to just completely change like this, especially in something when it comes to morality, for example, you see when you have a dominant power that has decided that this is how it's going to be, then people working with them and under them also start re sort of orienting themselves to manipulate that system. There's a book by Pamela Price, which is on these Tamil families and the succession disputes, et cetera, that took place in them. I forget the title. But she talks about how in these families often, because the British had this very mixed up idea of what Hindu law was, people on that side, on the receiving side, manipulated it often to get their way, which earlier than the actual traditional forms they could not have done. So there was a kind of counter manipulation, because this is the new order you've brought in. And we are therefore going to manipulate it. It happens even now. We've got laws that on paper are wonderful. But from ground up, it gets manipulated and interpreted and acted on in completely different ways. People find loopholes. They find ways to twist it. I've given this example of one of these Stravenco Rajas in the early 18 hundreds, around 1808, 1809. His divan sort of rebled against him. And there was this big-- sorry, against the British. And there was this whole uproar on the British had to really put down the rebellion in Stravenco. At that time, the Rajas' wife was somebody who had supported the rebels. And under British order, she was separated from him, sent miles and miles away. And they tried to voice another wife on him, the sister of a divan who was or a minister who was loyal to them. And the Rajas basically says that, oh, he writes these petitions. And he says, no, no, you can't voice another wife on me. As per this Hindu law and all, you know, once I've married this lady, I can't be separated from her and all of that. He's his vacuals or him. They're actually manipulating the British, because the British have this very textual, Sanskrit paste, 2000-year-old notion that this is what marriage for all Hindus everywhere is. But this Rajas comes off a matrilineal family. In the matrilineal family, the Rajas can marry. He can divorce. His wife has absolutely no political status. It's his sister who's the queen, not the wife. So technically, the Rajas' wife's separation isn't a big deal. The British have done something that's perfectly possible. Asking him to marry someone else can also be done. He can have multiple wives. The wife, you know, women could have multiple husbands. It was entirely possible as per local custom that had evolved for local Hindu communities and certain groups and castes in Kerala. But it had no reflection in texts. But because the British were obsessed with texts to get his way and to get his wife back, the Rajas sort of builds his whole argument around how, "Oh, under the law, you can't separate me from my wife. Now, can you voice another wife on me?" So Indians also learn how to play along with the system and to counter manipulate it. But your right, it does end up creating a new morality. It ends up creating a new attitude towards lots of things. And over a period of time, we also assume that those attitudes are traditional. And that, you know, that is what matters. Take the example of Pardar, right? I think it's generally understood now that initially you have Islamic rulers coming into India. They had among the elites this habit that women will be secluded. Which is not to say they were disempowered. Haram had its own. own politics and resources of power etc. Seeing that as the new high culture you find people like the Raj Pooots and the elite Hindus also starting to seclude their women. And as sanskritization happens this filters down comes down to the Marathas, the Marathas also starts secluding their women even though as late as the 19th century a lot of the women are opposed to this idea of being secluded they still go out riding on their horses and things like that. Today a lot of these people would think this is Hindu tradition right that elite families and elite women have to be segregated like this was part of some Hindu tradition but it's actually influenced by historical dynamics of an Islamic custom that was brought into the country from outside. It doesn't necessarily have that kind of textual validity in some old sanskrit text though in all likelihood if you look somewhere you will find some sanskrit test which probably justifies the idea of secluding women. But the point is historically we know this is how it originated. So people's idea of tradition also changes based on these historical dynamics because society is responsive and that's why this whole attitude of the British that we can revive the Hindu tradition by looking at their 2000 year old books is silly some of their own judges said that it's like looking at old Greek and Latin texts and trying to govern Europe in the modern period you can't do that. But Indians were viewed somehow as people stuck in the past not as a dynamic organic society but as one Indian critic a muggle critic itself in Bengal said the British looked at Indians like pictures on a wall. For them we were frozen in time of unmoving fixed like that and therefore they had to govern a fixed unmoving people. But the reality is that Indians were also living breathing organic community and society. I love the power of memes like you know from the purdah of those days to the paper straws of today you know how much we imitate things because of you know perceived status. I'm also interested in all this about how our self image and our history is kind of coming together it is almost being assembled by this interplay between the rule and the rulers at one point you write quote the Orientalist assembly of historical and cultural knowledge was an enterprise begun by a ruling race its Indian appropriation however was about quote-unquote natives reclaiming agency western enquiries into their past would allow Hindus to slowly attempt telling their own story and informs and ways that put them on the road to a certain nationality. After all as a thinker Sudhipa Kaviraj put it and this is his quote to give itself a history is the most fundamental act of self identification of a community and not just to then give yourself a history but then to also start disseminating it and so on and so forth and you know this takes obviously a much stronger form in the 19th century. But how does dissemination happen per se like would you say that you know until the 19th century it is still kind of fragmentary and people are just living their own local reality without this larger sense and yeah sure they might be your Brahman interlocutors talking to the governor and giving him a sense and there there's a sense of history evolving or have the do the narratives find a way of seeping out into the larger cultural consciousness. I think people at some larger sense of you know being part of something bigger but I think that was a sense in the background right as opposed to your everyday lived reality and I think the everyday lived reality must have been much more local much more oriented in practices that were exclusive to that particular region of that particular zone but that is mean people were divorced completely from the larger picture but because they were now being viewed very much from that higher prison by the British that requires a certain power and then we ourselves try to fit ourselves into that and reclaim that and turn that into a vehicle of political assertion that's what essentially ends up happening and that is a historical process it's not about good or bad whether it should have happened or not that is essentially what happened and then again technology plays into this power politics plays into this new identity formation plays into it these are all dynamic subjects these are not things that happen overnight but they're part of these processes that take place and people had agency they were also they also became part of these processes which culminates ultimately nationalism and the nationalist movement so even you know like take the example of the Gita right Warren Hastings and his translator of the Gita when they first translated to English their agenda was one what to show the Hindus that they valued a lot of Hindu text and to show their critics in London that oh look the Hindus do have you know great sublime ideas on God and philosophy and all of that they don't really need too much Western guidance we can rule them as per their own traditions so that was the intention of sort of romanticizing the Gita to a certain extent and and translating it so originally the Gita was translated to flatter the Hindus to a certain extent to show that oh look we value what you know your traditional your ancestors used to value over a period time what happens the Gita acquires a certain celebrity in Europe Indians of the 19th century who are now learning English who are now learning under the the British system who are reading these orientalist scholarship and and researchers into Indian subjects discovering that you know this is our history even though it's coming through that English prism they still discovering these things they appropriate the Gita and by that early 20th century it's become a revolutionary manual in the sense that it's used actually against the British so you know by that by Tillaxe generation etc they're looking at the at the Gita as a manual of action and action against who the British as early as 1857 you actually have a missionary warning the British that you know you better be careful about you know the text like the Gita because anybody who wants to mutiny against you in the British army itself the Indians in the British army they can justify it on the basis of some of the contents of the Gita so don't romanticize this text too much so the reason the text gets glorified by the British is one but the way it is appropriated by Indians and applied to reality and their own politics is very different something the British never expected and ultimately you know you actually have cases where revolutionaries are being captured in the early 20th century 1900s 1910s and they have you know copies of Tillaxe sorry they have copies of the Gita and translations of the Gita with them you know it's quite ironic that Mahatma Gandhi first reads the Gita not in Indian language but in an English translation and that's how he you know makes the Gita his personal sort of guidebook so it doesn't mean the Gita was given its intrinsic value by Europeans but its political value and meaning in that modern period does come from this interplay with with Europe before that people at a certain level certain elites would have been aware of the Gita you know in Maharashtra you have the the Nyanishwari I think which is a commentary on the Gita that's many many centuries old in the local language and that was also available to people of a certain strata and a certain class but it was not some kind of mass emblem of Hindus but once Hindu identity became a political identity the Gita did become an emblem of you know what it meant and how it could be used to assert the Hindu identity tell me about the role of the whole educational you know that appears to be a great way for example to westernize the natives you've spoken about the different kinds of debate states started happening like from 1813 and there was actually a budget for the thing and you know there were debates about do we just educate the teachers do we provide the books what language do we do it in you know at one point Eastwitch and there with their saga you know described that mission as putting the philosophy of the West into a native dress right and I did an episode which was up now little and she's her lovely book the Broken Skips kind of describes you know the Delhi school where the western subjects had to be taught in Persia and it was the first time that you were actually you know putting them in native dress as it was so how was that process playing out like at one level you actually saw what you see in large parts of India even today that English is learned but it is learned as a functional language to achieve instrumental aims to be a better clerk in those days and to maybe get ahead in different ways now but you're not necessarily internalizing the Western world view but over time there's kind of bound to happen as well so how what part does that play so there's no consistency at the beginning so on the British side also there are two camps one set of people feels that the English system in the English language so western knowledge is what the British should be promoting in India because you know why again give Indians their own traditional forms of learning you know there is Western technology there is science there are all these topics that need to be taught so it's best to do that in the English language so that Indians can benefit from it so they're saying that the only way to uplift Indians is to give them Western knowledge in a Western language but then because as I said there's this whole group of Indians who feel that in order for British power to even be secure in India you can't irritate the Hindus and you have to therefore value whatever Hindus value and show that you value it so they believe that actually Hindus should be taught more Sanskrit more of their own traditions if there are good things in their tradition that Europeans can identify good you know text like the Bija Ghanita which is a mathematical treatise things like that that you can you should teach Hindus so that they are following back on their own tradition as opposed to something alien something that's been brought from Europe because they will not appreciate it those so there are two camps on the British side the you know people who want native learning to continue and the others who want Western learning to be introduced on the Hindu side also there are two camps there's one side of people who want so called native learning to continue but again it's become very sort of synthetic and institutionalized so the British are setting up colleges where Sanskrit is being taught there's this one missionary he goes into one of these classrooms and discovers that puranic geography is being taught so it's the sea of butter the sea of nectar you know all those multiple seas as opposed to the fact that there's only salty seas there isn't or there aren't all these other seas so in he's very scandalized that instead of teaching students the reality of geography or teaching them puranic geography which is not actually the truth of the world but then there are other Hindus also like Ramohan Roy who believe that actually look we already have Sanskrit masters we have our pundits we have people who are willing to teach philosophy Banaras is full of them Nadia and Bengal is full of them you have different schools of Hindu tradition already available to Hindu scholars issued they want to learn it If the British have a certain budget and the British are here as Europeans, I think they think that the duty of the British is to actually disseminate Western science and Western learning, physics, chemistry, modern mathematics, modern geography. These are the subjects that need to be taught to the Indian so that Hindu society can also progress and become strong and be able to stand on its own feet. So they are arguing for Western style colleges. And Indian, like consuming masses who are actually subject to all of this education, they have their own interest as you said. Some of them want English just to get jobs. They think that you know the language and this upsets missionaries because missionaries have also set up schools and they are seeing schools as also a way to subtly sort of in by or incalcate Christian values and nudge people towards the Bible a little bit. Except they find that the kids come there, they happily read the Bible as it takes book to pick up the English language or whatever. And then they want to go get a job as a clerk somewhere and then move up in life using that. People and you have studies on this about how people would go to school, they would study science, they would study English and all of that. Yet they would cling on to their traditional habits at home. They were able to make that difference between what they did in school and what they sang onto in their traditional spaces. And I think Indians are still very capable of doing that. Again in your last podcast, there's a bit about how people criticize Isro Chairman for you know the lead scientist there before the big mission goes off to Mars or wherever it is. He goes to a temple. How is this possible? But actually this was always possible. Even in the 19th century, you see it. And 19th century Western critics also couldn't get their head around how Indians were doing this bizarre thing. Where on the one hand, you're getting maximum marks and maths and science in school. But then you're going back and you're reciting your puranas and you're praying to your so-called idol gods who are not really gods and all of that. So that that tension is there and through that tension, all kinds of things end up happening. British policy is also constantly flip-flopping. Like one government will come and say, okay, traditional learning. Next one will come and say no English learning. Then someone will say, okay, let's sponsor school. Someone else would say, no, no, this is too much money spent on schools. Pull it all out. Let's sponsor five good colleges instead for the higher cast and the elites of Hindu society. Let them study and then they can translate and things can trickle down to the master. So there's this whole trickle down concept also happening. And there's a whole generation of Indians who are also engaged in this. So you have them becoming teachers translating scientific textbooks into Marathi into Hindi into Indian languages in order that their students can understand. You have cases where in colleges like Bombay, they have to teach sometimes in multiple languages. Marathi, Gujarati and English because your students come from different language groups and you have to therefore very, you know, be very agile in terms of being able to translate modern science into this. Translating itself is a pain because how do you translate chemical compounds and some of these scientific terms into, you know, local languages. One set of Englishmen went around trying to find words in Sanskrit and create words out of Sanskrit to translate hydrogen and things like that. Others said, no, just leave it. Just, you know, vernacular is the word itself. You don't need an Indian term for it. There are Sanskrit term for it. So the debates are very granular at one level and on how to translate even. Then there's a whole question of should translation even be done? And sometimes the question of should we even bother with English or should we bother with traditional education? And I'm really intrigued by, you know, how a distant event can shape something in modern times and it's the kind of links and connections that emerge. For example, you know, your book taught me how to connect the industrial revolution to, you know, somebody being lynched in modern times for allegedly carrying meat in his bag. Right. Part of what the industrial revolution does besides, of course, start this, all these beautiful virtuous cycles, readily to a much more prosperous world, but part, but it also does two things which impact us very directly. And one of them is that it raises the self image of the British even more because hey, we've achieved all of these things which are like magic, we're getting prosperous. And therefore in contrast, you know, it enhances their viewing of us as savages who must be educated and so on and so forth. And what it also does is it turbocharges the evangelical movement. Right. So earlier, you know, at the end of the 19th century, you have missionaries arguing that the charter should support us. We should be able to go out and evangelize and you should fund us and all that. And, you know, not much heat is paid to them because the British are more concerned about the everyday practical matters of administrating and extracting and so on and so forth. By the time the 1830 charter is renewed, that changes completely because now the evangelical movement doesn't just have people in the religious business, but ordinary people everywhere, like you describe one guy as a shoemaker and he's coming to India and there's money suddenly flooding in and there are all of these people who, you know, would not have been missionaries a generation ago, but are now coming on the landscape with New Zeal and that gradually begins to sort of change everything. So tell me about some of those forces and how that plays out, how that transition sort of happens from, you know, the merchants winning the merchant versus missionary argument more or less and suddenly missionary zeal becoming a serious part of that civilizing process. Because, you know, Britain was also changing in this time and that's why it's very important when we look at colonialism to also look at what was happening in the country of the colonizer because attitudes there are also changing. Social dynamics there are also changing. Precisely because of the industrial revolution, new dynamics, the existence of a colony, you know, the existence of India alone and, you know, so much revenue coming in from India, all of these officers would come to India, make tons of money and go back and then buy seats and parliament, etc. That was already upsetting the political and sort of class-based system that existed in British society in the late 18th century. Then you have events like the industrial revolution that's completely changing how society is organized. You know, merchants are becoming more and more powerful, traders are becoming more and more powerful. There's the rise of a middle class that's taking place slowly in Britain over these decades and in the next century. Then there's political events, you know, in the loss of America, which was a huge embarrassment to the British. So, this leads to a kind of soul searching in Britain itself, where people start becoming more and more. So, it's almost like you have the industrial revolution and strange way results in a flowering of faith also because now, oh, there's so much change around you. The familiar world is vanishing, things are all up in the air and people tend to then go back to religion in a certain way. And they shouldn't surprise us. I always give this example about how starting in the 70s in Kerala, which is this big communist bastion and all of that, had this very proud, you know, rational culture. They will be Russian literature and all of that. The Gulf boom starts and after the Gulf boom, people's disposable income starts rising through the 80s and 90s. And it's not as if this led to some great flowering of rationality in Kerala. People became more religious. Over the last 25 years, we've seen people renovate their family temples, groves, people are doing more and more pujas. People have now inventing and appropriating religions, sort of religious practices from North India, keeping more fast than they ever did. Temple festivals have become bigger and bigger. Pujaris have higher revenues and incomes than ever before in the last 30, 40 years. And it's all being funded because there are all these changes taking place. So, there is religiosity flowering as a new middle class emerges and it's a middle class with disposable income. Now, think of 18th century, late 18th century, early 19th century, Britain. It is also a changing society. And especially after losses like America, there are, you know, fathers going around saying things like, yes, this is God punishing us for our pujas. You know, we've become too divorced from God. We've become too divorced from religion. We're chasing just money and wealth. And there is this growth. And an emerging middle class also wants a sense of meaning. So, your shoemaker, your carriage driver, you know, that entire class of people, they're also coming into a sense of self and they want a sense of meaning. And saving barbarians in other parts of the world gives you a sense of meaning. You are now the civilized people and you're part of some great mission to bring and sort of spread Christian light around the globe in Africa and India and all of these places. This leads to a flowering of evangelical literature because the fathers who are coming here are writing even more dramatic material on Hindu society and culture. But makes it seem like every second woman is being forced to become Sati and is being burned alive while the British are standing there and clapping. I mean, these are literally the things that are said that Governor-General is just watching while, you know, women are being burned, you know, right under his nose. And is this a Christian Governor-General? How can he tolerate it? Questions are being asked that, you know, how can you pay the Brahmins and not support missionaries in India? How can you prevent missionaries from coming into Bengal and preaching? But you're happy to get a Brahmin to put a garland on your flag and take part in Hindu ceremonies. How can you smash a coconut while you're not allowing evangelicals into the country? All of these questions are emerging. And this whole religious literature that's being created. So generations also changing at the British have been around in India for a while. So war and Hastings are generation, Malcolm, Monroe, Elf and Stin. These were those cautious men who wanted to keep showing respect to Hindu society, to keep Hindus happy under foreign rule so that they would never be too agitated in order, so as to stand up and rebel against the British. But now what's happening is that by Governor-General Dalu, it allows these time. These are men who are raised in this new evangelical climate. Many of them, you know, the famous Lord McCauley, his family wasn't evangelical family. His uncle, his, was his support, his uncle. He was a British resident in Trivenko. Was a supporter of evangelical missions in Kerala. So these men are coming out of a new climate in Britain, where they are also internalizing the idea that it is our job to civilize the native and it is our job to support Christian mission. Now you find English officials saying that we will not attend any Hindu activities on Sundays because Sundays are sacred to us. Why should we go smashing coconuts? When, you know, we have this bureaucrat who says, "When I signed up to join the civil service, I was not signing up to uphold the idolatry and superstition of the world. of the Hindus. So you see slowly within the British establishment itself people starting to become more and more negative in the perception of the Hindus and there's a certain contempt that starts seeping in which is that yes, you know, we have the upper ground. God has blessed us with greater resources. We now control so many lands around the world. We have all the industries, we have the money. If it weren't for God, you wouldn't even be under our rule. So we are clearly here with the duty to civilize you. God wishes it this way and you have evangelicals and fathers who are willing to support this narrative. So it's changing society in Britain ends up affecting British policy in India and necessarily that leads to a change in how Hindus are also responding to the British. So in Puri, if the priests of Puri receive the British East India Company army with Sanskrit poetry praising them within a few generations you have you know violence, you have 1857 happening, you have people standing up to the British and resisting British rule in very many ways. Yeah, and you know that whole thing about middle class empowerment, lead leading to a rise in religious nationalism and perhaps bigotry, which is another way of putting it is also something you see in our 91 reforms like our 91 reforms like the industrial revolution. Absolutely amazing, a huge net positive, yeah, hundreds of millions of people come out of poverty, but it also leads to a resurgence in a particular kind of nationalism, which is driven by the values of all these people who are now empowered to express those values and then, no longer have to kind of leave the behind and that's a cultural fight. You again have to win that freedom wins out in the economic marketplace. It might in the skeweriest twist and unintended consequence, you know be threatened by the resurgence that comes up. I'm also, you say something, in fact, in your podcast, you often talk about how social media, earlier people would have views that they would hesitate to express, but because of social media, they said hold on there are lots of other people who have these views, let's now express them because clearly we have an audience and there are others like us who are willing to be part of this conversation. And in this case, you have something similar, which is that print becomes such a big thing, periodicals become such a big thing that a lot of this, you know, anti-India or this evangelical conversation, let us go save the natives, their barbaric religion, this that is also getting a Philip constantly through literature because there are these periodicals that have become very successful. Literacy rates are also rising in this time. The press has become has completely revolutionized the way, you know, even scripture is studied across in different societies around the world. So just as we have social media, they now, at that time, it was periodicals, the press, the growth of literacy, that was also allowing a lot of what we would call negative attitudes to flourish because now there were platforms where you could actually add these ideas and be rewarded for it because there were other people willing to consume it and pay you, you know, for putting that out there. Yeah, and I'm also interested in how this muddy tabloid material actually goes into the proper history books and shapes, how first they see us and then how we see ourselves. For example, you've spoken about a lot, you know, earlier we spoke about the exaggerations that the early missionaries would do to get funding and etc. etc. And here is for a different reason, you're, you know, selling your accounts and selling magazines and selling newspapers on the basis of the most lurid sort of descriptions of infants being sacrificed and women being burnt and infants also fed the crocodiles in infants also fed to crocodiles and so on and so forth. And so that's one thing that is happening and this has a huge audience. Like as you've pointed out, there's a organization called the Church Missionary Society, the CMS, established in 1799 and their journal is printing 400,000 copies annually by 1824, right? And I think you've reproduced the pages of one of them which shows one of their, sort of clickbaity sensationalistic images. Human sacrifice. Yeah, human subtrickling of the steps and yeah, yeah, it's kind of marvel, like with the so many web series and just in each book of yours and you know, exaggerating Sati, for example, you point out that at one point, they're saying, hey, there are, you know, about 10,000 women dying every year while that particular year as you point out is like 384 or something like that. So all of this is happening and you'd think that, okay, this is a tabloid media, right? They'll say whatever it doesn't really matter, it doesn't affect the discourse. But then this is the only source of information for a lot of people and it affects them and you point out about how, you know, James mill in 1817 publishes a history of British India and the book is called the history of British India, but he's never been to India. He doesn't know the first thing about it. So he is getting all his information from the unimpeachable sources of the clickbait tabloids and you know, the bus feeds of the day and even worse, right? The op-india of the day and he's getting all his information from there and then that book is taken super seriously. You know, he is considered an expert. He's given a job at India House in 1819 and the narrative is being shaped by this and bizarrely the same narrative then goes back to the Indians who are reading this and taking it seriously and being shaped by this. Yeah. In fact, James mill takes, yeah, I think he calls it a judging history. So it's not even like he's pretending to be objective. He's actually calling it a judging history and not just a dispassionate history of any kind. But yeah, there is this whole flowering of this tabloid culture as it were in the early 19th century. And again, look at the people consuming it, right? It is that shoemaker. It is that carriage driver. It is people and this upset some, you know, lofty church people in Britain as well. They're not happy that suddenly every shoemaker thinks that he can come off to India as part of some sacred mission to civilize the natives because it upsets their internal hierarchies. Also, they are also not happy that this is happening because there's also class angle to it and this is the way classes that see they see is lower and now asserting their own agency and pushing forth. So it's interesting that you know, each is feeding off the other India supplying raw material for new classes to assert themselves in Britain. And the new classes are asserting themselves by claiming this great civilisation and mission that oh, we are going to come here and save the natives. Whereas here, the natives are also reading this material and they're also realizing that hold on. This is highly exaggerated. We're not burning every second woman we see. Widow is not being burned to death. Yes, and remember, widow burning was also largely restricted to certain provinces and certain castes and groups, military castes, etc. It wasn't a standard practice across India. So they're also reading this if you're sitting in Madras and you've never seen a widow burn anywhere around Madras for a while. And you're reading that oh, so many thousands of women are apparently being burned in India as a regular thing, you're also going to get upset. To be fair, there were British critics who tried to fight this back, fight back against this in that they would write texts one was by this, I think Charles Stewart saying a vindication of the Hindus saying that the Hindus actually don't need anything for Christianity. And he fell back on all those orientalist texts, all those ancient classical texts, the Gita, this that saying that the Hindus already have traditions that have all these higher precepts, they don't need to be saved by you. But then as today, the sensational sells a lot more than anything that's sober. And therefore, these these attempts from within the British system to push back against all this anti-Hindu literature didn't really fly much because the mood of the time was such that these cheap magazines priced very reasonably, you know, very titillating with these interesting images, even images of say Jagannath's, you know, the temple, Jagannath's temple, the carriage under which apparently Hindus were constantly sacrificing themselves willingly. It appears these are mostly accidents because there are so many people there. Sometimes people fell under the chariot and they were crushed occasionally. Maybe there was an overzealous person who wanted to like give themselves to the Lord or whatever. But these missionary journals would make it sound like Jagannath required people to jump in front of his chariot and be crushed to death. And that's how Jagannath was pleased. That was an exaggeration. So even the images of these deities would be published in these magazines. And to Europeans, they look very sinister, these dark, strange images, one is shaped like a cube, another is carved, something as it's tongue out, something as fangs. So they're constantly being fed this material to give themselves a sense of meaning, but also to support a political/religious mission in India. And naturally, it isn't this climate that Hindus also become sharper in the way they respond to evangelicalism. Remember with Zieghan Bagh and the earlier people we discussed, the British are still not ruling India. So you're not that threatened by the missionary. You're irritated by the missionary in certain cases. You don't necessarily like all conversions if say an uppercase Brahmin converts because then you're not pleased because it does affect your social fabric in a certain way. But it's not a threat because there's no state power here. But here you find that a generation has shifted British officials themselves are now pro evangelical. In fact, sometimes these evangelical missions would choose where they wanted to go and set up their base because they would know such and such a collector in say Madras presidency in such and such a place is his family is evangelical. That's why we should set up our base because we'll get support. In Travenko, the British resident is pro-Christian. Therefore, let's go there and set up a base. So people on the ground here started to seem that it wasn't just missionaries who are now coming in larger numbers preaching outside mailers, preaching outside temples, all of this, but also a government that seemed to be looking the other way. True, there was still people in government not happy with it. But as far as the Hindus were concerned, these are white men and it looks like the government is supporting the government were not supporting. How could the missionaries come and be so offensive on the streets and call out our gods and say horrible things about our customs. So that's when you start seeing that the Hindu response also starts getting sharper and sharper. And you know, just as we think of the clickbait and the outrage and the sensationalism and we think of Twitter, you know, the thing is that while there is Twitter, there is also the scene in the unseen. So there are also reason debates happening in those times and you've reproduced a bit of some of them. You've coated from the writings of Dandikur and Narayan Rao and Bhaskar Pandurang and that was like really interesting to me because it's, you know, well thought out stuff. It's clearly part of a larger dialogue. that is happening with the British. It's fairly nuanced and sophisticated. So how is that playing out? Because that's another parallel strand that is kind of playing out. You know, there is on the one hand, there is political power and there is the different kind of responses to it, which we'll discuss soon. But how are those intellectual debates kind of playing out among people trying to understand each other? So on the Indian side, a lot of these people, again, the British who wanted Indians to be given Western education, the idea was that they would pick up Western education, educate their countrymen, and stay loyal to the British. But the thing is, the Indians picked up Western education, they translated it, but in that translation, they were urging Indians, please study all this so you can stand up for yourself. And they were actually cultivating a culture of resistance, using Western knowledge and Western technology that the British were trying to pump in, to sort of, you know, keep India happy as well. And what's interesting is the Pandora, you know, Baskar Pandora is the one who in the 1840s already articulates a very clearly nationalistic criticism of colonial rule. It has an economic side, it has a religious side, it has a political side. He says, you have not built your roads and technology and all of that here to save us. You've built it for your convenience. In with conversion, you have, you want us to convert to your religion, at least under the muggles, if you converted to Islam, you would gain something out of it. You'd gain higher office. But because of your racism, even if we convert to Christianity, we're still seen as a lower class of people, and you're never going to give us, give me one example of a Hindu who's become a Christian and has been given higher office or some form of respect from your state. So he's saying that's also not being done. Then there's the political criticism, saying we don't need you to govern us. You're saying that we were oppressed under barbarians and there were these marauders who'd come and loot us every 10 years, but now under your very sophisticated government, you are extracting more money from us than anybody before. It's just that yes, you've given us order, but the order is in order to extract more. So don't I expect us to be thankful because we're still being plundered, except it's now happening every day as opposed to every 10 years under an army of marauders. So it's interesting that what d'Ada by Nao Roji, eventually builds up much later in the century, you find with Panduranga happening earlier. The interesting thing is Panduranga's older brother, who appears in chapter four, I think, was one of these teachers who was translating. So the younger brothers are articulating an nationalist to critique and he dies very young. So we don't know what he could have achieved if he had lived longer. But the older brother is one of these men translating scientific texts and all of that. So you see the intellectual side and that proto-nationalistic side is going hand in hand. It's not as if these things are evolving separately. That same generation, that same period is think, in the same period, they're thinking about both of these things. As people, the British thought they were going to enlighten Hindus, the missionaries thought that enlightenment and actually they even thought that Western science would make Hindus give up their belief in Hinduism and look at Christianity as a more rational faith. In reality, the missionaries were disappointed because Hindus would study Western science and try to father Western science on Hindu sages. Saying, "Yeah, yeah, this is all there in our way, that's already some talk it to extremes." Others said, "No, we had some notion of this in certain texts and we can see, we can trace some kind of scientific tradition within Hindu text." So the British were feeding Hindu something, a certain fair, expecting certain results. But in the hands of the Hindus, once they were digesting this, it was being digested in a very different way and it was being put to different uses. And that's why you see Hindu assertion as a people slowly growing in this phase. We're absolutely love how Pandurang is using exactly the tools of Western education and rationality to troll the Christians, where he's saying that you are criticizing our many gods, what about Father San Holy Ghost, what is that shit? And not in so many words, but yeah, or he's saying that you are saying your god is all powerful, well he could have saved Jesus on the cross, no, why didn't he do that, right? And then the Christian interlocutors, the burden is now on them to rationalize the way the Brahmins have been doing so far. So I love that. And these are our public debates. So these are public debates with an audience. So there'll be a Hindu guru who will come, there'll be some three missionaries who will come, they will sit on stage in front of thousands or hundreds in some cases, thousands of people and have this back and forth on religion. Then once this is done, they will publish it. Remember, print has come in newspapers have come in. So a lot of these debates are being covered by press correspondence, who are then printing what these debates are all about. And this is now being disseminated through written media to even larger numbers of people who are physically not able to attend it. So it's essentially becoming a spectacle. It's no longer an academic thing where, oh, you find a scholarly Brahmins sit down with him in a small room and discuss and go back and forth on religion as such, it's becoming public performance and public performance is also political performance. It is the brown man standing up for his religion against the white man who also represents the ruling class. And it is clear that to the audience that this is tension between foreign rulers and a foreign culture and a foreign faith and Indians standing up for what they believe in. So it's not again a question of who was right and wrong and what is good or bad. This is the historical process that played out in that period. Magnificent, before we go into a break, I'll just quote a leading evangelical that you cite in your book where he says, quote, "Hindu's resemble an immense number of particles of sand which are incapable of forming a solid mass. There is no bond of union among them, nor any principle capable of affecting its top court." And he's actually proved wrong whether events straight followed at all these particles of sand do come together to form a giant rock, whatever. We won't take the metaphor too far. Let's take a quick break and come back on the other side. Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love to help you. Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing and an online community has now sprung up before all my past students. We have workshops and newsletters to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction. In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know about the craft and practice of clear writing. There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs Rs. 10,000 per GST, or about $150. If you're interested, head on over to register at indiauncourth.com/clearwriting. That's indiauncourth.com/clearwriting. Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent. Just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Welcome back to the scene in the unseen. I'm still here with Manu Pillay. And we've just about reached the 19th century. And you mentioned this fascinating Persian book which came out in 1803, 1804. Call, please forgive me for my pronunciation. Oh, Persian speakers listening to this, which is called "Tuhfat ul mowa hiddine" is that correct? Well, I don't think I can, I'm very capable of pronouncing it as either. But yeah. And this is a book in Persian by Ramohan Roy. Where, and these are the first stirrings of his sinking. And you've got a fascinating chapter called "Native Luthers" and in a sense by Luthers, you're really referring to Martin Luther and you know how Protestant, "Tonism" was a challenge to Christian faith as it was then. And this chapter is really about people who in different ways are both shaping and challenging Hinduism. And how different they are, how the imperatives are different and all of that. So let's start with Ramohan Roy. In fact, I am calling them Luthers, but it's not my term in that this is not a term I endorse. That's what's in quotes. It was something they were called because they were seen very much as people reforming Hinduism. As I said, even if you go back to that introductory chapter, about the Puranas, what are the Purai? What is Purana Hinduism doing? It is synthesizing the unfamiliar with the familiar. It is taking on the appearance and certain qualities, even arrivals in order to co-opt them into a broader framework. And that's how it's making a whole out of this. Otherwise, what might seem like a kitcheny is given a structure, is given a certain completeness and a certain singular understanding, a singular framework. And now what you see is that same phenomenon occurring in the 19th century in the modern period, except now it is Hinduism responding to Christianity, while also in many ways absorbing certain qualities of how a religion should be shaped from Christianity. So because there is this tension with the missionaries, you obviously have Hindu thinkers responding to it in different ways. The three people I've chosen is Dayaananda Saraswati, Rajaramo Hanroy, and of course Jyoti Bafule. In their own very distinct styles, all are called reformers often, but all had very different interests and different styles of how they went about perceiving Hinduism, as well as reformulating or understanding Hinduism for their time. Ramo Hanroy is very much an anglicized figure. He comes from a very elite family, a lead background. He's got a Persian education. He's clearly very well read. This Persian text, you mentioned, is where he first engages with the idea of religion. So you know, Rajaramo Hanroy comes from this elite family. His family has been in government service for a while, even under the muggles. He's very well educated. He studied Persian. He knows a bit of Sanskrit. Mother's side are big priests in Bengal. So he's also exposed to that traditional side, not just the secular side of life in government service, but also to traditional ideas and Sanskrit, then all of that. And he's that Persian text you mentioned is him first engaging with religion. And I think he himself later distances himself from some of those views. Like most young people, I think he had much more radical views than he later came to believe in. And his essential argument was that if there is only one God, and there is only one humanity, and if different religions are giving you different prescriptions and some of them are contradictory, clearly a lot of this is of human creation. And it's interesting because some scholars say that it's almost as if he's questioning the concept of religion itself. But then as he matures and he gets older, he realizes that the world operates through religions, there are religious cultures and clearly there is competition and it is also linked to identity. So, into the 1810s etc. he's by now established, he's almost middle age, he's got resources, he starts writing and he writes written Bengali because he's also not just writing, it's English as well as Bengali. He's writing not just for Western interlocutors but also for Indians and he's hoping that a lot of this trickles down in people start understanding what he's trying to do and what he's trying to say. A lot of these tracks are actually distributed for free because he has the resources, he's not doing it for money. He sees himself very much as somebody who's reforming, who's doing something new but at the same time in his mind he's re-vivifying, reanimating good Hinduism as it used to be. Now here you can almost see the acceptance in great measure of the Western prison which is that there was a pristine, extra-l idea that is represented in the Vedas in his case primarily the Upanishads, the later part of the Vedic corpus and then it was corrupted into puranic Hinduism and temple practices and ritualism etc. So very much like a lot of these Westerners he doesn't appreciate Hinduism in its living contemporary form. His own mother has issues with him for this. She spends her dying days serving Jagannatha Puri, cleaning up and doing some menial work there because that's her final service to God. That is he doesn't believe in temple culture. He has a much more esoteric, much more philosophical idea of Hinduism and he's also at the same time criticizing Christianity. So in many ways his argument is that in order to reform Hinduism or to uplift the Hindus I don't need to lead them to Christ, I just need to lead them to the higher precepts of their own religion. So you're just trying to transition Hindus from a corrupted form as he sees it of their religion to a higher form and that is actually even better than Christianity. So he criticizes Christians saying that actually if you are able to think of it in Advetha the formless supreme is a much higher and more sophisticated idea of God than your Trinity. So in fact there are Christians who are anti-Trenity in America and Europe. They actually like Ramahundroy because he's also standing up to the idea of the Trinity and they don't like it either. So they see that he has a much more scientific rational sense of God. Of course nobody's questioning the existence of God itself in any of this but he believes that the Upanishadic idea of divinity is what will save the Hindus and you don't need a missionaries in it. So he's criticizing the missionaries. At the same time there is a selective appropriation of certain Western lenses and I use that term selective appropriation very consciously because that's where agency comes in. For people who argue that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century I think it flattens that out. Whereas here you see he's in being remolded completely by Western concepts. He's accepting only those concepts that he wants and he's populating it with Hindu ideas that he's found in the Hindu tradition and which do exist. It is selective on both sides but he's creating something with agency and with his own sort of vision in mind and responding to a political and social religious dynamic that's playing out around him. That's essentially what Rajaraj Mohan Roy is doing and ultimately of course he becomes a bit of a celebrity. He writes a great deal. He's very much on the side of people who want English education in Bengal. He believes that we already have enough Sanskrit education and doesn't make sense to keep sponsoring more under the government. If it's a British government what we need is Western learning and it is Western learning in order for us to go back to being the sophisticated people we used to be before we were corrupted by history and time. There's a memorable quote by him on Sathi where you quote him as saying God did not ask to burn women mended which is again speaks to that whole thing of this religion was fine but human beings and all these messy compromises, these different particles of sand they messed it up. Let's go back to the source. I'm interested in that shift from Persian to Bengali because when he's writing in Persian it is necessarily limited to certain elites who are reading it and it's in that circle of game. It's really limited. Bengali is his way of reaching the masses. It indicates that the quest is no longer a quest that we will be part of a dialogue where we find the truth but that the quest is turned from a spiritual one to a political one maybe from an intellectual one to a political one. There's an intentionality there and a reason and you seem to also hint at this where you point out the goal then was to fall to teach Hindus that the religion as it existed was not actually the religion and to persuade Europeans as exemplified by James Millen William Ward whose notorious works appeared in the same years that they had misjudged Hinduism. So there is this dual sort of intentionality but I wonder how one then thinks of him because I think when the a seeker of truth comes up with an agenda then everything that they do is through that prism. So he not only has adapted the Western prism of monotheism and the text and all of that but he has also sort of given up looking like one could easily speculate that perhaps he is now an atheist and he thinks all of this is rubbish but now he has a political agenda and he's framing makes sense in the context of this political agenda. So what do you think of him in this light because we often think of intellectual and public intellectual and actually an intellectual is not someone who is a public intellectual is not just an intellectual who's sinking out in public. The fact that the person is public changes a manner of their thinking I wouldn't say the quality. I think with Ramon Roy that Persian text at the beginning perhaps shows him being an intellectual for the sake of the ideas right he's trying to unerth something he's trying to make a point but I think later it becomes very clear to him that he's operating in a political climate and he has a certain he feels the sense of responsibility and duty and you can perhaps even call it some stirring of nationalism some stirring of you know wanting to uplift his people and sort of prevent further degradation under the British or whatever and he's very transparent about it. I don't know which page it is but somewhere he basically says that the current condition of the Hindus is not calculated for their political well-being or something like that and that is why he is trying to uplift them so he's very conscious that there is a political agenda to this it's not even something that he's oblivious to his writings in the very fact that he's writing in Bengali is because he wants Bengalis the average Bengali to be able to consume what he's saying and to see what he's trying to communicate what's interesting though is that I can't read Bengali but I would have liked very much to compare and I don't know if anybody has whether for example any critique certain Hindu practices whether it's Sati certain superstitions etc for which he also made lots of enemies by the way there were lots of just as there were missionaries who hated him there were lots of orthodox Brahmins also who hated him because they thought by by campaigning against Sati he was playing into the hands of the British and going against Hindu society but he was going against Hindu orthodoxy to create a Hindu modernity if you see the difference there but I wanted to compare I'd like to have compared whether he's as sort of blunt in his Bengali writings when he criticises Hindu customs as he is in English because in English a lot of his Bengali readership is not reading it it's essentially missionaries and certain other orthodox Hindus maybe who have familiarity with the English language but in Bengali it's all entirely possible he was not that blunt because his job was to also persuade a large number of Hindus and he would have therefore been perhaps slightly more circumspect in the way he went about it but that again I haven't I haven't been able to do it in this book but yes his was very much a political agenda he didn't see himself as an intellectual studying for the sake of academic argument he saw himself very much as a modernizer trying to construct a Hindu modernity and and create something that was able to that would be able to give Hindus the legs to stand up in the modern age for themselves and in a sense also being like the way I described you know Navrajee Rana De Agar Kerkokh earlier as being someone with liberal ends but conservative means so the liberal end would of course be that let's get get rid of some of these terrible practices like Saty and so on and so forth but the conservative means is that I can't do it by being a radical standing outside and giving my own rationalist view of the Gyan and I also cannot do it by fighting the British you know that this is a reality they are here let's work within the system and let's see what we can do and and they were radicals in his time I think they call the derosians because they were you know tutored by this man and they sort of took his name as their group identity as it were and that's how they described at least in a lot of literature and they were Paka radicals like you have some of them throwing beef into the yard of a Brahmin and things that very very radical but I think it's that kind of radicalism makes a point it has value but it can't change society in that incremental slow way society is like a tortoise it takes its time whereas Ramohan Roy I think understood that and therefore he was radical where he needed to be radical but also persuasive where he needed to be persuasive and had to make an argument consistently in the press through his writings through his books through engagements with the public through being a public face through campaigning for certain reforms and changes and constantly being there keeping that argument alive so he was very much I think aware of a lot of these of the realities of how the world operate in an earlier section of the book you've chosen about how the West began to engage with the Vedas in an attempt to kind of understand what's going on here and what I found really interesting is that Rajar Ramohan Roy also goes to the Vedas but not to the earlier Vedas but to the Upanishads and in fact the Anand Saraswati as we'll speak about him soon you know does exactly the opposite so let's talk about why like you know why does he make those choices that he makes and if you've read those texts you know please tell us a little bit about your reading of them as well so the earlier parts of it the even of the Rigveda the Samhitas as they're called because they have invocations to Agni and Indra and Varuna and Vaayu and all these various gods the argument could be made that they still reflect certain polytheistic impulses so missionaries when they focused on the Vedas often focused on this saying that look even the highest scripture of the Hindus is full of polytheism therefore they had no notion of monotheism They're all working within a framework where monotheism is the supreme, like to be truly sophisticated, you have to recognize monotheism. Anything else is corruption. And in fact, what's interesting is later in Bengal, we have an intellectual who actually questions this saying that why are you assuming that monotheism is somehow better than polytheism? Just because a building appears, it doesn't mean that the architect alone built it. He would have had Mason and subordinates to do it. So actually, you can make a case that you can make a bank in general. Correct. Yeah, you can make the case that the universe, which is so remarkable, is the work of multiple hands and not just one God. So he's being very tongue in cheek over there. So I think people like Ramon Roy realized that that segment of the Vedas was perhaps not conducive to creating this Hindu modernity, especially when these are the terms on which the debate is being argued and these are your opponents. Whereas if you look at the open open issues, it has philosophical content. Oriental scholars have valued it. They've actually written texts in Europe and published in Europe saying, oh, look, these parts of the Vedic corpus have these lofty ideas. There is monotheism that you can trace in it. There is philosophical ideas, we as Europeans and Christians can relate to. So he realized that in holding up a kind of shield against Christian pressures, evangelical pressures, the open issue, the framing of Hinduism was better. That was a better shield in that particular context. And that's why I think he preferred that. To be honest, there are people who've said that his understanding of Sanskrit was perhaps flawed. He was not some kind of great Sanskrit scholar. He knew Sanskrit. But apparently a lot of his translations were sort of fishy in certain contexts, etc. I think there was a Brahmin in Madras. I haven't been able to track down his name. But there was a critic in Madras who said that this man's interpretations of things are very selective and very mixed up. But again, I think Ramon Roy would have done some of that deliberately because he was again doing this in order to make an argument. And one could even say to a certain extent, he fit the evidence to support his argument, rather than being led to a conclusion through the evidence. Because it was a political climate in which he had to make a certain point and to be able to construct a certain wall of defense for the Hindus. And that's why he chose that particular segment of the Vedas. And Ramon Roy, of course, wanted the Brahmo Samaj, one of my dear friends, Ivankshu Dattab belongs to the Brahmo Samaj. In fact, he was on your show, I think. He was on my show. And he's in fact staying with me right now. Like you've come to my home studio. So he's here for a national bridge tournament. So he's here for three days. So he's been there both these nights, but he's left at eight in the morning and you've come after that. So you've just misleading him. But I did discuss your book with him and he loves your work. So of course he hasn't read this book, but he loves your work. Tell me about the movement. Like how did he shape the movement? What role did he say it playing? It's become largely kind of relevant. And I think in many ways, Brahmo Samaj people today, and please forgive me if my impression is wrong, but my basic impression is that they've kind of given up on being significant in any way. They don't even see themselves as part of mainstream Hinduism anymore. It's just this one thing that has become a movement of some, not even a movement, a community of some elite. So are usually rational and decent people and, you know, not at all religious minded in the conventional sense. But the movement really did take off at that time and it fizzled out much later. So tell me about that movement and, you know, I don't go too much into it. But yes, he, I think this was also time in organizing Hindus became a thing and like minded people were all sort of coming together in groups. So even his opponents had groups like Dharma Sabas, etc. where they would come together and say and defend orthodox traditional Hinduism. Saying how can you say temples are bad? How can you say rituals are bad? How can you say the Vedas are good but the Puranas are bad? You can't pick and choose between the theology and the philosophy and the tradition or at that, is that at that intellectual level and from the practice. Religion is one package. Both are part of it. You can't divorce the two. Whereas he belonged to a group of people who wanted to create a slight bifurcation in order to uplift one and play down something else. That was what he was doing. So groups were forming anyway. I think after he passed away, the Brahmasamaj did sort of go through a platoing phase and then I think under the tuggores is when they sort of revive it and it becomes a new thing. I may be getting it wrong because I don't go into it in the book. But from the back of my head, this is the trajectory I have. But you're right that the Brahmasamaj eventually is now Brahmoism as some people call it. He's the philosophy in the belief system and the identity of a very small set of people in India. It doesn't become a mass movement. And I think one of the reasons is that Ramohan Roy is still addressing at his level a much more of an intellectual conversation. This is not really a converse, much as he wants people to engage with it in Bengali and all of that. It's not a persuasive thing. People need something attractive to sort of gel around. He doesn't necessarily have that. There's no mass movement that comes out of it. He's essentially an intellectual argument. It's useful and it is lasting in the sense that wherever Hindus needed to make an intellectual defense of Hinduism in front of a Western audience, the Ramohan style, Adve Taweda and the philosophical reading of Hinduism became useful. And I subsequently say this that towards the end of this chapter, this is chapter six, that for those who are looking to defend Hinduism on those terms, philosophical, especially in front of a Western audience, this framing was ideal. I think I would place Vivekananda, etc., very much in this tradition, especially when he goes to America. There is that presenting of Hinduism's external face to foreign people, their Ramohan Roy becomes very useful. Whereas if you're looking at more mass activities, bringing more people together, someone like Diane and the Saraswati had greater success. And his Arya Samaj is now, you know, heaps of people, lots of money, lots of institutions, schools, oftenages, you know, that kind of, there's a whole support system that's evolved under around the Arya Samaj. And indeed, an influence that goes beyond the organizational own. Let's talk about Diane and Saraswati because he's a fascinating character. He's got a great origin story. And he's extremely different from Ramohan Roy because he is not responding to the British. He is on an individual quest of his own through an interesting life. And that kind of takes him to, like, in a sense, the journey makes a particular kind of destination almost inevitable. You know, Ramohan Roy could not have been, could not have founded the Arya Samaj and vice versa. So tell me a little bit more about, tell me a little bit about Diane. So Diane's answer to this is important to me also because in a way, he shows us that even traditional Hinduism has been put in pre-British or whatever was not a monolith. As I said, there are currents and counter currents within it also. There are conversations and debates and quarrels and disagreements happening within also. So his impulse for reform and change comes not because he's encountered some missionary or he has had some English education. He had no bureaucratic dealings with the British Raj or any of that. He came from a family in Gujarat in Kathiavar. We still don't know exactly which family. Some people have identified, but it's inconclusive. And this big story goes, you know, that one day during Shivaratri, they were all supposed to stay up that night. And he saw mouse sort of eating up all the food placed in front of the idol. And he thought, you know, if this idol is this powerless, that a rodent can come and have its way with the idol, then obviously the idol does not have power. So his critique of what is called idol worship was not a missionary critique, but it came from within. It came from within the Hindu tradition itself and Hindu society itself as a question that he posed. He obviously didn't want to marry his parents tried to foist a woman on him. He ran away. He was caught and brought back, but he ran away again and never went back to his family. For many years after that, he was wandering like a mendicant, you know, wearing a loincloth, climbing up the Himalayas, looking for sannyasis, looking for these, you know, great masters that he'd heard about. You know, people always have this idea that there are these great sadhus in the Himalayas who are these founts of knowledge. And everywhere he turned, for most part, he was disappointed. He was very disillusioned. There was one sannyasi, I think he met who also used to have these loud hysterical conversations with divine forces in the middle of the night. And he wasn't happy with that either. He one day saw cops floating, floating around in a river and pulled it aside and cut it open to see whether, you know, what was said in the traditional text matched what was actually the internal anatomy of the cops. And he was disappointed because nothing made sense. It was not what the ancient Sanskrit book said would be inside the body. So he threw the body and his Sanskrit books into the river and walked off. So he was very disillusioned, but eventually he finds a guru. And the guru basically tells him, go down to the river, take a bath and dump all that you've accumulated over the years there and come back to me with an open mind. And it is this guru who basically in Mathura, if I remember correctly, who essentially tells him that your job is to revive the Vedas. Some would read it as very very Brahminical mission, but what he's basically saying and as far as he's concerned is that you have to go back to the source. The Vedas are in many ways, you know, these supreme texts of Hinduism. So if you're disillusioned with the Hindu world, as you see it around you, this is where you need to go back. And essentially, that's why he's also branded by his supporters as a native Luther, like a Martin Luther went back to the core Bible and said, forget all the other church traditions. Let us look at what the scripture says and only go by what the scripture says and what the Bible says almost in a literal sense. So also, Diane and the Saraswati does it, but remember no exposure to Europe, no exposure to anything, this is happening within. So again, Hinduism within is still a dynamic force. It's not just Western influence. There are changes bubbling up from within that bottom up thing can still happen within Hinduism as well. That's when he becomes this traveling sunyasi. He starts having debates with these pundits. A lot of these early debates he's having in Banaras and other sacred cities. By now, he's traveled across large parts of the country. It's all happening in Sanskrit because he's having this with a scholarly, uppercast, Brahmanical elite that's there in these holy towns. Some people don't even like to meet him because they think he's an apostate. So there's this one guru who debates him with a curtain between them because he doesn't want to look at the face of somebody who's clearly an apostate. But then what happens is eventually at some point, he comes to Calcutta. This is where well into his life and well into his journey of reform. He encounters Ramon Roy's successors in the Brahmasamaj. And they are the ones who firstly gave him a rebranding of sorts. So they said this whole saniyasi look of a law in cloth, you look like a guru, but in this urban society, you need to sort of brand yourself a certain way. So you start wearing these robes, there's a turbine, there's a new physical appearance there. He discovers maximalist translations of the Vedas. He's interested in what these Western orientalists are saying about the Vedas. He wants to sort of understand how they've studied Hindu scripture. And he realizes that all his attempts in these temple towns have failed. So he realizes you really can't do something only by looking at the traditional intellectuals and the traditional elites. You have to get the people involved. And for the people to be involved, he notices that it is in the cities. It is in the urban class that there is a money, there is an aptitude, and there is an interest for reform. And especially in these English speaking circles also. So now he marries the two and these people start essentially supporting. He has a platform in urban areas. And remember if I'm not wrong and I think I mentioned this in the book, the Aryasama just found it in Bombay. I think the first place is Bombay. It's an urban city where people come together and essentially come up with the idea that you must set up an organization. Then of course it moves towards the north and Punjab and all of those places. That's where it really flowers. But the idea comes out of an urban set. And as somebody eventually describes him, it is the, it becomes the movement of the school teacher, the headmaster, the clerk, that middle class of Hindus who come not necessarily from the Brahmin caste, but the Khadri's, the middle land-owning caste, the bureaucratic classes, not the lower caste Cedar, but that middle segment, which is really in many ways the most influential segment. They are the ones who sort of coalesce around the Anand Sassaraswati. And they are also getting, just as I said the middle classes in Europe in Britain were getting a sense of meaning and of a feeling of being part of a larger mission by rallying around the evangelical cause. Here also you have something where they feel like they have part of a larger cause. They are reanimating Hinduism and bringing back something bigger. And that eventually leads to great and greater public engagement. So eventually a lot of this intellectual debate is left out and it becomes about cow protection. It becomes about setting up actual forces on the ground, mobilization of masses. Cow protection is essentially popularized in a great way in North India and in Punjab and those parts and eventually spreads to other parts and other provinces as well, under the Arya Samaj and its campaigns to protect the cow. And of course by the Anand Sassaraswati dies but the movement takes a life of its own. It has its chisms and splits within. There's one moderate faction, a much more radical faction and all of that. But eventually they even imitate and appropriate a lot of missionary techniques. So if the missionaries are here to convert, the Arya Samaj comes up with reconversion and they actually convert whole villages. And I find it amusing because just as in Goa and in the early Portuguese period, Francis Xavier went around including in Tamil Nadu converting whole villages overnight to Christianity very much through tokenistic practices. Here also you have whole villages and hundreds and thousands of people being converted overnight and brought back into the Hindu fold from having converted to say Islam or Christianity or whatever. So you see in many ways in the end I call the Anand Sassaraswati the grandfather of Hindu nationalism because that muscular Hindu identity where Ramohan Raya appropriates a lot of the intellectual attributes of the criticism, re-orient it and gives back an intellectual response. Here you find almost missionary activities and missionary organizations printing books dissemination of tracks through the printing press, large numbers of people newspapers exactly what the missionaries were using earlier in the 19th century. Here it is co-opted and appropriated by a reform movement which is now even reconverting people back to Hinduism. So here the techniques of your enemy are appropriated to push back against that enemy as you see him. And you know different as they are I see a similar trajectory in what you have described by Ramohan Raya and the Anand Sassaraswati in the sense that at the start they are seekers. You know they want to know the truth like what you said about the Anand Sassaraswati cutting open a cops to see does a heart really look like that and reminded me of you know what you earlier said about a puranic geography being taught in classrooms when you said that I thought to listen Ayurveda is still taught today. So if you're going to examine the basic first principles and all that you know we still have a lot of back witness and the and then there is that shift where he is first you know this causing with people in Sanskrit but then he shift to Hindi then he takes up printing then he thought see optics out where he has an actual advantage of kind of looking like a Sadova anyway. And it seems and then he adopts the early Vedas you know instead of the open issues of Ramohan Raya is also interesting you pointed out about how you know it's almost embarrassing for his followers later that when they are challenged on his essential position on the Vedas they're kind of floundering for example he says that listen you know all this animal sacrifice staff it's just symbolism. And then when it's pointed out to them that the Vedas actually have descriptions on how do you kill an animal clean it eat it et cetera et cetera and those descriptions would not be there if it was only the ritual sacrifice yeah and then not there so it feels like this is again you know narrative building you're constructing a narrative the two doesn't matter you take whatever part of the Vedas suits you Ramohan royal like Salater parts because in front of Western audiences and in fact he spent a lot of time in the West he was when it was a little bit more of a story. He was when he did in London and so on in London he saw somebody studying the earlier part of the Vedas and he said it's a waste of time you're something like that you mentioned that in your book yeah so that suited Ramohan Roy but here this guy is trying to build this particular movement and something else suits him and while reading this and well you know reading about the answer is with the else where it strikes me how how so much of modern Hindu talking points come from there you of course mentioned Kauslota but there is also these invocations to a glorious past where he's saying 5000 years back. It was like this and even America would learn from us and he's saying all these and he identifies pathal with America so in the you know he says pathalam is basically America the explanation that's given yeah so how does it take off in his lifetime and how does it take off after that like you made the intriguing comment at around the time he died you know one would have thought that Brahma samaj will flourish and it was doing well or he is a man. God knows how it will do but actually the Brahma samaj is like a tiny I mean this was Max Mueller Max Mueller is the one who wrote that in an obituary he said that you know something like the Brahma samaj of course it will flourish in India because all the intelligent when will see its value where is something like the Arya samaj will just sort of you know fade away after that and on time it's not bound to survive but it's actually the opposite that took place because the Arya samaj involved people it involved a public a larger public gave them a sense of meaning gave them something to do and remember the Kau became a very important motive because different casts different groups you would not eat with each other you would not marry each other all of these differences were there but a lot of these middleing cast that support of the Arya samaj they were all because they were middleing cast they all venerated the cow the cow was sacred to all of these communities so cow protection became a plank to actually unite a lot of these different casts in groups and mobilize them towards Hindu assertion because everybody recognized the cow as a sacred animal and the British also eventually you know that you have a visor I quote I think very basically says that the cow has supplied all these raffians and mischief makers a common platform under around which they can unite because it is something that is so emotional but something that gives them also a sense of being part of something bigger and I think that is the victory of the Arya samaj whereas the Brahma's remained in many ways a much more intellectual a much more you can even say sophisticated in terms of the cerebral aspects of things but this was very much on the ground this moved from purely thinking about the ideas to how do you people get people on the ground to move and towards the end you know I don't serve as the was debating missionaries also he did recognize the missionaries a threat and he did realize that actually hold on there is a threat to Hinduism from the outside earlier his reforms and all of that he was talking to orthodox pundits in Sanskrit in traditional spaces he to eventually realize that there is the missionary and remember when he writes his his seminar text the satyarth prakash which is fascinating reading like it's interesting how he interprets the way that how he puts forth his ideas and so on it's after he's he's gone to Calcutta he's also seen that the Brahmos have text they also printed something and the power of printing and the power of a book being able to guide a movement comes to him then so there is a continuation he is to a certain extent influenced by certain things that the Brahmos have done well he takes it on but then moves it also to a mass thing and the satyarth prakash in many ways becomes the Bible of his movement for them it is the guiding sort of text of their movement under the are a smudge and so you see there is it is separate in terms of its origins from Rajar Amhun Roy but at the same time there is still a continuation from that form of reform and that level of reform and this level of reform and this form of reform and the power of the power of print is of course something that the Gita press also takes upon so in a sense you could see because of Rajar Amhun Roy the was it the press so here's another question like if I look at the phrase religious nationalism it strikes me that there might have been a sense that because of our oppressors from outside we need a nationalism and what else can give us a coherent nationalism but religion and therefore religion becomes instrumental in that and within that things like cow slaughter which resonate with so many people becomes instrumental within that so it's not that you're fundamentally starting from a position of faith but that you're starting from a position of fighting the oppressor and religion becomes to be the one thing that you can use you know that's it's so that's why no if you look at the Gandhi court Mahatma Gandhi much later I think in the 20s then in the seriswati began with the Vedas right we need to go back to the Vedas but eventually the Arya Samaj is associated no longer with that kind of internal reform of Hinduism of Hinduism. It is very outward oriented. It is about how do we keep the missionary at bay and Gandhi has this quote by Gandhi says the Arya Samajas does never as happy as when he's reviling the followers or proponents of another religion because it has become outward oriented. It is very much now a political movement that sees it not just as a Hindu reform thing at some abstract level, but very much as a real thing in a real imperfect world where you have to survive. And in order to survive you have to appropriate the appearance and sometimes the strategies of your enemies as well. So yeah, that's what they end up doing. Let's talk about the third of your loathers, Jyoti Bhafulay, who is very interesting in the sense that he now brings a sense of caste consciousness to this as well and is starkly different from the other two guys for that reason. So tell me more about him and how he's view of Hinduism. And there also there's a slight continuum in that when the answer is what he came to Pune, Jyoti Bhafulay was one of the people who sort of part of this procession that they took out because there were lots of orthodox people in Pune who did not want the Anand Saraswati there. So when there was this big procession with the Anand Saraswati, I think they paraded a donkey alongside to make a public statement. And Fule was among those who supported the Anand Saraswati because he also felt anybody who's here to reform Hindu society is somebody we will support. But that said, Fule was not besotted with the Vedas, he was not besotted with the Puranas because his mirror he was holding up within Hindu society to ask questions of Hindus themselves. So just as the Ananda supporters eventually are outward facing Fule's inward facing, he's like hold on. Yes, I mean, what I forget the oppressor outside what about oppression within and this is the tradition, Ambedkar etc. take up later, which is that you're all talking about nationalism and getting rid of the foreign oppressor. What about oppression within? You can't get rid of the foreign oppressor to continue oppressing everybody here within the system as you've been doing for centuries. If there is reform there, there has to be reform here as well. And there what I see and what is interesting is that just as all of these people co-op strategies and mechanisms from their enemy, Fule takes the missionary's critique to the extent that some of his critics say that he's a missionary in brown clothing like an in brown and skin. But he takes missionary criticism and actually uses that to puncture a lot of Hindu pretension. So he says things that Hindus were not like about say Krishna or Brahma, Narasimha came out of a pillar. So he doesn't hesitate to even criticize Hindu gods. For example, he has this in his Marathi writings, if you read, it's actually very blunt language. He essentially says that if the Brahmins are supposed to have come out of Brahma's head right, that's the whole idea. Does that mean Brahma menstruated through the mouth? If Narasimha emerged from a pillar who got to the umbilical court? Like how was that done? Was Brahma's head also a uterus? Like he actually asked questions like this. And he's using, this is language, missionary is used by the way. Missionaries used to write such language about Krishna, his romantic dialyances this that, whereas fully uses that to ask Hindu certain questions of their own traditions saying that you guys need to learn some rationality, not everything written as scriptures and traditions needs to be swallowed whole sale. So he's a asking some questions like this and he makes enemies. A lot of people feel that he is pro missionary precisely for saying this. But the other thing is exactly caste consciousness. He says that you cannot really have any formal reform if there is this consciousness of caste and if there is a glorification of one set of people as Bhudevas, you know, God's on earth and everybody else is somehow oppressed and suppressed by them. So in many ways that oppression lens is something he marshals in order to call for reform within Hinduism. What I find interesting is that he never converts to Christianity. He's supportive of people who do. There's this one play or skip that he writes in which there is a Brahmins who comes and I think who doings a couple, you know, foist all kinds of rituals on them saying you have to do this. Okay, give me my fee. Then you have to do that. You have to give me my fee. So he does this. The Brahmin is basically, you know, taking advantage of these ignorant peasants. And then there's a Christian missionary who comes in and shows them the light. But at the end of the story, it's not as if the missionary and the farmers walk happily towards the church and they convert at the end, it is get education and it's almost like go to foolish school, foolish school and get education. He stops short of urging people to convert. He supports people who do convert. He's protective of them when Ramabhai, Bandita Ramabhai converts to Christianity. He's one of the people standing up for her right to convert. He's, you know, taking the criticism that he's a missionary in a native man's gab. But he himself doesn't convert. And I don't think in his, I haven't in the bits that I've read at least, you don't see him urging conversion on people. He's still happy to stay within the Hindu fold, but he wants a complete reconceptualizing of it and a removal of the Brahminical Stranglehold as he sees it on Hindu society from within. So much of the later successors of his in the 20th century even say that he rescued Hinduism from Brahminism. So Brahminism is like this got his tentacles on Hinduism. Fule is the person who rescues it by getting rid of those tentacles and sort of giving Hindus their true Hindu identity. So there is that later reading of Fule as well. But yes, he's very much an internal critic who is making use of missionary language to pose questions to Hindus themselves that you are not only looking at the outside of pressure, what about injustice within. And not just injustice within when it comes to cost, but also when it comes to gender, you know, where again, I hardly need to kind of expound on that. And you know, as you've pointed out, he dedicated his 1873 book, Gholam Giri to quote and quote, "The good people of the United States for abolishing Negro slavery." In quotes obviously. And so, you know, the West is very much part of you know, part of his audience, part of his frames. And it's also interesting that out of these three people, he is a one who is purely a reformer. There's no nationalism per se here. And for him, political liberty doesn't matter. Social justice matters. And he see any appeals to the British to be allies in this where he tells him the quote in quote, "Sudrazar," you know, the backbone of the country. And if you just look after us, we will be your biggest allies and all of that. That's why he's even called anti-national, you know, not exactly in those words, but he's accused of not being, you know, on the side of Indian nationalism by later critics. Yeah. And how people define a nation can, you know, determine so many of these terms. But this is the thing you see by the end of the 19th century, right? You have a modern Hindu identity taking form. You have the intellectual argument that helps you give a good image and put for the good face in front of Western critics. You have mobilization where people are becoming alive to their hindu-ness. It's been there, but it's never been politically mobilized. And under the Arya's Samajan movements like that, there is a mobilization taking place. There is a muscular assertion of that taking place. And equally, there are also fragilities within. And Fule is a representative of those fragilities, which is that you're talking about one identity, one political, a mobilization, and all of that. But ultimately, you can't ignore the elephant of the room, which is caste. How can you say you are one people if you have this distinction on the basis of caste? So the modern Hindu identities, not just the creation of that identity, but also acceptance of these fragilities. And a quest to somehow grapple with those fragilities and understand what about the internal dissonances and internal, you know, issues that exist. And is it fair to say that that internal resonance just at difference between the Arya's Samaj and Fule, while both strands remain alive in Indian politics, that in a sense that was met or attempted to be countered by the assertion of Savarkar and also the RSS, that heavy, you know, caste should not matter, caste is bad. Let's reunite the Hindu identity. There is a greater purpose to this. Let's bring the litz within the fold, let's bring Jans, Buddhists and so on within the fold as well. We'll talk about Savarkar later. So is there a sense that it all kind of goes in that direction? And that stands also comes from happenstance. It doesn't come necessarily come from true belief, but it comes from politics. Oh, very much. I think there are very, very convincing studies that once the British started doing censuses and the idea of majority, minority, your numbers started matting. Earlier, yeah, you lived in your village and there were different castes and groups and the Brahmin was different from the Dalit, the Muslim would be different from the Brahmin. There were different groups there. So I don't think anybody sat around counting who was what and what numbers existed. If you counted also, you would say, okay, these many Brahmin's, these many casters, these many smits, these many Dalits. And that also, the Dalits themselves were not one casted. There were different castes. So these many Mahars, these many monks, that's how you would count perhaps if at all you needed to. Now, however, because remember, all the way from the establishment of the British state, they also accepted the two master categories of Hindu and Muslim, right from Warren Hastings this time. There is Hindu law and then there is Islamic law for the Muslims. So there's already two legal categories created from the late 18th century that there are these two groups. Senses is also sort of continue to reify a lot of these identities which is that everybody counted on no matter what your caste is or whatever. Some a large chunk of those people are now put under the Hindu bracket. So you are the Hindu majority and the rest are the Muslim minority and the Christians or whatever it is in the country. So there is awareness of majority. And all the way through the 1920s and sometimes even later you find that when people use the term Hindu, they don't include a lot of Dalits in it. So you actually have cases where the newspaper, the Hindu actually writes about this and I mentioned it towards the end of the book about how officials are not happy when lower caste communities are included in the Hindu category. When senses are conducted and lower caste communities were counted as Hindu, there were orthodox Hindus who did not appreciate it. To call yourself a Hindu in Chathis God in some of those parts was to essentially say you are not from the Chammar community. That's a quote again. I'm not using these words myself but that's a quote. So but the point is it was also used on the basis of caste. Basically upper caste so-called clean non-polluting caste. They were considered Hindu. The Dalits were and the untouched bulls were on the peripheries of this identity. In some regards culturally you can say they were Hindus because they were some shade gods certain unto you. the standings etc. There's one scholar who basically says that they were part of the Hindu social structure and in order to maintain that Hindu structure you needed them there in that particular spot but they were not given membership of that structure. So it's an interesting place to be in. But when numbers start mattering and when conversion is this big anxiety that you already have there is a colonial state that is hostile to your culture as you see it and then there is this game of numbers majority and minority and you realize that large numbers of Dalits can be wooed into Christianity or Islam or other religions that missionaries are doing this. They look etc. right about this right there is a famine and then the missionary organizations have their money coming in from Europe and America and all of that and they are collecting people and young children etc. in order to convert them. These are accusations that I made because these anxieties that uppercast Hindus feel that is when they say okay no we must find a way to keep Dalits in. It is very for want of a better word instrumental to maintain your majority and through that claim of being a majority to maintain your control over things you need as many people in your camp and therefore Dalits who are on the paraphries and slightly in this vague position of other Hindus are they not Hindus they are also co-opted and there are studies in my final epilogue etc. I cite the scholar I think his name is Joel Lee who studied about how a lot of Dalit religion might not even be branded Hindu because it was very different and in the process of incorporating them into the Hindu identity a lot of them to give up a lot of their old gods they to give up certain practices they to give up names there were Dalit communities that had names with Islamic inspirations that had to be given up so Rahim had to become Ram and you find this even now in families where you know you will find a man in his 60s whose father had some kind of Muslim name he's a Dalit because their religion was influenced by multiple things including Islam. So that is when the this whole obsession with maintaining numerical majority crafts this majorityarian idea of the Hindu as the dominant number of people in this country. No one is remarkable but measurement doesn't how we don't realize it like just impact that GDP had on the way you know states looked at their people and at themselves and at their mission just having a number out there and being able to understand something makes a difference that you know the moment Hindus realized that Muslims actually have small minority you know your lens can change you can do things differently. And you spoke about Dalit giving up a good like Prasan Shah had an excellent book in the BJP's rice rupee in 2014 and in 2014 and 2019 of course more Dalits voted for the BJP than any other party and the scholar Badri Narayan referred to the BJP as the Dalit party of India and the logic was that they weren't just trying to cynically like part of it was of course really cynical in the sense that you know the existing Dalit parties were catering more to Jathavs who are at the top of the Dalit Harar ki so the BJP would go for non Jathav Dalits and non Jathav O'Bee season so on and so forth so they played that game exceedingly well in terms of strategy and tactics but also I remember reading in that book that there were cases where for example the party would go out and in a Dalit village they would build a temple to a Dalit God to you know and again that sort of assimilative process perhaps you know what the British never really learned that these guys kind of figured out so I don't think it's just organizations right as I mentioned when I was describing my own family temple Murthy you know that that deity that was worshipped by a Dalit community that did till our fields today Murthy is in our temple and although the temple is our private temple every time we have the Anyud Puja descendants of those Dalit community members who worked for us and our family do participate they come we sit together in feasts and all of that I'm not saying this in a in a patronizing way but I'm saying that Murthy is now being accommodated in the temple again you see that dexterity of Hinduism which that once Murthy was in a separate grow where he received blood sacrifices secretly you would give a bottle of alcohol to somebody but Murthy has been brought into the temple and the people who once worship Murthy outside with blood sacrifices have now come into the temple and are participating in the temple rights every time we have a major function and that itself tells you something this is not because it was an organization this was just that okay that God can't be abandoned he's no longer receiving worship in the group we have to create space for him here that's how that particular deity was brought here another thing I've noticed it again in my village is we have the ceremony where these all the old I think they have 12 carra's as they call it 12 parts of the village they all bring these ratas full of lamps etc and it's a big festival it's called the Palli velaka back in the day only uppercast men could pull these rats so basically it was naya men and so on who used to pull it now what's happened is all the naya men are abroad in Dubai making money and building fancy houses here when the festival happens some come back but many can't because they're working there it is young Dalit boys who now pull the rats and it's interesting because politically they are very loyal to the communist party so every time an election comes they will vote only for the communist and there's no question there at least in the village and the families that I know but when but equally they participate in these temple rights because at a different level it is also for them a mark of their assertion and a mark of their new status that now they are the ones pulling the chariots of the gods not uppercast groups so it's interesting like there is the social justice angle which the party in politics gives you and it gives you certain rights and gives you certain identity but there is also religious framing where you are now part of this religious process and part of the festival in the most visual way in the most visible way and in this what was earlier an uppercast territory so you know it's it's quite interesting how these things work out let's now talk about you know the actual freedom struggle as we think about it from you know the end end of the 19th century and onwards and so on and so forth and you know I remember this fine biography of Gopal Krishna Gokhale by B.R. Nanda where Nanda spoke about how the moderates were modern ex extreme in their moderation and the extremists were moderate in their extremism and one of the extremists he was talking about of course there was Bal Gangadhar Thilok and I've always had great disquiet when I read about Thilok because you know the fact that he was against women working women getting educated etc etc all of it seems incredibly sort of not aligned to the values I believe in to put it mildly but at the same time you know he was an incredible political activist he played the long game he knew how to you know think about society a lot of the stuff he did was pretty far reaching and you know in a sense he is a continuation of the story that we ended with when we spoke about the Anand Saraswati's death so tell me more about Thilok because I find him incredibly an interesting man in Thilok in many ways so if I said the Anand Saraswati was the grandfather of Hindu nationalism Thilok is also somewhere in that at that level although we put sawar kars the father remember Thilok was in many ways sawar kars perceptive he is the one who wrote sawar kars recommendation letter to go abroad one of sawar kars books was dedicated I think it's very first book was dedicated to look my nathilok he was somebody who influenced and inspired sawar kars a great deal in fact some scholars I'm not mentioned this in the book but I think when I actually thought we're the also on your podcast when he was here they have wondered why sawar karn that phase of his 20s seem to be when he was very young there was a clear anti-Muslim a very pronounced anti-Muslim streak then somewhere in his 20s it sort of receives and then it comes back with a fury much later when he's older and what in that 1900s phase made him relatively you know sober in the way he was talking about it but this is also the time when he was under Thilok's influence and you know very closely involved in some of the things Thilok was doing in Pune and if you look at Thilok's career Thilok in this phase had moderated some of his own anti-Muslim rhetoric so if you combine the two together it might be possible to make sense of some of sawar kars own sobriety in this phase because for political reasons Thilok had reigned in his his anti-Muslim tone and it's possible sawar kars was sort of channeling that as well because they were trying to build a broader nationalistic movement at that time but Thilok is a very interesting figure he is one of those people who this book is also about what paves the way to Hinduathwa right the modern Hindu identity modern Hinduism and of course Hinduathwa is an extension of it and Thilok in many ways is an important element of that story because mobilization of Hindus as Hindus that's the thing it's not Hindus as a people mobilizing financial degrees it is Hindus as Hindus being mobilized to also stand up for their religion he's also an anti-missionary voice in many ways what you're referring to women going out to study women going up and taking jobs these are things he he was against partly because he saw it as a salts on Hinduism and Hindu society the best example is the age of consent bill because there was this case in Bengal where a child was married to a much older man and essentially died after she was raped on her wedding night because the injuries were so bad and that's when there was a huge public debate and Thilok still sided with the conservatives because he said you're taking a few bad examples to tarnish Hindu society as a whole in many respects if you read some of his writings you will find that he's not necessarily against reform at a personal level but when it comes to preserving Hindu society he takes a very hard line position because he sees that all of these things as assaults in that political climate any call for reform he sees as weakening the Hindu cause from within so even Fule you know Fule is final 10 years and Thilok sort of rise as a journalist in MaraSh and the 1880s there's a kind of overlap there and Thilok was not very fond of Fule and for his school of thinking because he saw this is something that weakens Hindus it splits Hindus from within this is the time to focus on the aggressor outside reform etc will happen later even when Thilok moderates himself a little bit later with Muslims this is what he says oh let the British go then like we will decide we'll figure out how the Hindu Muslim issue needs to be handled let's not get into this now because it'll be used as a plan to divide and rule so it you can see this pattern with Thilok even with the caste question but he is definitely a Hindu He's one of those people who tries very hard. He uses the word Hindutva, Lord Anismarati writings. Something again, I went and read in his collected works. He uses the word Hindutva. He tries to define it in different ways. And his definition is still a sort of religious definition, which is that you believe in the Vedas as supreme. You believe that there are multiple paths to God, which is interesting because this is the point that Hindus debating with missionaries all the way from the 17th century had been making that there are multiple paths to God, not just one. And he enshrines that as an important part of Hindutva and he goes on certain puranik ideas and all of that. But again, the fact is there were Hindus who did not believe in the Vedas. The large chunks of Hindus never had any access to the Vedas. So his religious definition of Hindutva was still floundering. Like he used the word people understood what he was trying to signify. But theoretically defining Hindutva was a task that the luck was not able ultimately to pull off because it was not convincing enough and an all encompassing definition yet. But he remains a very important figure, partly also for endorsing violence. Of course, every time the colonial state hauled him up in front of court, he said, "No, no, I'm just writing. If misguided students go and do a perform violent acts, then that's on them really." But the British always saw through it. They said, they found it amusing that he would give these very radical speeches, call on people to rise to the occasion, throw out the legalisms of the penal court, think of what Shivaji achieved, think about the Gita teachers. See, again, the Gita is brought in as a very masculine, martial kind of text. Think on those terms, not on the snaroprosm of legality. You're saying that and then a few days later, the Chaapika brothers go and shoot an English officer to the British state. It's very clear, as far as they are concerned, that you are endorsing violence, even if you're not the actual one pulling the trigger. Subsequently, also, this is a question that his biographers have to figure out. But although Tillak himself never actively promotes violence, you often find that revolutionaries who are captured as part of violent plots often have his portrait with him. Later, they have his translation of the Gita with him. And he's very much seen as a person who revolutionary standing up to the British in a violent way, look up to as a leader and as somebody they should emulate. There are schools being set up so it can turn out boys in the mold of Tillak's world. So he's seen very much not just as a Hindu leader, not just as a nationalist leader, but also as somebody who promotes aggressive nationalism, but also a militant assertion of the Hindu identity, where again, in his case, the other in the form of the Muslim comes in. And that's why festivals like Ganpati, Shivaji Jayanti, all of these are sort of promoted and they become widely popular. Because people were looking for a plank and Tillak was able to supply that plank at the right time when people were looking for it. And you know, I find it amazing how you know, just those festivals of Ganpati and Shivaji Jayanti actually reached the kind of a stature that they did because today it's all around us, we normalize it, we assume it's been like this for a thousand years. But they were actually part of political tactics, they were part of mobilizing a community and bringing them together. And I'm curious about that because you know, when you think about Tillak's strategy, he seems to me to be Modi plus Shah plus Guttkari combined. That he's a demagogue, he's a political strategist, and he's also an event organizer. And a thinker. And a thinker as well. So you know, add another name to you. And so he's all of these. So from greeting his Marathi writings, for example, where you went to the source, did you get a sense of what is his interior life, what is the intellectual journey that brings him to this? Because you don't get to all of this overnight. Yeah, you know, it's a bit tough his interior life because even when his wife dies, it's very tough. Like in a letter, this barely any like actual expression of grief and what he's actually feeling. He's sad, of course, but it's covered very quickly. I think that generation of men were not very expressive about these things. But I think we can trace his attitude from a different point, which is that and this I covered in the book a little bit, which is that I think there is a reason why Hindu nationalism and Hindu thought solidifies and takes that form that we now call Hindu thought. It was bubbling around in Bengal also. In fact, someone recently sent me an email because in another podcast, I mentioned that Hindu thought could not have emerged in Bengal because there was a slightly more anglicized thing there. And that's why the version Maharashtra later. But what I mean is not that there weren't Hindu nationalist impulses in Bengal, but Hindu thought as we can see it now, this theoretically framed, much more sort of potent, a sharper kind of device emerges in Maharashtra. There is a reason for it and the British were quite aware of it, which was the Maharashtra in Brahmin. And specifically the Chitpavan Brahmin. If you remember my book, "Fall-Sahalai's Wish I Discussed with You a Few Years ago", in that you find when the British East India Company was fanning out and establishing itself across India, their secretarial backbone was actually Deishastha Brahmins from Maharashtra, who had gone out with the earlier Maratha rulers and had become bureaucrats. But those were Deishasthas. Chitpavan Brahmins were those Brahmins of that particular subclass who had supported the Peshwa State. They were part of the Peshwa regime. And they were very powerful. They had grown to prominence under the Peshwas. So in 1818, after the Peshwa rule ends, a lot of these Chitpavins no longer have that point of patronage. The British do extend some of it, but there is the sense of loss. And also under the Peshwas, the Chitpavins were not just Brahmins. They were also fighters. They were also bankers. They were warriors. They had a very political role. They were not just priests. They were not just scholars. They were playing a political role. You know, that whole concept of the Brahma Shatriya as it's called in traditional language. You, in some ways, they do exemplify that. And Tillak and Savarkar both come out of this tradition. Both have memories of family history by their estates and landed properties and the families lived in glory under the Peshwas. And there was a clear sense of loss. And if you look at the British record, the British always suspect with the Chitpavind Brahmins. They always consider them the most seditious, perfidious group of people in Western India. That even when they worked for the British government, there were suspicions that they were working from within to subvert the British thing. So much so that by the early 20th century, you actually find records where the Bombay government is no longer hiring. Or they've decided to lower the number of Brahmins they're hiring from this community because they can no longer count on their loyalties. So there is this sense that the Chitpavind Brahmins is a very clever, shrewd person, a very capable person, but also has political ambition and feels like they have the right to govern India as opposed to the British. So the British see in them a group of people who see themselves as a ruling class and Tillak comes out of this tradition. I'm obviously simplifying a bit, but you can see he comes out of a caste background and a social background where power, status, religion are all mixed up in this very interesting way, which you don't necessarily found in South Indian Brahmins or Brahmins elsewhere. There's a very peculiar mix because of Maharashtra, a very interesting history in the post-Shri Vajee period where the Peshwas came to power, etc. So that I think is playing on his mind. The second thing is that of course he's very well educated in English. His father was one of these people who translated a text. Remember we spoke about those educators who were translating Western knowledge for Indian students. His father was somebody who had done that. So he came out of that tradition and I think there was an awareness that we need to assert our identity. And by the time Tillak is born and going to college, nationalism is growing. Pandurong wrote in the 1840s, "We are not talking 1870s, 1880s, 1890s." So the young man Tillak is very much a firebrand where that kind of climate is actually getting stronger and stronger. So I think that explains some of his aggression and all of that. He was also a journalist. He even had to spend some time in jail in the 1880s for a due to a defamation case that was filed against him. So even as a journalist, he had a very aggressive pin. When he joined the Congress, he was aware that the Congress is a useful vehicle, but he was not happy with the moderation. And when you mentioned the festivals, he openly says, "Why should we not convert our religious festivals into political movements? Why should we not convert these into political stages? People come here, they gather here and religion is a good vehicle to mobilize people." At that time, the religious nationalism wasn't even a concept that people had studied and there's no big fear of religious nationalism. For him, identity is linked to religion. Identity is also linked to political assertion, marry the two. The moderates were very careful about involving religion and politics because India had this Muslim Hindu kind of divide and they didn't want to get into that game because that would play into British. Their whole strategy. Whereas Thilak thought the other way around, which is a Hindu's with a majority, you have the numbers. Hindu assertion is a way to actually mobilize people and ultimately create what he calls a Hindu rastra. He actually does want a Hindu state. So you know, you were speaking of Brahman's earlier and this reminded me of a quote you're reproducing your book of Evie Ramaswami Nikers saying that if you have a choice between killing a Brahman and killing a snake, spare the snake. Because in the south, this also leads to in the south, especially in the Madras Presidency, the non-Brahman movement and that's very anti-Brahman. And this also later after Thilak thought is the editor of his paper, the case where I think it's a son and I'm not sure. But he basically says, "Look, if you're going to target Brahmans, like this, the Brahmans are going to leave the National Struggle." Whereas if you look at the National Struggle, a lot of the leadership was supplied by Brahman. So it's a very interesting dynamic that takes place in South India and later spreads to Maharashtra also. A lot of full-ass successors are very sharply anti-Brahman. But it's interesting that they don't deny the Hindu term. There's a wonderful scholar called Rahul Sarvati who's written about this. I think it's a dissertation which is now coming as a book soon. And it's interesting to read that because they accept the term Hindu not just as an identity and a platform for mobilization, but they do so by excluding or by rejecting Brahmanism. So they say, "Brahmans are acceptable so long as you come here as Hindus, but not with your Brahman cast pride." So it's interesting that that ultimately plays out. Whereas for Thilak, cast also mattered. Each cast had its slot and they had to work together as a machine. He was never against cast as a principle. He thought that was very much part of our tradition. And cast gave people their individual identity. it is within the Hindu order. If you're a Brahmin, there were certain practices that came to you in an inherited way. If you were a Maratha, there were certain customs and specific peculiarities that you inherited culturally. Those were equally valid to him. There was no, he did not want to homogenize Hindus as one group, even though he wanted them to act as a political block under one name and under one label. And you spoke of Hindu Rastra and it strikes me that one of Thilak's heroes, you know, I think of him as being, you know, the first person who actually, you know, conceptually thought of the world at the end of Shivaji, obviously. So, and you could call him the great grandfather or great-great-grandfather of Hindu nationalism. I mean, you're building a full family tree here, like, give us. So, tell me about Shivaji and tell me about why he stood out from other Hindu kings of that time and what was he trying to do and how does that then get passed on at a level of ideas to someone like Thilak who uses it to form his own world view. So, as I mentioned earlier, Shivaji came from a world where his father and uncle, according to some of them, are at Habakkars, could be named after a Muslim Sufi saint. But remember, he came from a region which had been under Islamic rule for many, many centuries by then. So, you know, there were the Bhamini sultan's, then there, the Bhamini Empire broke up and then there was the Nizam Shahi, the Adil Shahi's, his family served both at one point. They served even the Mughals. It was a time where order at the highest level was framed in terms of the Islamic regime. Like, those were the rulers, you had sultan's who believed in a different faith and there was a different kind of political culture, a very Persian political culture. And then Shivaji emerges in the space but he's also carving out his own territory because these Deccan sultanates are collapsing, the Mughals are invading internally they're collapsing. It's a time of chaos, but as the famous Game of Thrones line goes, chaos is a ladder. You can actually create something new out of chaos. And Shivaji starts creating something new. But when you're creating something new and it's also autonomous, you also have to find legitimacy for it and justify it. He could never do it on terms of the sultanate because he was not part of the Muslim ruling class. So he fell back on older traditions that came out of the so-called classical Sanskrit texts, the idea of Shattriahud, the idea of, you know, Hindavish Swaraj as he put it. This is a rule that is going to be about Hindus as the ruling class. So I think he does frame the idea of Hindu rule in a certain way. And I think what's interesting is it doesn't mean the exclusion of Muslims. It means, however, that power must reside with Hindus. And you see some of these echoes in Tillak also, which is that yes, we'll accept everybody else, but power must always reside with Hindus. If you go back to also what happened in Goa and all of that, I'm just tracing back the Hindutva trajectory of his tree. Even they'll say that in South set, if the population moved from 8,000 Christians and 100,000 Hindus to 100,000 Christians and 3,000 non-Christians, that tells you that it's important to hold on to power if you don't want to be devoured by other religions or whatever. So there is a sort of trajectory that comes from there. There's also, you know, the ideas are from this, you know, his teachings are also often very blunt. Some of his sayings, you can very clearly see there is animosity towards Islamic rule that emerges in the spirit. It's not purely because of religion. There was also, this was also in the 17th century, a time of famine and lots of like general chaos. Look, there's an invasion happening. There's no stability. Const, you know, idea who's going to plunder, political borders are falling away. It's a time of chaos. So in times of chaos, people do look for anchors in certain ways. And one anchor came in this political formulation of Hindu rule. And I think that gives a kind of or late, from later Nationalists that were able to trace a tradition from Shivaji onwards saying that from the Chhatrapati stand, this is what we were spied for. And this is a sort of culmination of what he was trying to achieve. So he becomes an icon. The frat truth is that when when well before Thilak creates a Shivaji festival, Shivaji's actual samadhi outside of the fort was in a bad state. The British government, sorry, I don't mean there's a book that was published which laments this in the 1880s. And then the British government, you know, it shows a maintenance grant, but there's no Chhatri, there's no canopy, there's nothing there. Then Thilak and this generation practically turn it into a shrine. They start organizing annual events there. There are lectures there. They they trek all the way from Pune and Bombay to actually go there. And there's a whole movement to bring back Shivaji as a as a an exemplar of who you should be as people. And the interesting thing is it can be read and the British read it as a sedition in that when you're telling people to be like Shivaji and to look up to Shivaji, you're telling them to stand up to the British Raj as Shivaji stood up to the Mughal Empire, which had invaded from the North. But the other thing is also that for Thilak was also that he's a Hindu icon. There is something Hindu about him. His language was also something Hindus could draw inspiration from to mobilize as Hindus. Of course, later he goes on to say once he becomes a more pan-Indian leader and he has to bring on more Muslims because now he needs their support. He does play down saying, no, no, Shivaji is just a hero to ask like Napoleon is a hero to all Frenchmen, not just a certain group of French Christians or whatever. So he does say that later, but the Frank through this, the sort of codified meaning is Shivaji represents both of these impulses anti-British but also Hindu assertion. Like I'm also curious about something you haven't directly kind of spoken about in this book or any kind of lie. But I'm also wondering about what's happening with the trajectory of the Congress party because there is this sort of tussle within the Congress party between Thilak's way of thinking, which some would title extremism and the moderate way of thinking. And essentially they all kind of die out. You know, in the second decade of the 20th century, Goklae dies, Ferocia method dies among the moderates, Thilak dies, Jinnah is kind of the last moderate left standing and then this black swan event of Gandhi comes and nothing actually makes sense. He's radical in an almost incoherent way in the sense that he does a tie up with the Khilafat movement and all that, which also has an influence on Sauer curve, but we'll come back to that later. So what's really happening within the freedom movement at this point because even after this, like one of the reasons I Hindu Massaba and the RSS never gained much political traction for a long time is that the Congress was fundamentally a Hindu nationalist party only. In that sense, Nero was an outlier, but anyone else who was a possible Prime Minister at independence, whether it's Rajendra Pasa or Patel or Gandhi himself. They were all kind of within that framework of Hindu nationalism in one way or the other. Right. So what happened to that movement? What happened to that party? Where was that kind of mainstream going? I think Tillak is that important sort of juncture where he manages to seize control, especially in the second, after his second imprisonment where he sent off to Burma for several years and he comes back and by then go clays dead, many of his rivals are gone. He is the tallest pleader. In many ways, the British call him the most dangerous man in India at that time because he is indeed the tallest leader available now and he has mass appeal, not necessarily in all parts of India in the same way, partly because of language reasons and all of that because in Maharashtra, he can speak in Marathi, he can write in Marathi, he has a very strong pen. In English, he's not from everything I've read, he's not a great orator or anything, but he had a certain charisma and people looked up to him in a certain way. When he was sentenced to his second imprisonment in Burma, Bombay was up in flames because all the mill workers came down, the city had to shut down, people died in police shooting and all of that because he had that kind of power on the street, which is what the moderates did not have. At one level, I think Tillak was important in pushing the national struggle into that phase of involving the masses, not yet to the level of Gandhi. In the sense that village people are not mobilizing in the way they would under Gandhi, but urban people were indeed realizing that mobilizing at mass level was something that needed to be done. In urban centers, the important nodes of Indian of India's political landscape, there was mobilization beginning and Gandhi continues it. Remember, although Gandhi and Tillak had very different styles, Gandhi did not appreciate Tillak endorsing violence and so on. He said that Tillak has mistreated the Gita. My Gita does not allow me to be violent. So again, the Gita can be read depending on your own tastes. But remember when Tillak died, Gandhi went to his cremation, Gandhi carried the body along with the others. In some ways, Gandhi anointed himself through that public performance as Tillak's successor. And Gandhi then takes it to the next station. Remember, Gandhi is not a Hindu nationalist, but Gandhi did wear his Hinduism on his sleeve. His language, his political rhetoric was very Hindu in its tone. It was therefore able to bring a lot of Hindus into the fold. He too did not appreciate Umbhaitkar's trying to keep the Dalits as a separate electorate and all of that. And essentially, as scholars would argue, Black male Umbhaitkar into making sure that Dalits remained formally within the Hindu bracket as opposed to being a separate entity. So Gandhi was there, there are interesting overlaps again between the two men, not complete acceptance and, and you know, they're not on the same page on everything. But you can see that on enough things they did agree and everybody understood this concept that the majority community had to be somehow, had to stay part of the national struggle. Tillak I think was never able to sort of go rise about caste, Gandhi, etc. did. So again, you see a generation on gap also. Tillak has come this far as a radical, but he's a radical in politics, but not in social reform. Like in social reform, he wants to be a very moderate, incrementalist. When it comes to politics, he's not an incrementalist. So sometimes, in fact, when you read Tillak's criticism of the moderates, the same criticisms were made of Tillak by full-age successors on social questions, same language, same kind of points, except that they were both using different aspects of the overall picture to project what they wanted to project. So let's talk about Savarkar. And Savarkar is particularly interesting in that when we think of Savarkar, all the main talking points is framing of Hindu-Tua, his hatred of Muslims, his desire. to unite all the caste, is opposition to caste, is really something that becomes explicit after his imprisonment ends in the 20s. I am also interested in the younger Savarkar up to 1910, because it often strikes me when I read about that part of his life that had he died then, had he died in his first year in prison or whatever. If there is a chance, he would be thought of in the same way as we think of Bhagat Singh or whatever. He was exactly that kind of figure, he believed that the nation was one, Muslims were part of it, you know, you've reproduced a bunch of codes to that effect as well. So it was a very different kind of Savarkar and it is that young man who was not just agitating and passionate about things but also writing books one after the other, you know, 1907 to 1910, the books that he wrote. It's a very interesting man, both of thought and of action. But tell me a little bit about that Savarkar before he becomes, you know, we as it were. Yeah, I think he was an interesting commodity. Again, I find these people's early lives very interesting, you know, personal losses, what were they like when they were children, what were they reading and so on. Thilux influence was strong because Savarkar was reading the case, you find that when the Chaapika brothers, who, which are in their assassination of British officials, is what led Thilux to jail for the first time because of his fiery speech that apparently led to it. At that time, Savarkar wrote a song sort of a dress to the Chaapika saying, don't worry, we will take your mission forward and all of that. So, Savarkar is being groomed as a teenager in this political climate where Thilux is already an important voice and his newspaper, the case, he is the medium through which this militant idea of Hinduism is being disseminated across Maharashtra and the Marathi speaking part of Western India. He grows up, of course, and like most people of this time, there's no, there's no contradiction between being a staunch Hindu and being aware of that identity, but also going to an English school and going to an English college. In fact, Ferguson College where he goes and where I studied and I believe you studied. Where I studied. Yeah, it was a place that attracted a lot of these young revolutionary type of people. Thilux was one of the founders of Ferguson College. Ferguson College, in fact, is where in 1893, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandar Gandhi met for the first time and they took a long walk around the loans of Ferguson College, but less current alumni start imagining that. Let me point out it was in a separate campus then. Yeah. So, you know, he is raised in that climate, then comes off to Pune. As I mentioned, Thilux writes his recommendation later to get him a scholarship to go and study law abroad, etc. But already, while Saurkar's abroad, not only is he writing Nationalistic Literature, which the British are outlawing, even though he's a young guy, he's already being trailed in his 20s by the police. He's known to be a firebrand and they actually have a quote I have it in the book. I say, he's in the mold of the chapikers or something similar. So he's, they have a sense that he could get, he could become a prophet of violence at that level. And of course, he's writing and publishing and all of that. His books are being banned. They're being smuggled into India. He's smuggling weapons, send couriering weapons into India secretly. Sometimes interesting, considering this book is also about missionaries, there used to be hidden in the Bible and, you know, sort of his literature used to be given covers that made it look like it was the Bible, but in reality, it was his writing. So that kind of propaganda and contraband was being sent off into India by Saurkar. But at this time, yes, I think in his, in his writings, as I said, because Thilux in this time had started to moderate himself slightly in order to win greater public appeal. Thilux also, any is in Maharashtra as much more of a militant Hindu. As he becomes more and more prominent at the Pan Indian stage, Thilux also tones down the anti-Muslim rhetoric, a great deal because he realizes that for the nationalist struggle, you do need Muslim cooperation and you can't alienate the Muslims at the national level. It is in this phase that you find Saurkar also in his literature looking at the Muslims as an element that is a legitimate element of India's political stage. Yet it is important to note that he does say that earlier Islamic rule was unjust, but it was defeated and then we've moved on. 1857 showed that we were mature enough to now work together. But it is interesting that the subtext there is that Muslims cannot be in power. You are fine as people here, but power cannot be in your hands because that is where the tension arises. So again, we fall back on power. Who has power in this country and in the Indian subcontinent is ultimately the point at which the thing flips. So he is aware that since the Muslims are no longer in power, we can be friends. And this comes back recurrently in his later writing also, which is that the Marathas, the Peshwas, they did divest most Muslim rulers of their power and they had become the Supreme authority in India, the Supreme force in India. And that is why in many ways, as I write the title, the deed of India, if it was taken from Hindu hands, it must return to Hindu hands and the Muslims cannot intervene there. Power has to always come back to Hindus. So that impulse is already there, but it's not so pronounced. But he's also revolutionary. Eventually, as we all know, gets captured in London, tries to jump off a ship in Marseilles and escape, but that doesn't work out. He's brought here tried sentence to many, many decades in prison, which would have seen him coming out as an old man. Janki Barkley's book is interesting because she says that the British released him back onto the political stage within just over a decade of his imprisonment partly because by now, the nationalist struggle under Gandhi was growing and he and Gandhi didn't get along. And it's interesting that they saw some utility in releasing him back onto the stage and he was always an irritant and Gandhi's side. And the British at some level seemed to have appreciated that. That's why even though after his release, he wasn't supposed to comment on politics and he's publishing a lot under pseudonyms and secretly and all of that, it's entirely possible they could have tracked it and called him up and pulled him up for this. But they also didn't that much because they saw some utility in it in the fact that this man was annoying Gandhi like this. But yes, the young Savarkar is an interesting commodity. Prison transforms him. That's the big question. Like what happens in prison? Some say that no, he always had that anti-Muslim streak and I say, yes, he did. But I think prison still, the tortures of prison must have somehow broken something in him. You do see in his prison memoirs this distinction where a lot of the prison waters were Muslims and a lot of the prisoners were him, were people like him Hindus. The other thing is petty things in prison. No, like the water will come in its natural food. Saying, today I'm eating I'm eating a food or whatever. But when that guy is a Muslim and you're a Hindu, it also acquires a very different connotation. So you see some of those things working out in prison. The other thing was also you find this grievance that Muslims were allowed time off work in order to pray several times a day, whereas Hindus were denied this because they would say this is not an essential practice to Hindus. But he'd say that's not the point. You're making a you're I mean they're getting time off from work because they're Muslims. We are also entitled to it. How can you then discriminate between us? So some agitation, some hardening of what was perhaps a sentiment at the back of his mind does take place in prison. And it's in prison that he ends up writing essentials of Hindu thought or what we call Hindu thought who's a Hindu. That book emerges out of prison and is what brings him his subsequent fame in the 1920s. You know, and I forget which of his biography is prompted me to go out and actually read the prison diaries of other people over there at that time in Kalapani. But maybe Puranthari, I think, possibly that's the first one I read. But the truth is that the kind of torture that he went through in fact that other prisoners went through during that time is pretty freaking horrifying. And you have to read it for yourself. And therefore, you know, when people say that he's a coward, he wrote those apology letters. And he never did. And he never was imprisoned in, you know, pretty much five star circumstances because relatively relatively and books you had access to pens and paper. You could write. You were bullet even till act when till act was sent off to Burma. He was a political prisoner. He wrote his entire commentary on the Gita while he was in prison in Burma. Because he had the time. There was a man who was appointed to cook for him one of the other prisoners who am, you know, who so he had an attendent. Somebody to take care of him. Somebody to shave him. Like he, it wasn't five star, but yes, he was a political prisoner. So, however, he was treated as a revolutionary and therefore as a hardened criminal, you know, there was a very different experience he had. If like Nero and Thilla, he had been given a political prisoner kind of categorization and given access to literature and writing and all of that, then perhaps he would not have come out in the way he did. But yes, he was broken. His health was broken down in the prison. He was sent off in the Kalapani. Yeah, I mean, there would be made to stand for us. If food would be taken away and other kinds of torture and even worse from some accounts. And I don't remember in which of the bios. I've read this. I've read all his bios, but you know, the Muslims apparently were described as Burli, Patans and all of that. So really conforming to the worst theory would happen. Then you're getting tortured by those guys and not directly by the British and is going to have an impact. And you know, when I, whatever I've read of him or by him before that period and after that period, it is completely stark. So, you know, what do you hold off the theory that, you know, it was that which radicalized him against Muslims and ironically, therefore to rationalize that new hatred of Muslims caused him to come up with the framing of Hindu tour, which proved so powerful and which we'll talk about after this. I mean, to some extent, maybe there is some truth through it, but I don't think it's the whole truth in the sense that it's pretty, it's pretty, pretty certain to me that whatever happened, prison made him a much more cynical bitter kind of voice because all his writing subsequently, there is a bitterness. He's not a, it's not a constructive argument. It's always this bitter, kind of negative argument. And that, that is a streak you see throughout his writing subsequently. The earlier writing before he went to prison, there's this much more glorious sort of, you know, maybe because he's also young, he's not yet jaded, but prison is what makes him a jaded bitter kind of figure. But I don't think that's the only reason he reframed Hindu tour because again, if you look at Raul Sarvat, he's worked this conversation around Hindu tour was happening anyway. People were trying to figure out what is it that makes Hindus Hindu. How is it we define this in a way that that theoretically meets all our requirements, at the same time can also be practically enacted. So, and this is happening in a great deal Maharashtra in the Maharti language. And remember, Savarkar also wrote in Maharti. So, it's possible that he was also listening to these conversations, not when he was in prison, but he was aware of the general dynamics and the general conversation emerging around him from Telux time itself. And that anyway, he was something, it was something he was thinking about. It just so happens that prison would have hardened him in a different way. And when he emerged from prison, he came out with a very specific worldview, ready now to articulate it in a certain way. And to be honest, that was a theoretical master's joke when he came out. And he said, it does not matter what your caste is, because caste is a way to divide Hindus. It does not matter whether you pour milk over your deities or blood over your deities, because those were the other things, or higher Hinduism, lower Hinduism, which is it, is the illiterate religion part of this or not. He says, it doesn't matter. All that matters is, are your holy places in India. Is this your holy land? It has to be your land by descent. If it's your holy land alone, that doesn't work because then people from China who are Buddhists and come here saying, "Gaya is our holy land." And then you'll have to accept them as Indians and Hindus. He says that alone won't work. It has to be your holy land and your fatherland. But one alone will not work. Fatherland means all Muslims and Christians can also be claimed, also claim to be Indians and part of the Hindu civilization. But he says, no, it has to be both categories ticked together. So you have to have, you have to be descended from the people here and you have to have your holy land over here. Both of those parameters have to be met. And by this he asked, "Everybody including Jains, Buddhists." So Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shaattas were Hindus in the religious sense. Jains and Buddhists are not. But in the Hindu thought definition of the political Hindu, those two were also Hindus because their holy lands and their ancestral lands were both in India. Sikhs were also acceptable because their holy land and ancestral land was also in India. But Christians and Muslims, as he says, if your face has ever turned to Mecca and Rome, you know, you have extra territorial allegiances to places outside this country, which means you can never be truly part of this country. This is not your nation. You are a community here, but you are not part of this nation. So when I first read the book Hindutva, I was horrified at how bad it was. I hadn't expected that. Like I thought it feels on both the levels that I then thought mattered that as a book of ideas, it is garbage, it's intellectual garbage. And as a political work, it's just so badly written and incoherent, it doesn't make sense. However, you know, I have over time come to appreciate the power of that theoretical framework because that theoretical framework fits the evolving political environment and the way that people feel that, you know, other the Muslims kick the British out. And for this, we need an alliance. So everybody else is part of it. How do we justify it? Make this the first principles. Why is this the first principle? He doesn't have to say it's a statement, but his statement is that this is how I define it. And as I mentioned, Tillak had tried to define Hindutva, but that was still religious terms made as multiple paths to God. He removes religion from the equation. Believe whatever you want. The only you just have to satisfy these two parameters. You believe in the Buddha, you believe in Jain philosophy, whatever it is, believe in Guru Nanak, all fine. Believe in whatever you want, practice whatever you want, belong to whatever like background you want. These are the only two parameters. You need to tick in order to be part of the nation. So his Hindu nation is not, so for him, Hindutva is not something that comes out of Hinduism. Hindutva is the larger umbrella. Hinduism is only a part of it. It's only one small part within that umbrella. He reverses that a little bit. So Hinduness is what is the overarching principle. Hinduism is something that emerges from it. He even critiques Hinduism. He I think understands that Hinduism is very much the way it's defined as very much because of colonial influences and so on. So he's not besotted with the idea of Hinduism. For him, Hinduness is what matters. And I think that is the last thing principle that operates Hindu Thva even today. This definition of what has made Hindu Thva last all the way to this day. The elixon all would have failed. They would not have been able to push it this far. But this very simple, on the face of it, it's very simple. The other way it's been conceptualized. But it's also enduring because it's that simple and because it seems so straightforward. Having said that, it's probably immediately successful. As you just said, he spends many years kind of pissing off Brahmins. By scandalizing the orthodoxy, for example, you point out that between 1930 and 1935 in Ratnagarhi, he is staging these events where all the caste, it and it together. And the Brahmins are absolutely scandalized. And he's like, no, we are all Hindus. This is Hindu Thva. It doesn't really matter. That's going on. So what are the debates like within the Hindu nationalist movement? Like the Mahasabha and the RSS never got on for that matter. They were at loggerheads for a long time. So what's going on there? Today, Hindu Thva is a blanket term that you use. And I think many of the people who use it just mean it in a very vague sense and are not necessarily going back to Savarkar's framework. But what are the debates happening within the Hindu nationalist fold? And outside the mainstream, because to me, the mainstream of Hindu nationalism is still another Congress party and all their leaders. But what's happening in this space? I think there is tension in that some people are more persuaded of the need to get rid of caste in order to unify Hindus. Others are just paying lip service, which is that okay, in public, they're not saying, "Haha, caste is bad, but at home, they'll make sure that only a Brahmin will cook their food." So I think you have different kinds of people within the mode. None of these are monoliths. Savarkar is trying to push something, but there are limits to how much he can push it also, because not everybody is on board. Yet people also recognize it in order to give the movement proper momentum. You have to at least pay lip service to it. At one point he's going around giving sacred threads to the lits, saying that, "Okay, you know, if the sacred thread is something that makes a Brahmin special here, everybody takes the sacred thread." But you're still not cutting sacred threads off. You're still like trying to give it to everybody. So it's interesting. You can see the tension is there. It's not completely resolved, but he's also trying to paper over it, saying, don't get caught up in these things. Frankly, even if you're attached to your caste identities, makes no difference because Hindu Tv is not reliant on that. It's bad. We want caste to go. We want Hindus to operate as one group, but their lack of operating as one group does not take away the fundamental concept of Hindu Tv defined in the way he defines it as holy land, tick, fatherland tick. So those are the, I mean, that's the parameter through which he worked. And what some people tell me most notably in Raja Tavkshu's been on this show will often say that Savarkar is a more complex character than people realize and the only key to that is reading his Marathi writings, most of which are translated because there's a massive volume of his work in Marathi and he's an interesting thinker. And the English stuff doesn't come close to capturing that. And as someone who's also read him in the original Marathi, what is your sense of daily? I've read his more famous books in Marathi, but I think there's a lot of journalism in Marathi that needs to be tackled. Janaki Bakle has tackled that. Some of the songs he's written, some of the journalistic pieces he's written and her studies actually quite quite remarkable and he does come across as a more complex figure than we think of. See, I grew up in Maharashtra and it's very interesting that from school, I remember in my teens being taken to watch a movie in Marathi on Veer Savarkar and we always grew up calling him Veer Savarkar because here, and I still remember the highlight of the movie was him jumping off that ship and trying to escape. He was a revolutionary. I think I read that in Amar Chitra Katha, that it was he, it took days, but actually, I brought it in your book, it was 10 minutes. It was 10 minutes or less, very quick. It was already docked there, like he just had to jump out and swim and quickly run. That's what he did. But the point is that a lot of people in Maharashtra see that writing, a lot of his songs, the poetry, all of that and the revolutionary side of it. The Hindu side of it, which is what intellectuals at a pan-Indian level criticize, has not been the main prison through which he's viewed in Maharashtra. Even for me, it was after I got older, started reading more widely that I realized, oh, there's this other way in which Savarkar is perceived because of his political ideology. But his earlier deeds about made him a hero in Maharashtra, to many people a hero even today. So, he already there, you have a complex it, right? Does the fact that he created Hindu Thva erase some of his revolutionary boldness? I don't think it does in this, and I got told in Kerala once for this because, you know, I was on stage with two authors, including a Wipe-Up who were written on Savarkar and I was like, look, everybody knows about the Hindu Thva thing, what people don't know, especially in Kerala, where the left, you know, is aware of Hindu Thva, how Savarkar created. Let's focus on his early life. Let's see what people can learn here because for me, it was like a learning experience. I was like, let the audience learn something new. And they thought it was a whitewashing episode. And the first question was, is this panel trying to whitewash Savarkar? I was like, I'm no fan of Savarkar. But at a historical level in order to understand the man, you have to understand the man in full. And it is an interesting question to ask that, you know, his revolutionary face, just as you said, if he had been instead of given a prison sentence, if he had been hanged in 1911, would we be venerating him as we do Bhagat Singh? In all likely, we would be because at the time he was sentenced, the Indian nationalist press was pro Savarkar. Even when he wrote his books, Nero wrote a wonderful review of his book, saying that, you know, other than his flowery language and, you know, some exaggerations here and there, it's actually a very good book. So he was a figure Gandhi, he didn't hesitate to share stage with him as a younger Gandhi. And Savarkar when they met in London, they were willing to share a stage together because he was seen very much as an important figure in the movement at that time, even though they disagreed on the means and the method. So Hindu thought doesn't negate that side of Savarkar. So already there, we see a complexity in the man and the way we ourselves approach him. And necessarily, therefore his inner life would also have been much more complex. And remember, just as I said Ramohan Roy in his Bengali writings might have taken a very different tone and level of sharpness compared to what he did in English, because the two audiences are different. So too, it's possible that if we look at Savarkar's journalism, we might see slightly slightly different picture compared to just his main texts that most of us analyze and study. So, you know, I've taken tons of your time. There are nations which could have gained independence in this time, but heavier. But some final questions. And I'm struck by two sentences from your epilogue of the book. And I want you to explain them for us because I think they provide an overarching view of what the book is about. And indeed, perhaps what Hindu nationalism is about. And in one of them, you quote Ashish Nandhi saying that the ultimate violence which colonialism does to his victims is in creating a culture in which the ruled are constantly tempted to fight their rulers within the psychological limits set by the latter. And your other sentence that comes on the page after that is what Brownman seized. It can be argued was not Christian wine for Hindu bottles, but Christian bottles for Hindu wine. Yeah, I think that is essentially what my conclusion is in this, in the way I've chosen to study the modern Hindu identity. I think there are different ways in which it can be studied. Like some people will study it through the prism of Hindu Muslim relations. I think you can study it purely from what reforms are occurring within Hindu traditions, like the Ananda Saraswati before he encountered missionaries and anglicized people. That was already happening within. There were reform movements within completely, I mean, not completely, but untouched by colonialism in a very direct way. You can study it that way. I've chosen this prism of the mold of, you know, how did this current mold through which we defined religion, how did Hinduism become an ism? Earlier there was no such ism, right? But its creation doesn't necessarily mean invention. It means that it became a vehicle for people to assert something that they felt naturally anyway. And then conveniently a word was placed then. They were able to appropriate the word with great energy and enthusiasm and build on it and create something that we all live with today. So I was trying to figure that out. And there I think, yes, this whole idea of Christian bottles for Hindu wine. It comes out of a missionary who said that, oh, what they were appropriated is Christian wine and Hindu bottles. You know, this monotheistic idea, you're talking about Adve, all of this is actually Christian ideas. You've just rebranded it into a Hindu bottle to reinvent your religion. Whereas my argument is actually the other way round, which is that the ingredients for already here, the wine, you could easily distill in and make in India itself. But the bottle is what we borrowed from Christianity. Because the dominant idiom around the world and because of modernity, we were suddenly aware of how the rest of the world viewed us and how the rest of the world understood the concept of religion. We therefore appropriated that bottle and made sure that Hinduism could also be defined through that bottle. Even today, the actual life of Hindus is still very diverse. It is still extremely diverse. People still go to Sufi Sains, Adargas, they still do all kinds of things that can't that defy definition at a uniform level. But in the way Hinduism has presented the world, in the way in many ways, Hinduism self represents when it encounters another is I think now mediated through this. And there the Aashishnan the court comes in, which is that you cannot erase the legacy of colonialism. Colonialism is an important disruption. It is what gives Hinduism that psychological terrain on which it operates and it had to redefine itself. It had to reinvent itself. So my argument in the book is that he modern Hinduism is not an invention. It is a reinvention of something older. But that reinvention was necessitated by colonialism. And because colonialism was such a powerful force, it had to be done in a certain pattern and in a certain way. And we have to live with that. It's not a question of good or bad. It's not a question of endorsing or not endorsing. Is this original? Is it not? Is this purest, is it synthetic? Was if Hinduism is like this now? Was it always like this? That's not the question because history is always about things moving and taking different shape. Christianity a thousand years ago is not like Christianity today. Just the number of sects have changed. There's this whole story. I forget where I read it where somebody asked Gandhi why he didn't join the Christian church and he said which one? Because just as somebody might argue, like when you say Hinduism, what Hinduism, which Hinduism are you talking about? Because every caste, every person has a different Hinduism. Gandhi was reversing that in this potentially apocryphal tale, but I've read it somewhere definitely. And he's also saying, well, from my prism, there are so many Christianity's, which one are you talking about? So it is accepting a certain framework from the West and colonialism is about new frameworks coming into places that were otherwise not exposed to those frameworks. But again, those frameworks were not imposed. I think the framework came in. People on the ground saw the framework. They accepted parts of it. They manipulated parts of it. They reoriented parts of it and then used that framework to push back against the colonizer. That's these are the dynamics in which modern Hinduism took shape. And that's what I try to find out through gods because it's about questions of divinity, guns because it's colonialism, even though the colonialism itself is a conflicted, complicated mixed up messed up kind of thing and missionaries because they are that final religious voice and religious competition in the field. And you know, what your book captures beautifully is how through these centuries, what Hinduism is even before it uses that word for itself is something that is contingent and contains multitudes and is responding to circumstances. So first you have you know, the sort of the puranic adaptations as it were to local customs and you have all these stories and gods being incorporated and it is this beautiful rich flowing tapestry. You have in a scene wars, yes, something changes when Islam comes in. You know, part of that entry is violent, but a lot of it is not especially when they turn from robbing banditry stationary bandits. But yet there is a sense this is another culture and therefore the rest of us have something in common. And then the colonialism begins, the Portuguese come, the British come, there is a response to that and as a response to the growing evangelism of the 19th century, which itself is partly fueled by the industrial revolution, then there is these different strands towards the formation of the Hindu identity of which the strongest of your Luther's it would seem today is the Anand Saraswati and you know the muscular militant Hindu nationalism it created, you move on to Thilak, you move on to Savarkar, that notion that caste should not matter, the rest of us have to unite, the Muslims are the other, the British are the other, kick them out, etc. All that takes shape. My question is in the here and now at one level I get exactly what you say when you say that by defining Hinduism and by beginning to you know assemble a history from the pieces we have been given, we restricted that we draw a border on the tapestry and the tapestry is no longer flowing and there is a bottle into which we imprison this. At the same time as you pointed out the lived reality is that people still go to the dhargas of Sufi saints and people still do all kinds of different things you know it might be said that there are as many Hinduism as there are Hindus but I would actually argue there are more Hinduisms and there are Hindus because even a non-believer like me will have some of it running through my veins without realizing it. So my question to you therefore is that you know as a historian has been easy for you to look back with hindsight and say how this happened that happened these were the contingencies these are the incentives but when you look at modern times you know is it firstly is it coherent the current shape of Hindu to are both in terms of the political movement and in terms of you know how society sees itself and what are the imperatives now which could take it in interesting new directions. So you know one every time I finish a book I send out the manuscript to a few people to read you know it could be a young reader someone in their early 20s it will be someone from the business world so I can see if the book makes sense to somebody who's not used to reading anything from the humanities or anything that's related to history and then there'll be scholars. So there's this young chap called Shari Klaaliwala very bright scholar political scientist now in America doing his PhD I think of post PhD studies and he you know PhD and he read parts of the manuscript for me and he said actually you know even now people when they think of their identity they think through prisons of caste they think through other prisons it's not purely the religious prison and that's true even now in elections right depending on the kind of election it is people switch very easily so even now while there is a modern identity that's been defined it's not the only way people defend themselves I don't know I mean I may have mentioned this example on analogy earlier where I said that if you know you and I are talking to each other we will identify ourselves as I'm a mullily your part Bengali that's how we speak if you go to America we use the word Indian because based on context the hat we wear sort of shifts and I think that's true of Hindutva as well it is dependent on context where the context arises people feel that need to assert a muscular Hindu identity where the context is not there many very often they don't and sometimes within the Hindutva camp also where there are dissonances just as there were dissonances in Savaarkar's time just as tilluk had to grapple with all kinds of internal contradictions and yet try to construct an overarching argument even now many of those contradictions continue in the epilogue of the book I actually mentioned that that you know ultimately you know there's Savaarkar has this thing where he says and this is from Vikram Sapa's biography and his translation where he says to Dalit's take this sacred these sacred threads he's given the Dalit sacred threads and stop bickering and I thought I found that stop bickering very interesting because that's the thing right the one thing that could weaken that one major fragility even for the Hindutva identity today is internal caste based bickering and that remains one of those elephants in the room so what Fulea attempted to do in the 19th century remains a very alive issue to this day in crafting that modern political Hindu identity so the matter is still not closed so attempts have been made to stitch up that outer border but I think it's not as easy but the people stitching it up still haven't figured out how to sort of complete the circle I mean I know the efforts that happen in terms of defining it or building it as a political movement from the top down I'm constantly intrigued by what's happening from in the bottom up and I think a lot of what's happening from the bottom up is no longer Hinduism in a sense it's just life has happened modernity has happened technology has happened globalization has happened we are becoming global citizens the tapestries is actually much bigger than it used to be partly because of geography and technology and so on and so forth. So yeah, we live in interesting times and my final question to you kind of predictable. You haven't been on the show for a long time. So I think I can ask you for recommendations in that last three years. Books, films, music that you really loved so much that you want to share it with the world. Well, I really like Vinayak Saturveda, his book on Savarkar that he had you had him on your show as well. Jan Kiwakles' book was also very good, but I think I'm just thinking of Savarkar books because we just finished talking about Savarkar. I like Swapna Little's book, The Broken Script. I thought it was very well written, very solidly researched book of history and done by a popular historian in a style that anybody can access, but also very sound in terms of its research and sources. In terms of shows, God, I'm watching like part of many shows and I can't even remember their names. This is what happens in the age of Netflix. I watched something completely forget the name of the show. I watched the show called Anne with an E, which is Anne of Green Gables, an adaptation by Netflix or was it Amazon Prime? I'm not sure. Wonderful show. Unfortunately, they cut it short because I think it was such a sweet show that it didn't have the potential to become like a mass thing, but it was a beautiful show beautifully done, very, very nice show, which I really liked. I watched a lot of these like, there's like no watching show called Arcane, which is none of these animated thingies, like very sci-fi, super natural mixed up kind of a thing. So I'm watching that in terms of other books. I don't know. I think this is probably it. You've put me on the spot. I can't think of anything suddenly. Well, you'll be back someday, especially if you're cancelled and we can, or if you just want to send me a list of things that you love, I'll just append it to the show notes. So thank you so much for taking out this time. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for having me. At one point, I remember you telling me that my episode with you was the longest till then. But then obviously you've now hit a 12 hour episode. I don't think this is that long, but hopefully, you know, people listening will like this one also. It's all one extended conversation through time. So don't worry. Thank you. Thanks for having me. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes and your habit holds at will head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up God's guns and missionaries, the making of the modern Hindu identity by Manu Pillai. Exceptional book, you can follow Manu on Twitter at Unum Pillai. You can follow me on Twitter at Amitwarma AMITVA RMA. You can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene on scene.in and every podcast app of your choice. Thank you for listening. Did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of this show? You can go over to seenunseen.in/support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.