MOST of us in India, if born into Hindu families, grow up unquestioningly as Hindus. We pick up what we know about religion from our families and our environment – from the way it is talked about and generally understood. We learn nothing new, as such, about religion in school; if anything, our clichéd understanding is confirmed rather than questioned, and we are not given the option to delve deeper into it in college or university since religious studies is not a discipline that is generally offered in higher education in India. As a result, we become prey not only to platitudes, to beliefs that actually came up only in the late nineteenth century, but to the manipulation of religion by political parties.

The problem lies in the uncritical projection of Hinduism back into time. Handbooks and histories often begin with certain assumptions, which are left unstated. The assumptions are, as S. Radhakrishnan has put in The Hindu View of Life, ‘The differences among sects of the Hindus are more or less on the surface, and the Hindus as such remain a distinct cultural unit, with a common history, a common literature and a common civilization.’¹ Regarding the broad mass of Hindus as differentiated among itself but in the end unitary, Radhakrishnan proceeds to speak of the Hindu in the singular, the Hindu attitude, the Hindu dharma and so on and to project these constructions into the past, in spite of his wide erudition and insights into history.

 

Radhakrishnan attributes the division of Hindu society into castes to custom. Today it would be difficult to speak of caste in the same terms, whatever the opinion privately held. ‘Caste, on its racial side,’ he says, ‘is the affirmation of the infinite diversity of human groups.’2 Of tribal groups he says, ‘The tribes were admitted into the larger life of Hinduism with the opportunities to share in the intellectual and cultural life of the Hindus and the responsibilities of contributing to its thoughts, its moral advancement and its spiritual worth – in short, to all that makes a nation’s life.’³ It would no longer be politically correct to articulate it thus, but the underlying assumptions are still likely to be widely shared.

It is notoriously difficult to define Hinduism. The term ‘Hindu’ itself is not very old. It has a much vexed and contested history, given the emotional and political baggage it has now come to carry. It acquired dimensions verging on the holy from the late nineteenth century on; these were to find a first culmination in V.D. Savarkar’s eulogy in Hindutva: Who is a Hindu.⁴ Savarkar offered his speculative projections of Hindu and Hinduness into the pre-historical past as proof of the existence of a proto-national community since the dawn of time. If we try and trace its actual oldest usage, we find that the term ‘Hindu’ does indeed first find mention in the Zend Avesta; it crops up in the expression Hapt Hindu (identical with the Rigvedic Saptasindhava), one of the sixteen regions created by Ahura Mazda.⁵ Its connotation is, however, entirely territorial. In its religious sense, it seems to have been first used by Alberuni (1030 CE) and he seems to have confined it to denote what we would today regard as Brahmanical Hinduism.

 

Three centuries later, Ziauddin Barani also makes frequent references to Hindu in his history of India, either as a political-administrative category, or a religious one and sometimes as both, but the coverage, once again, remains fuzzy. At times he includes Jains, Yogis, Sanyasis, Charavakas; at other times they are excluded. Before the fourteenth century, however, no Indian describes himself as ‘Hindu’ to denote religious affiliation, though the term does indeed crop up in a Vijaynagar inscription as early as 1352 CE and seems thereafter to be used sporadically by non-Muslim rulers in the South as part of their royal title: the purpose seems clearly political. It is not used in Sanskrit in any self-representational sense by any religious community before the nineteenth century and this happens clearly as a consequence of the encounter with Christian missionaries. Rammohan Roy is the first Indian to use the term ‘Hinduism’ in the sense of religious community with a sense of affiliation to it; he does so in 1816. He is thus the first self-declared Hindu in the modern sense of the term.⁶

The use of the term ‘Hindu’ from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in languages other than Sanskrit is a phenomenon that takes place primarily in the works of the saint-poets of the newly forming bhakti or devotional communities ‘with reference to adherents of the caste-centric Brahmanical religion, against which they raised their voice.’⁷ These communities thrive precisely in the act of resistance to the centripetal Brahmanical discourse. Thus the very impulses and movements comprising the so-called bhakti movement, which were to become so central a core of modern Hinduism from the second half of the nineteenth century, do not project themselves but rather the dominant ‘Other’ as ‘Hindu’. The argument of scholars that Hindu religious identity defined itself primarily in opposition to Islam in the medieval and late medieval period can only be deeply problematic.⁸

 

In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, modern Hinduism did indeed come to encompass a wide variety of groups and formations. These came to include many of those who had once been ranged in antagonistic camps. We have only to think of formations such as the Vaishnavas and the Shaivas in the medieval period and, in the modern period, of the many religious reform movements (the Arya Samaj for instance) which invoked the Vedas as the originary text of the Hindus while resisting the orthodox Hindu. These now came to be grouped together as Hindu, as did the many traditionalist formations, comprising amongst others the heirs of the medieval bhakti movements, who also now invoked the Veda in the name of the orthodoxy which, in the meantime, many of them had come to represent.

This new orthodoxy tended to present itself as eternal and unchanging, as the bearer, in fact, of Sanatana Dharma. This was an expression which had originally signified ‘eternal law’, ‘unshakeable, venerable order’, ‘ancient and continuing guideline’⁹ etc. and had been used in the epics, in the Puranas and elsewhere, in the general sense of ‘traditionally established customs and duties of countries, castes and families.’¹⁰ However, in the nineteenth century, Sanatana Dharma came to stand for an all-comprehensive Hinduism, ever rooted in the Vedas, dharma being now used in the modern sense of ‘religion’.

 

Given its late genesis in the modern, can we speak of Hinduism when we revert to the medieval and early modern? Modern Hinduism, ‘itself the historical product of discursive processes’’¹¹ has a genealogy, which we can trace in the many strands that, as noted above, did indeed coalesce to an extent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In historicizing precisely these moves, we can aspire to viewing past traditions within their own given context and, in fact, not speak of Hinduism in its present form being handed down to us through the centuries.

As for Hinduism’s territorial spread, a brief discussion of the cluster of terms, which have acquired new valence in the present, would seem to be in order. The cultural and geographical unity of Hinduism as it is perceived today is usually mapped on the territory covered by terms such as Bharatavarsha, Aryavarta and Jambudvipa, which are projected back into the earliest Vedic period. This is not borne out of the literature handed down to us. Bharatavarsha itself is nowhere mentioned in the Vedas, though the Bharatas crop up as the name of a Vedic clan, and Panini knows Bharata as the name of a small janapada. In later literature, the territory denoted by it expands and contracts, often leaving out large tracts of North India, and by and large excluding territory South of the Vindhyas. The same holds true of the other two terms, Aryavarta and Jambudvipa. By the late nineteenth century, however, these geo-cultural terms come to be seen as coeval with the territory covered by British India and the princely states under their protection.

 

Though the territorial terms noted above have a long cultural history, the presently projected mapping is, once again, clearly a modern phenomenon. That after independence the Indian Republic chose also to be known as Bharat, gives the term yet newer meaning. The goddess figure of Bharat Mata, a Bengali imaginary of the late nineteenth century, thus clearly cannot go back to a hoary past. If there was no Bharat in the modern sense in the past, there can be no Bharat Mata that goes back in time. Further, her imposition on all of India is an unwarranted call to pay homage to a newly created Hindu figure; her cultural accoutrement is Hindu. The temples dedicated to her in Varanasi (1936) and a newer one at Haridwar (1983) are also modern. Her elevation to a key symbol of nationalism by the Sangh Parivar is thus not only very problematically Hindu, it is an invitation to exclude non-Hindus.

But to get back to religion once again: if we do indeed proceed to view the past in terms of the present, and seek a monolithic Hindu religious tradition, we are likely to find not one but several ‘religions’. According to von Stietencron, the major theistic post-Vedic Hindu religious traditions such as Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, today viewed as sects of Hinduism, can be regarded as autonomous religions, as formations no less distinct than Buddhism, Jainism, or for that matter, Judaism and Islam.¹² While connected to each other by a shared cultural context, these post-Vedic Indian religions insisted on sharply demarcated theological boundaries, and defined themselves in terms of superior access to divine grace and salvation. Theologically, all other religious traditions and their gods were subordinated and assigned a preparatory role for people at a lower mental level. This preparation could lead to a better rebirth but not to salvation.

 

Vaishnavism, Shaivism and so on were, however, in their turn not homogeneous, for they comprised orthodox and heterodox communities. Over time, they had also absorbed many other formerly independent cults. Within Shaivism for instance, the different sampradayas propagated a wide variety of methods for attaining the highest perfection, and some, such as the kapalikas and kalamukhas, were considered highly controversial and rejected as unclean or even heretic by a majority of Shaivas. However, the Shaiva traditions shared a corpus of recognized holy scriptures, and adored Shiva as the highest being and lord of the universe. They shared an identity which clearly demarcated them from the Vaishnavas and other religious communities. There is thus often a shared cultural matrix, but no single Hindu religion to which allegiance was paid by all Hindus. This statement appears to be true at any given point of time in pre-modern India.

 

This state of affairs was to change radically from the late eighteenth century on, when Hinduism came to be used as a collective term for the non-Muslim religious formations on the subcontinent, though once again there were many readings – the missionary, the Orientalist, the Hindu reformist, and the Hindu ‘traditionalist’, all of which interacted intricately with each other and to some extent also overlapped. While there has been broad consensus that the Hindu reformist formations responded to the encounter with western learning, Orientalism, and Christianity, it has generally escaped attention that the trustees of the collectivities which go by the name of Sanatana Dharma were also responding, though in somewhat different ways, to the same modernizing impulses.

In their teaching too, the traditional categories of thought, even as they were being projected as eternal and unchanging, were shifting to accommodate change. This can be seen in the public discussion carried out in the vernacular Hindi press, in tracts and in books, as it was led and steered by Harischandra of Benares (1850-1885). As I see it, this discussion reveals a clear pattern in the evolution of what was increasingly being projected as the national religion of the Hindus, a pattern which has significant bearing on the developments today.

The strategies evolved to subsume the claims of the many ‘sects’ within Sanatana Dharma were to lead to the Vaishnavas emerging as the dominant traditional strand in North India. This is a pattern which can be followed back into the sixteenth century when the major devotional traditions of the North first crystallized. The difference now being that it was projected as valid for all of India. This was a claim which had the backing of a substantial number of Orientalists, who, in their turn, supported the Vaishnava claim to be the only true monotheists and the only authentic practitioners of bhakti or personal devotion to a personal god. However, Harischandra, as a product of the late nineteenth century, while viewing Vaishnavism as the dominant strand, and emphasizing the need for a collective view of Hinduism, acknowledged the presence of a plurality of traditions within Hinduism by engaging with them.¹³

 

This was a practice followed by others as well. I have written elsewhere about this loss of plurality in public opinion; I recapitulate it briefly here.¹⁴ Dayanand Saraswati (1824-1883) for instance, followed an old practice in declaring the Vedas to be the primeval text of the Aryas as he laid out what he saw to be its truth in his programmatic work, Satyarth Prakash or the Light of Truth (first published in 1875, second revised edition, 1882). He saw himself constrained to devote a whole chapter, the eleventh, of his work to ‘An Examination of the Different Religions Prevailing in Aryavarta’.¹⁵ In his exposition, Dayanand was savage in his denunciation of Brahmans, whom he consistently addressed as ‘Popeji’. According to him, they did not deserve to be called Brahmans. They enjoyed no divine authority; in any case, no person could be Brahman simply by birth.

 

He explicitly rejected the Puranas and the creed they propagated. He found Jaina and Baudhha mata to be most frightful; they were slanderers of the Vedas and the Shastras. He roundly denounced the Vaishanvas and Shaktas and their ritual practices. There could obviously be no separate place for Tantriks of any kind. Idol worship, pilgrimage, and funerary rites such as sraddha connected with Puranic religions, as also astrology, were in any case inventions of the Popes. Nor did the ascetic siddhas and sannyasis have any space in his scheme of things. But even Kabir, Nanak and Dadu, poet-saints who had risen from the people, were given short shrift. As for the great social reform movements such as the Brahmo and Prarthana Samaj, they could not be taken seriously, since they did not acknowledge the Vedas. Once again, the very act of enumerating these religious formations acknowledged their co-presence on the subcontinent.

The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century saw a major shift in this practice. Sanatana Dharma. An Elementary Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics,¹⁶ a primer authored for use in their schools by the theosophists, Doctor Bhagwan Das (1869-1958), and Annie Besant (1847-1933), articulates overarching claims about the beliefs and practices of Hindus at large. Both the Arya Samaj and the Theosophists link their notion of religion with a textual corpus in a specific language (Sanskrit), with territory (Aryavarta), nation (Bharatavarsha), and the new concept of race (Aryan), thus foreshadowing much that had been adopted by present day Hindutva. The express purpose of the textbook however, contrary to the practice of Dayanand Saraswati, is to stress the common features of all formations which could be regarded as Hindu and to subsume differences without engaging with them, in most cases not even conceding them.

 

The Elementary Textbook avoids all controversy in fact. Though possibly more Vaishnava in its core than otherwise, since there are many citations from the Bhagavadgita and more examples from the Bhagavata and Vishnu Purana than other Puranas, it stresses the unitary character of Sanatana Dharma. It does not enter into any explanation of why Sanatana Dharma came to be known as Hindu, it simply accepts the fact. The Elementary Text Book of Hinduism for all its openness then also presents a closed system. This I regard as symptomatic of modern approaches to Hinduism, including that of Vivekananda whose thinking found its core in Advaita Vedanta.

There is, however, a great difference between these approaches and that of Gandhi. He too had his own unitary view, but it was not high Brahamanical; it has popular devotional or Bhakti underpinnings, and it acknowledges difference from Islam, while at the same time extending friendship.

As John Zavos has shown, when the reformists and traditionalists, the Aryas and the Sanatanis, finally merged their resources in the interest of Hindu sangathan (which in Hindi has come to mean ‘the act or process of organization’) in the 1920s, it was the Sanatanis, as foreshadowed by the theosophists, who came to dominate and define the character of the collective.¹⁷ They still differed on some major issues from the reformists, but they had been part of the same modernizing impulse and had interacted with each other as much as with missionary and colonial discourse. In forging this larger Hindu national community, then, the categories invoked in the interest of sangathan perforce acquired an almost diffuse, transcendental character. The various formulations of modern Hinduism, from the early twentieth century onwards, in forging unity while trying to contain the upward thrust of lower caste mobilizations, which also gained momentum in the 1920s, defined themselves largely in opposition to the threat they saw posed by the Muslim ‘Other’.

 

The unitary character of Hindutva as defined by Savarkar is thus not unique in this respect. However, in proclaiming itself to be a largely cultural formulation, and by glossing over all matters of belief and difference, Hindutva has, in a sense, hollowed out Hinduism from within. There is no religiously grounded, moral or philosophical hand restraining its excesses and its violence. Given that the plurality of the once-competing religious formations, the sampradayas and the panths have today been subsumed within the overarching phenomenon that is modern Hinduism, all creedal coherence has been lost.

Not surprisingly, it was Ambedkar who noted the many contradictions in theological thought and in customs and practices, between North and South for instance, that have come about as a result. The first riddle of his recently published tract, Riddles in Hinduism: An Exposition to Enlighten the Masses is titled ‘The difficulty of knowing why one is a Hindu’. As he points out: ‘A complex congeries of creeds and doctrines is Hinduism. It shelters within its portals monotheists, polytheists and pantheists; worshippers of the great gods Shiva and Vishnu or of their female counterparts, as well as worshippers of the divine mothers or the spirits of trees, rocks, and streams and the tutelary village deities…’¹⁸ As he further notes, it is also not possible to point to customs and practices as in any remotest possible way uniform: ‘For all Hindus do not observe the same customs.’¹⁹

 

With little or no knowledge of the history of Hinduism, of its relatively recent creation as an umbrella term, with no common moral or philosophical creed to restrain them, with a notion of the Muslim as Other as the primary cementing force, Hindus today find themselves caught between traditional scholarship, still mired in the past, and the ever-drumming voice of powerful politicians exploiting hate as the only guiding force in today’s world.

The secular intelligentsia has bowed out of the discussion altogether. Can we leave Hinduism to be defined by the Hindutva brigade? Is there a way to create dissent to the ruling ideology within the ranks of believing and practicing Hindus, who are mostly upper caste? Who is to create the new pedagogy of religion needed today? Perhaps it can only come from Dalit quarters, balanced precariously in and out of Hinduism.

 

Footnotes:

1. S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu Way of Life. Upton Lectures delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, 1926. George Allen and Unwin, London, 1927, p. 14.

2. Ibid., p. 97.

3. Ibid., p. 98.

4. V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (originally published under the title Essentials of Hindutva). Veer Savarkar Prakashan, Bombay, [1923] 1969.

5. In the following I draw upon my introduction to the Oxford India Hinduism Reader. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2007. The discussion of the terms ‘Hindu’, and ‘Bharatvarsha’ is based on D.N. Jha’s presidential address to the Indian History Congress (2006), which offers a systematic and dispassionate account of the stereotypes which have gone into the construction of modern Hindu identity.

6. As noted by Dermot Killingley in Gavin Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Blackwell, Oxford, [2003] 2005, p. 513.

7. Dwijendranath Narayan Jha, ‘Looking for a Hindu Identity’. Presidential Address, 66th Session of the Indian History Congress, 2006, p. 15. http://www.sacw.net/India_History/dnj_Jan06.pdf

8. David N. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism? Yoda Press, Delhi, 2005.

9. Julius Lipner in Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (eds.), The Hindu World. Routledge, New York and London, 2004, p. 19.

10. D.N. Jha 2006, op cit., fn. 7, p. 20.

11. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1993, p. 29.

12. Heinrich von Stietencron, ‘Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim India and the Modern Concept of Hinduism’, in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.), Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity. Sage Publications, Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London, 1995.

13. For an extensive discussion on the theme, see the chapter on religion, ‘The Only True Religion of the Hindus’, in my monograph on Harischandra: The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997. Reprint: Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010.

14. ‘Whither Pluralities and Differences? Arya Dharma and Hinduism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Martin Fuchs and Vasudha Dalmia (eds.), Religious Interactions in Modern India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, forthcoming.

15. Dayanand Saraswati, Light of Truth. English translation of Satyarth Prakash by Chiranjiva Bharadwaja. Sarvdeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabha, Delhi, 1984.

16. Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das, Sanatana Dharma. An Elementary Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics. The Theosophical Publishing House Adyar, Chennai and Wheaton, Illinois, [1903] 2002.

17. John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000, p. 13 and 113.

18. B.R. Ambedkar, Riddles in Hinduism: An Exposition to Enlighten the Masses. The Annotated Critical Selection, with an Introduction by Kancha Ilaiah. Navayana, Delhi. 2016, p. 63.

19. Ibid., p. 63.