It was hubris that brought the Italian Jesuit Rodolfo Acquaviva to Fatehpur Sikri, the seat of the Mughal throne, in 1579. His aim was to convert Akbar, who lorded it over the subcontinent, to the true God. Mistaking Akbar’s intellectual curiosity for theological frailty, the missionary didn’t quite realise that the emperor was not for turning. 

Akbar saw Acquaviva as a figure of ridicule. For one thing, he was struck by the priest’s intolerance: on encountering transsexuals, the Jesuit had wondered why the Mughal ruler hadn’t already consigned ‘these libertines’ to ‘devouring flames’. For another, he found the whole business of the virgin birth utterly preposterous. Frustrated, Acquaviva left Fatehpur Sikri, making his way back south to Goa. There, he would learn the virtues of toleration in a hard school. Just as he planted a cross on the ruins of a temple razed to the ground by the Portuguese troops accompanying him, he was set upon by natives and hacked to death. 

This is one of the many dozens of stories that comprise Gods, Guns and Missionaries, the precocious young Indian historian Manu Pillai’s new book. Here, in under 350 pages of text, he presents a confident survey of encounters between Indians and Europeans from 1500 onward – five centuries of