How Hinduism’s Protestant Turn Paved the Way for Hindutva

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In the early years of colonial rule, many Europeans regarded India’s spiritual world with contempt, dismissing its rituals and philosophies as primitive or idolatrous. Yet as colonial encounters deepened, attitudes shifted. By the time of the Enlightenment, European intellectuals were turning to Sanskrit texts and Hindu metaphysics not merely to understand India but to critique the rigidity of their own Christian traditions. They mined the Vedas for what they saw as purer spiritual truths, framing Hinduism as an ancient system that predated and surpassed Christianity.

This European fascination with Vedic texts and its projection of a singular, codified Hinduism influenced Indian religious thinkers profoundly. Reformers like Dayanand Saraswati and later others sought to create a streamlined, ‘authentic’ Hinduism, mirroring the scriptural centrality of Christianity. In their eyes, centuries of plural, regional, and caste-based traditions represented corruption rather than the flexible, syncretic reality that had characterised Hindu practice for millennia. As Manu S. Pillai notes, Hinduism’s modern form thus emerged as a hybrid: grounded in indigenous customs yet refracted through the colonial lens of Protestant structures and Western rationalism.

This transformation was part of a global reordering in which local religious systems – from Buddhism and Zoroastrianism to Shinto – were reorganised to resemble the Abrahamic mould: monotheistic, scripture-bound, and doctrinally exclusive. It was a profound loss of diversity. Where once multiple gods, paths, and truths coexisted, the new model prioritised singularity and orthodoxy, leaving little space for syncretism or fluid boundaries.

Yet the current reality of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, was not inevitable. Alternative reformist visions once flourished, engaging positively with Christianity, Islam, and modern liberal thought. But the trajectory changed decisively under Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Inspired by European nationalists like Mazzini and fascist ideologues including Hitler, Savarkar formulated a stark identity politics: a Hindu, he declared, was someone who regarded India as both fatherland and holy land. This deliberately excluded Muslims and Christians, casting them as perpetual outsiders regardless of how long their families had lived on Indian soil.

Though Savarkar’s life ended in near obscurity, his image tarnished by his association with Gandhi’s assassination, his ideas were resurrected decades later. Under the BJP, his vision has been reinvigorated and disseminated through a vast cultural machinery: Bollywood epics, devotional pop music, textbooks, and a flood of communal propaganda on social media. The recent riots in Nagpur are but the latest eruption of this long-standing politics of resentment, in which real and imagined historical wrongs are used to legitimise violence.

What India is experiencing today is not merely a political shift but a tectonic moral and cultural reorientation. The founding values of secularism, pluralism, and tolerance are being eroded rapidly. As journalist Rahul Bhatia writes in The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, ‘Our elders had raised us with values that they had themselves abandoned. Like moisture that warps paper, something unseen was changing us.’ Pillai’s work reveals that this ‘unseen’ force is no recent contagion. It is an accumulation of centuries of reinterpretation, colonial entanglement, and internal anxieties – a long history that has finally coalesced into the dominant and exclusionary vision of Hinduism that we see today.