In the early 19th century, Reverend Andrew Fuller, a leading evangelical, dismissed the possibility of any anti-colonial unity in India, claiming that “Hindoos 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 effecting it.” Yet, over the next century, Fuller’s glib remark would be upended by the very forces he had underestimated. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rising wave of Hindu nationalism had begun to consolidate those so-called “particles of sand” into a powerful, collective identity.
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