Hindus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hindus number approximately 1.17 billion people worldwide, making them the third-largest religious group on earth, after Christians and Muslims. They account for nearly 15% of all humanity. Yet ask what makes someone a Hindu, and you will find no single founder, no singular creed, no central governing authority, and no fixed set of required beliefs. In 1995, Chief Justice P. B. Gajendragadkar was quoted in an Indian Supreme Court ruling: "When we think of the Hindu religion, unlike other religions in the world, the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one god; it does not subscribe to any one dogma." He concluded that Hinduism "may broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more." That description raises more questions than it answers. How did a word that began as a Persian geographical label for people living near a river come to name one of the world's great religions? Who decided which people counted as Hindu, and who did not? And why have courts in modern India repeatedly been forced by the constitution itself to rule on that very question? The answers reach back to a 5th-century BCE Persian inscription, pass through medieval wars and colonial library shelves, and land in the living rooms of more than a billion people today.

• 2. A Word Born from Rivers

  ›

  The oldest known use of the word that would become "Hindu" appears in the 5th-century BCE inscription DNa of the Persian king Darius I, which refers to the province of Hindush in northwestern India. The scholar Gavin Flood notes that the term arose as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus," the river the Sanskrit tradition called Sindhu, meaning a large body of water. The Punjab region, called Sapta Sindhu (land of seven rivers) in the Vedas, bears a direct counterpart in the Zend Avesta, where it becomes Hapta Hindu. From there the word moved westward: the Greek cognates became "Indus" for the river and "India" for the land. The Hebrew cognate hod-du, referring to India, appears in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Esther. In the 8th-century Arabic text Chachnama, the people of India were called Hinduvān, and hindavī served as the adjective for the Indian language. According to D. N. Jha, the term in these ancient records was an ethno-geographical label and carried no religious meaning at all. The word was simply a way outsiders named the people living east of a great river. That geographical plainness would not survive contact with the centuries ahead.

• 3. Medieval Meanings, Shifting Borders

  ›

  Al-Biruni's 11th-century text Tarikh Al-Hind uses the term Hindu to include all non-Islamic peoples, among them Buddhists, and treats it as carrying the ambiguity of being "a region or a religion." The Indian historian Romila Thapar observes that in the court chronicles of the Delhi Sultanate period, the Hindu community appears as the amorphous "Other" of the Muslim community. By 1350, the Persian work Futuhu's-salatin, composed in the Deccan under Bahmani rule by 'Abd al-Malik Isami, distinguished between the word meaning "Indian" in an ethnic-geographical sense and the word meaning a follower of the Hindu religion. The poet Vidyapati's Kirtilata, dated to 1380, uses Hindu in the sense of a religion and describes Hindus and Turks (his term for Muslims) living together in a city, each making fun of the other's religion. The Mughal emperor Jahangir called the Sikh Guru Arjan a Hindu in his court writings, illustrating that for Persian-language writers of the period, Sikh and Hindu were not yet distinct categories. As the Sikh scholar Pashaura Singh notes, in Persian writings Sikhs were regarded as Hindu in the sense of non-Muslim Indians. It was not the word itself but the slow pressure of military, political, and religious conflict that forced the category to harden.

• 4. Wars and Identity Formation

  ›

  Sheldon Pollock traces an emerging Hindu political identity to the arrival of Islam in India and to the spread of religious and political symbolism drawn from the Ramayana. A 13th-century record describing the Yadava king Ramacandra of Devagiri praises him for freeing Varanasi from what it calls the "mleccha horde" and building there a golden temple, even though Ramacandra was a devotee of Shiva, a Shaivite, while the record describes his deeds in the Vaishnavite terms of the deity Rama. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya challenged this reading and pointed to wider evidence: wars between Islamic Sultanates and the Vijayanagara kingdom, and raids on Tamil Nadu kingdoms, which were described using a broad range of religious symbolism, not only the Rama narrative. A vivid example survives in the 14th-century Sanskrit text Madhuravijayam, a memoir by Gangadevi, wife of a Vijayanagara prince, which describes coconut trees replaced by iron spikes bearing human skulls, Brahmins dragged in iron fetters, and the waters of the Tambraparni river running red from slaughtered cows. Andrew Nicholson finds in the vernacular poetry of Bhakti movement sants from the 15th to 17th centuries, including Kabir, Eknath, and Vidyapati, a clear literature that contrasts Hindu and Islamic identities and reflects a distinct sense of Hindu religious selfhood. DN Jha's historical essay argues that no Indians described themselves as Hindus before the 14th century; what the medieval wars produced was the slow crystallization of that self-description.

• 5. Colonial Redefinition

  ›

  One of the earliest uses of the word Hindu in a religious context in a European language appeared in 1649, in a Spanish-language publication by the Christian friar Sebastiao Manrique. By the 18th century, European merchants and colonists had settled on the term as a collective label for followers of Indian religions, placing it in contrast to "Mohamedans," meaning Muslims. The influential Asiatick Researches, founded in the 18th century and later known as The Asiatic Society, initially identified only two religions in India: Islam and Hinduism, treating all Indian religious traditions including Buddhism as subgroups of the latter. By the early 19th century these orientalists began subdividing: among the earliest new terms to emerge were Seeks (later spelled Sikhs by Charles Wilkins), Boudhism (later spelled Buddhism), and Jainism, which received notice in the 9th volume of the Asiatick Researches. According to Pennington, the colonial project stereotyped Hinduism as an irrational and traditional "ancient default oppressive religious substratum," while presenting Buddhism and Sikhism as rational reform religions, yet the mid-19th-century reports offered no evidence of doctrinal or ritual differences between these newly separated identities. In colonial Anglo-Hindu law, the term Hindu applied to followers of Judaism and Zoroastrianism as well as all Indian religions. DN Jha summarises the colonial transformation: "The British borrowed the word 'Hindu' from India, gave it a new meaning and significance, and reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism."

• 6. What Hindus Share

  ›

  Julius Lipner observes that one need not be religious in the minimal sense to be accepted as Hindu by Hindus, or to describe oneself as Hindu. The scholar notes that the custom of distinguishing between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs is a modern phenomenon and a convenient abstraction. Hindus subscribe to a diversity of ideas on spirituality, with no ecclesiastical order, no unquestionable religious authorities, and no single founding prophet. A Hindu may choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic, or humanist. What is shared includes philosophical concepts such as dharma, karma, kama, artha, moksha, and samsara; sacred texts including the Vedas with their embedded Upanishads; and ritual grammar such as the Sanskara rites of passage marking weddings, births, and cremations. The practice of puja, which Jeaneane Fowler notes is often misread by non-Hindu observers as idol worship, may be directed toward a metal or stone statue, a photographic image, a linga, a tree such as the pipal, an animal such as the cow, or the tools of one's profession. Sacred geography also ties Hindus together across vast distances: the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines of Shaivism and the fifty-one Shaktipitha sites of Shaktism appear in early medieval Puranas as pilgrimage networks spanning from the Himalayas to the hills of South India and from the Ellora Caves to Varanasi. Non-textual evidence for this shared geography, including cave temples separated by thousands of kilometers and copper plate inscriptions listing medieval pilgrimage sites, predates the texts that describe them.

• 7. A Billion-Plus and Growing

  ›

  Pew Research projects that the Hindu population will reach 1.4 billion by 2050, growing from the current 1.17 billion. The fertility rate for Hindus is 2.4 children per woman, slightly below the world average of 2.5. Only two countries have Hindu majorities: India and Nepal, and together they account for more than 95% of the global Hindu population. The next largest Hindu populations live in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the United States, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom; those ten countries together account for 99% of all Hindus worldwide, leaving roughly 6 million spread across every other nation. Over 3 million Hindus live in Bali, Indonesia alone, a community whose origins trace to Hindu traders who reached the Indonesian islands during the 1st millennium CE. Balinese Hindus read the Vedas and the Upanishads as sacred texts, perform the Ramayana and Mahabharata through community dances and shadow puppet (wayang) performances, and recognise four paths of spirituality they call Catur Marga and four proper goals of human life they call Catur Purusartha. In the modern era, Hindus have faced religious persecution outside India in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Myanmar. The Supreme Court of India was called upon as recently as 2005 and 2006 to rule on whether Jainism is legally part of Hinduism, because under articles 15 and 30 of the Indian constitution, the answer affects who qualifies as a religious minority with special protected rights.