The word Hindu occurs nowhere in the classical scriptures of Hinduism. The ancestors of the present day Hindus did not identify themselves as Hindus. When Western scholars and Christian missionaries arrived on the scene, the Hindus found their faith tradition ism-ized and its name became Hinduism. That even an atheist may be called a Hindu is an example of the fact that Hinduism is far beyond a simple religious system, but actually an extremely diverse and complicated river of evolving philosophies and ancient traditions. The word Hindu is not a religious word. It is secular in origin. It is derived from the word Sindhu, which is the name of a major river that flows in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. The ancient Greeks and Armenians used to refer the people living beyond the river Sindhu as Hindus and gradually the name stuck. When the Muslims came to the sub continent they called the people living in the region as Hindustanis to distinguish them from the foreign Muslims. Subsequently when the British established their rule, they started calling the local religions collectively under the name of Hinduism. Only 180 years ago Raja Ram Mohan Roy coined the word Hindu to describe the huge variety of faiths and sects with similar but not identical philosophies, myths and rituals. Hinduism refers not to an entity; it is a name that the West has given to a prodigiously variegated series of facts. It is a notion in mens minds--and a notion that cannot but be inadequate. To use this term at all is inescapably a gross oversimplification. [There was] no such thing as Hinduism before the British invented the holdall category in the early nineteenth century, and made India seem the home of a world religion as organised and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam. The concepts of a world religion and religion as we know them now, emerged during the late 18th and early 19th century, as objects of academic study, at a time of widespread secularisation in western Europe. The idea, as inspired by the Enlightenment, was to study religion as a set of beliefs, and to open it up to rational enquiry. Hinduism--the word and perhaps the reality too--was born in the 19th century, a notoriously illegitimate child. The father was middle-class and British, and the mother, of course, was India. The circumstances of the conception are not altogether clear. One heard of the goodly habits and observances of Hindooism in a Bengali-English grammar written in 1829, and the Reverend William Tennant had spoken of the Hindoo system in a book on Indian manners and history written at the beginning of the century. Yet it was not until the inexpensive handbook Hinduism was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1877 that the term came into general English usage. According to the New Encyclopedia Britannica 20:581, Hinduism was a name given in English language in the Nineteenth Century by the English people to the multiplicity of the beliefs and faiths of the people of the Indus land. The British writers in 1830 gave the word Hinduism to be used as the common name for all the beliefs of the people of India excluding the Muslims and converted Christians. The English term Hinduism was coined by British writers in the first decades of the 19th century and became familiar as a designator of religious ideas and practices distinctive to India with the publication of books such as Hinduism (1877) by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, the notable Oxford scholar and author of an influential Sanskrit dictionary. Initially it was an outsiders’ term, building on centuries-old usages of the word Hindu. Early travelers to the Indus valley, beginning with the Greeks and Persians, spoke of its inhabitants as “Hindu” (Greek: ‘indoi), and, in the 16th century, residents of India themselves began very slowly to employ the term to distinguish themselves from the Turks. Gradually the distinction became primarily religious rather than ethnic, geographic, or cultural. According to our ex-President [India] and scholar Dr S Radhakrishnan, the term Hindu had originally a territorial and not credal significance. It implies residence in a well-defined geographical area. The word Hinduism is an English word of more recent origin. Hinduism entered the English language in the early 19th century to describe the beliefs and practices of those residents of India who had not converted to Islam or Christianity and did not practice Judaism or Zoroastrianism. Just who invented Hinduism first is a matter of scholarly debate. Almost everyone agrees that it was not the Hindus.... As a discrete Indic religion among others, however, Hinduism was probably first imagined by the British in the early part of the nineteenth century to describe (and create and control) an enormously complex configuration of people and their traditions found in the South Asian subcontinent. Hinduism made it possible for the British, and for us all (including Hindus), to speak of a religion when before there was none, or, at best, many. It was the Europeans who coined the word Hinduism to denote all the Indian religions except Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists, and the word Hindu was erroneously used for those following the religions and worship under Hinduism. Hindus themselves prefer to use the Sanskrit term sanatana dharma for their religious tradition. Sanatana dharma is often translated into English as eternal tradition or eternal religion but the translation of dharma as tradition or religion gives an extremely limited, even mistaken, sense of the word. Dharma has many meanings in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hindu scripture, including moral order, duty, and right action. It is most striking that people we now call Hindus never used this term to describe themselves. The Vedas, the Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita, which today are seen by many as the religious texts of the Hindus, do not employ the word Hindu. That term was first used by the Achaemenid Persians to describe all those people who lived on or beyond the banks of the river Sindhu, or Indus. Therefore, at one stage the word Hindu as an ethno-geographic category came to englobe all those who lived in India, without ethnic distinction. It was only under the Muslim rulers of India that the term began to gain a religious connotation. But it was not until colonial times that the term Hinduism was coined and acquired wide currency as referring collectively to a wide variety of religious communities, some of them with distinct traditions and opposed practices. Communities like the Saivites, Vaishvanites, and Lingyats, each with their own history and specific view of the world, were tied together under the blanket category Hinduism. The non-Muslim people of the South Asian subcontinent called Hindu had no precise word for their religions. They were, as they are, divided into thousands of communities and tribes, each having its own religious beliefs, rituals, modes of worship, etc. Finding it difficult to get the names of the religions of these communities, the British writers gave them the word Hinduism to be used as a common name for all of their religions in about 1830. Thus the people called Hindus got a common element, at least in word, to be identified as a distinct, single community. All scholars agree that the category Hinduism is something created by Orientalists. This obviously does not exclude the existence of an Indian spiritual experience. But at a certain point it was decided to use this label, which during Colonialism became a flag for independence, and after that an attempt was made by the people of India to recognize themselves in a common religion. Surprisingly, though Hinduism is a very ancient religion, the word Hinduism, which today defines it and distinguishes it from the rest of the religions, is of much later origin. In ancient India you had either a yogi, a bhakta, a tantric, a sanyasi, a sankhya vadin, a vedantin, a lokayata, a rishi, a muni, a pandit, a pragna, a yogini, a devi, a swami, a Saivite, a Vaishnavite, a siddha or Buddha, but no Hindu. Unliess by Hindu one means nothing more, nor less, than Indian (something native to, pertaining to, or found within the continent of India), there has never been any such a thing as a single Hinduism or any single Hindu community for all of India. Nor, for that matter, can one find any such thing as a single Hinduism or Hindu community even for any one socio-cultural region of the continent. Furthermore, there has never been any one religion--nor even one system of religious--to which the term Hindu can accurately be applied. No one so-called religion, moreover, can lay exclusive claim to or be defined by the term Hinduism. The Supreme Court [of India] in the course of deciding an appeal in an election petition, has interpreted the meaning of Hindutva and Hinduism as a synonym of Indianisation -- i.e. development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all all cultures co-existing in the country. The unanimous judgement given by the three-judge bench consisting of Justices J.S. Verma, N.P. Singh and K. Venkataswami, on December 11, 1995, has quoted earlier Supreme Court judgements and opinions of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Dr. Toynbee and others in coming to the conclusion that Hinduism represented a way of life. The Supreme Court [of India] bench dealt with the meaning of the word Hindutva or Hinduism when used in election propaganda. The court came to the conclusion that the words Hinduism or Hindutva are not necessarily to be understood and construed narrowly, confined only to the strict Hindu religious practices unrelated to the culture and ethos of the People of India depicting the way of life of the Indian people. Unless the context of a speech indicates a contrary meaning or use, in the abstract, these terms are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people. Unless the context of a speech indicates a contrary meaning or use, in the abstract, these terms are indicative more of a way of life of the Indian people and are not confined merely to describe persons practicing the Hindu religion as a faith. This clearly means that, by itself, the word Hinduism or Hindutva indicates the culture of the people of India as a whole, irrespective of whether they are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews etc. The word Hinduism was coined by European travelers and traders in the 16th century. It is interesting to note that the word Hindu is neither Sanskrit nor Dravidian and did not originate in India. It was not used by Indians in their descriptions or writings until the 17th century. If we go by the original definition of the word Hindu, any one who lives in the subcontinent is a Hindu and whatever religion he or she practices is Hinduism. The word Hindu is a secular word and literally translated it means Indian and the word Hinduism denotes any religion or religions that are practiced by the multitude of people living in the land beyond the river Indus. It is hard to define Hinduism, let alone defend it. This is the reason when someone asks the question, Who is a Hindu or what is Hinduism? a variety of answers are given. The most appropriate answer perhaps is a long pause and then silence. The confusion that has been propagated in the religion over many centuries has made it prohibitive even to define the word Hinduism. Unfortunately Hinduism is represented as monolithic. However, there is no essential Hinduism, no single belief system, and no central authority. The Hidden Hindus... include at least 1-2 million non-Indian Americans (Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc.) who practice Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, believe in reincarnation and karma, study the Vedic scriptures, etc., but who –- despite the fact that they are practicing Sanatana Dharma -- will not call themselves Hindu, and do not understand that they are part of an ancient and living religious tradition. We need to do everything in our power to bring these two communities together, to bridge this gap. It is well known among scholars of South Asian religion that the word Hinduism is a term of convenience--a blanket name for a wide variety of religious practices, beliefs and worldviews that some times have little common ground beyond their Indian origins. Ironically, Hinduism is not an indigenous word to any of the traditions it labels. There are legal pronouncements [in India] that Hindus are Indian citizens belonging to a religion born in India. This means Buddhists, Sikhs or Parsis, even those who did not recognize themselves as Hindus, are to be considered Hindus. It should be pointed out that the word Hindu is not found in any of the classical writings of India. Nor can it be traced to the classical Indian languages, such as Sanskrit or Tamil. In fact, the word Hinduism has absolutely no origins within India itself. Still, it persists, and traditions as diverse as Shaivism and Jainism, Shaktism and Vaishnavism, have been described as Hinduism. This may work as a matter of convenience, but ultimately it is inaccurate. Hinduism as one of the world religions we know today had only occurred or perceived since the 19th century, when the term Hindu-ism started being used by leaders of Hindu reform movements or revivalists, and, often considered to be biased, Western orientalists or the first Indologists. However it is clearly accepted that sources of Hinduism and the streams which feed in to it are very ancient, extending back to the Indus Valley civilization and earliest expressions of historical Vedic religion. It is not an accepted view that Hinduism is the construction of Western orientalists to make sense of the plurality of religious phenomena originating and based on the Vedic traditions, however some many have suggested it is. From the western point of view, the understanding of Hinduism was mediated by Western notions of what religion is and how its relates to more ancient forms of belief. It is further complicated by the frequent use of the term faith as a synonym for religion. Some academics and many practitioners refer to Hinduism with a native definition, as Sanātana Dharma, a Sanskrit phrase meaning the eternal law or eternal way. Hinduism has one of the most genetically and ethnically diverse body of adherents in the world. It is hard to classify Hinduism as a religion, as the framework, symbols, leaders and books of reference that make up a typical religion are not uniquely identified in the case of Hinduism. Most commonly it can be seen as a way of life which gives rise to many civilized forms of religions. Hinduism, its religious doctrines, traditions and observances are very typical and inextricably linked to the culture and demographics of India. Using the overarching term Hinduism for the many religions of India is comparable to ignoring the different religious orientations within each of the Western traditions, arbitrarily merging them under a single banner—Semitism (which, like Hinduism, merely denotes geographical location). Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other constitute the diverse religious traditions of the Western world. Just as the term Semitism is too broad and reductionistic to represent properly the unique religious manifestation of the great Western traditions, and just as it would be inappropriate to refer to all these traditions as one religion, the term Hinduism falls short. The word Hindu is also not mentioned in holy books, Upanishads, Shashtras and Valmiki Ramayan, Shatpath Brahmin Granth etc. And in these holy books there is not any word Hindus or sects or caste system, where as it is clearly mentioned in every chapter of thereof that there is only one God of the Universe. The name Hinduism is a misnomer and of a foreign coinage. Indeed the term Hindu is found nowhere in the Vedic scriptures, nor can it be found in any classical texts of Sanatana Dharma. According to Jawaharlal Nehru, the earliest reference to the word Hindu can be traced to a Tantrik book of the eighth century C.E., where the word means a people, and not the followers of a particular religion. The use of the word Hindu in connection with a particular religion is of very late occurrence. If you examine ancient Indian history and religion, you will find that the word Hindu dharma is not used to describe what is today called Hinduism. The word Hindu is relatively modern and is derived from the word Sindhu which means red. The Arabs called the Sindhu river the Indus river since they could not pronounce the S-sound. Thus, the people west of the Sindhu river came to be known as the Hindus and the country got its name India. The original name for the country was Bharata Varsha - the land of Bharata, the king who ruled the country in ancient times. The true name of the religion is Sanatana Dharma. Sanatana means ancient and eternal. Dharma means moral duty. The word Sanatana Dharma connotes a Universal Way of Life for all living entities. As a follower of the religion of santan dharma, I find it offensive that we use the word Hinduism. This term is an illegitimate term that was used to label us by foreign occupiers and aggressors. Hindu means a person believing in, following or respecting the eternal values of life, ethical and spiritual, which have sprung up in Bharatkhand [India] and includes any person calling himself a Hindu. The word hindu is a non-Indian word, its origin is Persian/Arabic. Its original meaning is dog, low life or slave. I wish to state emphatically and categorically that the very word Hinduism is a misnomer. Properly speaking there is no such religion called Hinduism. This great country to which I happen to belong was known from time immemorial as ‘Bharatha’. Even in Bagavat Gita Lord Krishna often addresses Arjuna‘as Bharatha’. The Ancient Country has gone through uncountable vicissitudes. Because, foreign intruders, invaders and travellers had to cross the Indus River before entering this fabulous country (it was so in the past), they began to call its inhabitants of this great and vast land as “Hindus”. This word “Hindu” requires further elaboration. The word for water in Sanskrit is “Sindu” In the Vedas and our Legends we come across such words as “Saptha Sindavaha” which freely translated would mean ‘The Land of Seven Rivers”. While other rivers have been given individual names, this river on the extreme Northwestern border was known as ‘Sindu’. Eventually, Sindu became ‘Hindu’. That is how the intruders, invaders and travellers began to call the original people of the land Hindus. The word Hindu means a liar, a slave, a black, an infidel, in short, a man possessed of every evil to be found in the world; while the term Arya means a pious, a learned, a noble, and a wise man, devoted to the true worship of the Eternal. With this explanation, I dare conclude that no man of common sense would like to be called a Hindu, when once he knows its meaning. It should be noted that the word Hindu originally referred to any inhabitant of the Indian subcontinent, or Hind, not followers of the religion as it does now. If we see in the four thousand years worth of religious literature in India we cannot find a single reference to the word Hinduism anywhere! Hinduism is a word concocted by Europeans to refer to the myriad streams of religious faiths in the land of Hindustan. The word Hinduism itself is a geographical term based upon the Sanskrit name for the great river that runs across the northern boundaries of India, known as the Sindhu. The word Hinduism is not found in the hindu religion. In fact there is no such thing as the hindu religion. The word Hinduism was introduced in the 19th century to define the aggregate beliefs of the Arya, immigrants who left Central Asia in 1500 BC, and animist religions of native populations in India. The word Hindu is not found in any Hindu religious text or any other ancient writing. People who lived on the western side of Hindu Kush (killers of Hindus) mountains gave this name to the natives of India. The word Hindu means black, slave, robber, thief and a waylayer. Until about 19th century, the term Hindu implied a culture and ethnicity and not religion alone. When the British government started periodic census and established a legal system, need arose to define Hinduism as a clearly-defined religion, along the lines of Christianity or Islam. The word Hinduism originated about only 200-300 years ago. Beginning around 1000 AD, invading armies from the Middle East called the place beyond the Sindhu Hindustan and the people who lived there the Hindus Today most Western scholars seem resigned to the inconclusiveness of the project of defining Hinduism. Some decline to use the word Hinduism at all, or prefer to use it only in the plural, Hinduisms. At a very early date, Persian explorers entered the Indian subcontinent from the far Northwest. After they returned, they published chronicles. But due to the phonetics of their native Persian language, the S of Sind became an aspirated H. This is how the people of the Indus Valley came to be known generically as Hindus by the Persians. This flawed intonation inevitably stuck. And was later re-imported when the invading Moguls conquered India. Since they always referred to the locals as Hindus, the term was adopted by the Indians themselves as a way of distinguishing native culture from that of the foreign Muslims. The word Hinduism was coined by the Muslim scholar Alberuni in the 11th century C.E. Various origins for the word Hinduism have been suggested: It may be derived from an ancient inscription translated as: The country lying between the Himalayan mountain and Bindu Sarovara is known as Hindusthan by combination of the first letter hi of Himalaya and the last compound letter ndu of the word `Bindu. Bindu Sarovara is called the Cape Comorin sea in modern times. Hinduism did not exist before 1830. It was created by the English colonialists in the 1830s. This remarkable circumstance is evidenced by the fact that none of the travelers who visited India before English rule used the word Hindu.... This is amply borne out by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which states: The term Hinduism ... [was] introduced in about 1830 by British writers. In other words, the founding father of Hinduism is an Englishman! According to the Hindu Scholars, Hinduism is a misnomer and the religion ‘Hinduism’ should be either referred to as ‘Sanatana Dharma’, which means eternal religion, or as Vedic Dharma, meaning religion of the Vedas. According to Swami Vivekananda, the followers of this religion are referred to as Vendantists. The word Hinduism is an incorrect nomenclature, which was coined by the British. Thereafter, it has stuck due to the ignorance of its followers. The term ism refers to an ideology that is to be propagated and by any method imposed on others for e.g. Marxism, socialism, communism, imperialism and capitalism but the Hindus have no such ism. Hindus follow the continuum process of evolution; for the Hindus do not have any unidirectional ideology, therefore, in Hindu Dharma there is no place for any ism. Hindus are democratic in approach, for each individual is free to adopt any philosophy or way to self-realization.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:05:33 +0000
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