When European missionaries first arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But quickly it became clear that Hindu 'idolatry' was far more complex than white men's stereotypes allowed, and that Hindus had little desire to convert.

But then, European power began to grow in India, and under colonial rule, missionaries assumed a forbidding appearance. During the British Raj, Western frames of thinking gained ascendancy, and Hindus felt pressed to reimagine their religion. This was both to fortify it against Christian attacks and to mark resistance to foreign rule. It is this encounter that has given modern Hinduism its present shape. Indeed, Hindus subverted some of the missionaries' own tools and strategies in the process, also triggering the birth of Hindu nationalism, now so dominant in the country.

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 is a book ambitious in 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.