Hinduism

Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that Christianity or Islam is a religion, and most of the confusion about it starts with the assumption that it must be. There is no founder, no single scripture, no creed, no church, and no mechanism by which anyone could be declared a heretic. What there is instead is a very old and very large family of traditions that share texts, vocabulary, ritual grammar, and a set of arguments they have been having with each other for three thousand years.

The name itself is external. “Hindu” began as a Persian geographical term for people living beyond the Indus. It became a religious category largely through encounters with Islam and, decisively, through British colonial administration, which needed a box to put people in for census purposes. Traditions that had never regarded themselves as a single thing found themselves counted as one.

What holds it together. A shared canon that everyone argues over rather than agrees on: the Vedas as nominal authority, the Upanishads as the philosophical core, the epics and Puranas as the actual popular scripture. A shared set of concepts: dharma (duty, order, the right thing given who and where you are), karma, samsara, moksha. A ritual repertoire. And a striking tolerance for metaphysical disagreement: the six orthodox schools, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta, include a rigorous logical realism, an atheistic dualism, and a radical non-dualism holding that the self and ultimate reality are identical and that the world of distinct objects is a misperception. All six are Hindu. They contradict each other extensively.

On “polytheism.” It’s the wrong word, or at least an insufficient one. Most Hindu practice centers on an ishta-devata, a chosen deity, and is functionally monotheistic within that frame; the major theological schools are variously monist, qualified monist, or theist; and the Rigveda itself contains the line that the wise speak of the one in many ways. There are certainly many gods. What that means theologically is the thing under dispute, and has been for millennia.

The main streams. Vaishnavism (centered on Vishnu and his avatars, above all Rama and Krishna), Shaivism (Shiva), Shaktism (the Goddess), and Smartism. Then the devotional bhakti movements from roughly the seventh century onward, beginning with the Alvars and Nayanars in the Tamil country and spreading north over the following eight hundred years. These democratized religious access in enormous ways: vernacular languages rather than Sanskrit, a direct relationship with the divine rather than priestly mediation, and poet-saints drawn from every social level, including the very bottom.

Hinduism and politics. Since the late nineteenth century, one strand of Hindu thought has developed into Hindutva, a political project defining Indian nationhood in terms of Hindu cultural identity, articulated by Savarkar in 1923 and now the ideological basis of the country’s governing party. It is a modern political ideology, not a religious tradition, and conflating the two makes both harder to discuss. It is also the single most consequential thing happening in Indian public life, and any honest page about religion in India has to say so.

Further reading: Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), contentious and worth reading alongside its critics. Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (1996), for the sober version. Jonardon Ganeri on the philosophical schools.