"In Gods, Guns and Missionaries, Manu S. Pillai takes us through these remarkable dynamics. With an arresting cast of characters--maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen--this book is ambitious in its scope and provocative in its position. Lucid and exhaustive, it is, at once, a political history, a review of Hindu culture and a study of the social forces that prepared the ground for Hindu nationalism. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated--and infinitely richer--than popular narratives allow"--Provided by publisher.