WHO INVENTED HINDUISM?

(DEBATES)

BY

S. M. MUKARRAM JAHAN
M.A. SEM I, ID: 201905072

SUBMITTED TO
CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS AND CIVILIZATIONS
JAMIA MILLIA ISLAMIA, OKHLA, NEW DELHI-110025
Professor: Mr. Sanjay Dhansalia

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 WHO INVENTED HINDUISM—DEBATES
Prologue
The debate on the antiquity of the term “Hindu,” construction or invention of the category
“Hinduism,” the idea of Hindu religion and its conception has often engaged the attention of
the scholars. The debate is of immense importance as it seeks to locate itself within the
questions of legitimacy attributed to “Hinduism” as a religion. There have been two main
theories in this regard viz. the term as well as the religion did not exist before the nineteenth
century and that the colonialists, for administrative and taxation purposes, clubbed all the
belief systems that were found in India, other than Islam and Christianity (they were in the
know of only these two religions and not the rest) together and as a result Hinduism as a
religion emerged with its own specific identity. The other theory being that Hinduism already
existed as a religion with its adherents having a self-conscious identity from ancient times
and is not a construct of colonialists. We have examined both theories in this essay.
Hinduism—A Colonial Construct
This theory is propounded by a wide array of scholars like W.C. Smith, Richard King,
Robert Frykerberg, Carl Ernst, David Lorenzen, etc. It postulates that Hinduism as a unitary
entity is not indigenous to India but was created by outsiders. Accordimg to Wilfred Smith,
“Hinduism is a concept certainly (Hindus) did not have.” What he means to say is that the
Europeans, more specifically the British, imposed a single conceptual category on a
heterogeneous collection of sects, doctrines, and customs that the Hindus themselves did not
recognize as having anything essential in common. According to this view, it was only after
the concept of Hinduism was constructed by these Europeans that the Hindus themselves
adopted the idea that they all belonged to a single religious community.
In The Meaning and End of Religion, W.C. Smith says: “Hinduism” refers not to an entity; it
is a name that the West has given to a prodigiously variegated series of facts.” Similarly,
according to Richard King, “the current historical evidence suggests that the concept of
“Hinduism,” developed initially amongst the protestant commentators… The category of
Hinduism emerged in the colonial encounter and was fundamentally moulded…” Following
his analysis, King concludes by suggesting that the term Hinduism should be avoided to
denote the religion of India prior to the 10th Century C.E.
According to Brian K. Smith, “Hinduism” as a singular religion was invented 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 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” (sic).
Of a similar opinion is Harjot Oberoi who writes that the term “Hindu” was first used by
Achaemenid Persians to describe all those people who lived on or beyond the river Sindh, or
Indus. Therefore, the term, when initially conceived, came to denote an ethno-geographic
category of people for all those who lived in India. However, it was during the Muslim rulers

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of India, that the term came to have religious connotations. But ultimately it was during the
rule of the British that the term Hinduism was coined and came to gain currency as referring
collectively to a variegated religious communities, with distinct traditions and opposed
practices.
To S. N. Balagangadhara, “Hinduism” is a phenomenon constructed by the West and
constitutes an “experiential entity only to the West.” While the beliefs and practices that
constitute the phenomenon referred to as Hinduism do indeed exist, he says, it is the
grouping and unifying of these practices into a perceived entity that is problematic. He offers
the reader an analogy: If an alien were to arrive on earth and observe grass turning green,
milk turning sour, and birds flying, for example, the alien might, in an effort to explain what
he observes, claim that such phenomena were evidence of the existence of some unifying
force, such as “hipkapi” (a term Balagangadhara has made up to illustrate his example); the
alien would then point to all observable phenomena as evidence of the existence of
“hipkapi.” This, says Balagangadhara, is what has happened with “Hinduism.”
Balagangadhara goes on to define religion as “an explanatory intelligible account of both the
cosmos and itself,” which the practices that purportedly constitute Hinduism do not provide.
As such, he asserts, there are no religions in India other than Christianity, Islam, and
Judaism.
Another scholar of the same line of thought is G. A. Oddie who means to convey that the
religious self-identity of Hindus manifested only after external forces posed a threat to their
way of life and they united only in face of an unprecedented vulnerability. This point is
elaborated, albeit through a different angle, elsewhere.
Hinduism—An Ancient Singularity
The promulgators of this theory do not deny the fact that the English word “Hinduism” itself
did not exist before the nineteenth century. The term appears in 1829 for the first time in
English sources. However, in the published English texts of Raja Rammohan Roy, the term
can be found as early as in 1816.
Some of the scholars who support this version and question the erstwhile point of view are
Lawrence A. Babb, Peter van der Veer, David Lorenzen, etc. David Lornzen very ardently
asks that if Hinduism is a modern construction, why do authors who support the claim write
about it as if it existed from many centuries earlier?
According to Lorenzen, the religious connotation of the word Hindu has long overlapped
with geographical and ethnic sense and those who favor the opposite opine that the ethno-
geographical sense of the word remained dominant until the nineteenth century, after which
its use as a religious term became widespread as a direct result of the word Hinduism.
According to him, the evidence instead suggests that a Hindu religion theologically and
devotionally grounded in texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranans, and philosophical
commentaries on the six darśanas gradually acquired a much sharper self-conscious identity
through the rivalry between the Muslims and Hindus in the period between 1200 CE and

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1500 CE and was firmly established long before 1800 CE (thus meaning that European
colonizers did not construct/invent Hinduism). He also argues that those Muslims who were
indigenous converts from low-caste Hinduism, should have been called “Hindu Muslims”
but the term never occurs anywhere which suggests that religious connotations were equally
meant if not more, than ethno-geographic connotations of the term.
It is also pointed out that the missionaries and even some scholars have tried to define
religion in terms of a monolithic and homogeneous reality. Religion for the missionaries
represents something true, universal, historical, moral, uncorrupted, one and undivided.
Religion is sought to be conceptualized as something definable in absolute and concrete
terms. Plurality and diversity was portrayed as weaknesses against the western rigid
framework of religion. Perhaps, the flaw lies in trying to conceptualize Hindu traditions as
religion in isolation, sometime even ignoring the larger historical processes that have even
gone into the making of the religions like Christianity and Islam.
In his Who is a Hindu?, the Hindu nationalist author Koenraad Elst says that the term Hindu
was used by Muslims during the beginning of the medieval times for all Indians who were
“unbelievers” or idol worshippers, including Buddhists, Jains, animists and later the Sikhs,
but in contradiction to Indian Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and of course Muslims
themselves. This way at least by the time of al-Biruni (early 11th century), the word Hindu
had a distinct religio-geographical meaning: a Hindu is an Indian who is not a Muslim, Jew,
Christian or Zoroastrian.
In Who Invented Hinduism?, David Lorenzen goes on to give various arguments and proofs
to support his antithesis like the quotations from European sources before 1800 CE, wherein
the words “Hindu” or “Hindoo” or “Hindooism” are used as having religious meanings
rather that ethno-geographic. The author admits that the Hindus needed an Other (other being
here Muslims conquests) to reinforce a sharper self-conscious religious identity among
themselves. In Lorenzen‟s words:
“In practice…without the Muslim (or some other non-Hindu),
Hindus can only be Viashnavas, Saivas, Smartas, or the like. The
presence of the Other is a necessary prerequisite for an active
recognition of what the different Hindu sects and schools hold in
common.”

However, he also points out to various sources within Indian History that represent that there
were elements already in Hinduism that had a pan-Hindu effect on its adherents and that the
Hindus were already religiously self-conscious of their identity. The Muslims only
exacerbated the situation. Pertinently, the scholar has been able to find a reference of as early
as 1323 CE, when the Muslim conquest of South India (Andhra Pradesh) had begun and the
title „Sultan among Hindu kings” (perhaps the earliest use of the term Hindu in an Indian
language) begins to figure in Andhra inscriptions from 1352 CE onward. He argues that in
the Islamic literature of as early as 1350 CE, Abdul Malik „Isami in his Persian treatise

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Futuh-us-Salatin, has used the word “hindi” to mean Indian in an ethno-geographical sense
and “hindu” in the sense of the follower of the Hindu religion. He also invokes passages
from Indian History vis-à-vis the Bhakti saints, who quite cogently have differentiated
between Hindus and Muslims in their poetry to rebuke or reprimand them (in fact Kabir has
carved out a position for himself that is separate from Hinduism as well as Islam), in order to
prove that Hindus in the medieval India were already a religiously single unit and were not
clubbed together by the British in nineteenth century.
Epilogue
In Constructing Hinduism: Myth or Reality, the author concludes by noting, “If Hinduism is
a construction or invention, then, it is not a colonial one, nor a European one, nor even an
exclusively Indian one. It is a construct or invention only in the vague and commonsensical
way that any large institution is, be it Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, communism, or
parliamentary democracy. In other words, it is an institution created out of a long historical
interaction between a set of basic ideas and an infinitely complex and variegated socio
religious beliefs and practices that compose and structure the everyday life of individuals and
small, local groups.”
In simpler words, it is to be concluded that we cannot pin-point to a certain exact date of the
founding of the religion and unlike other religions it doesn‟t have a particular person as its
founder. Traces of Hinduism can be found from even before the Indus Valley Civilization
and as the cultures were being promoted to civilizations, naturally new social customs,
practices and traditions arose which were being constantly blended with the existing beliefs
and gradually gaining religious connotations. And since the subcontinent is geographically a
humungous entity, it is nighly impossible for different kinds of beliefs and practices
emerging from different corners of the subcontinent to have uniformity. With the passage of
time, people did start interacting with other groups and gradually people started identifying
themselves with their religion. It is to be admitted that in the Muslim, European and other
non-indigenous sources, the term “Hindu” did occur with the aim of denoting an ethno-
geographic group of people, but by that that time these people had already developed a self-
conscious religious identity and the phenomenon was only reinforced when the foreigners
(Turks) began their conquests in India. Concluding, Hinduism as a term was invented in the
nineteenth century, but the religion and its distinct identity among its adherents did exist
earlier.

END

‫شیخ دمحم مکرم جہبں‬

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