What may come as a surprise to most of us is that the term ‘Hinduism’ was unknown in India before the 18th or even the 19th century. While caste and jatis neatly divided Indian society and hundreds of local gods and goddesses were worshipped from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin nobody among those worshippers would ever have imagined they were members of a common religion called Hinduism. The Brahmins of India, the highest caste and the religious leaders in all regions of the subcontinent would have abhorred being listed in the same category as the lower castes. In any case listing and categorizing was anyway not a work they indulged in.
The words Hind and Hindu themselves has been coined outside India, namely in Persia. Learned linguists have established that the Persian word Hindū is cognate with the Sanskrit Sindhu. The sound-change from S to h occurred between 850–600 BCE, according to Asko Parpola. Hence, the Rigvedic Sapta Sindhava (the land of seven rivers) became Hapta Hindu in the Avesta. Thus Persian conquerors of parts of India called their newly acquired land Hindustan. The indigenous name of India would be Bharat. From Persian sources even the modern name ‘India’ is derived losing the ‘h’ in the beginning.
With regard to the devotional practice Indians followed, it was more unselfconscious practice than rigid belief before British interference. Their rituals and deities varied greatly. Both snakes and the ultimate reality of the universe were worshipped in the same region, sometimes by the same person. The scriptures written in Sanskrit were unavailable to most of the people and only Brahmins were allowed and able to read them. While the common man would invite a Brahmin to perform certain necessary rituals in Sanskrit in day to day life he would do as his ancestors had done. Such an unorthodox practice is called ‘popular’ religious practice.
The same was true by the way for Muslims. Other than stated in many publications Islam was not spread by the sword but by Sufi saints who came from Iran and central Asia and established their Khanqahs together with a langar and started preaching. They treated all that came for advice equally and looked after them which made Islam attractive. Some upper class Indians did convert to further their careers with the Moghuls but most converts were common men from lower castes. They were illiterate, had no knowledge of Arabic and often no access to a mosque and mostly continued to live their lives after conversion as before. ‘Popular Islam’ thus had much in common with local customs and saints as there was no neat division between ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ in a village. Contemporary researchers in Rajasthan have detected a couple of years ago that people who when asked if they were Hindus or Muslim- called themselves ‘Hindu Muslims’. They attended a Sufi shrine and gave sacrifice to a local goddess just to be on the safe side. That was the reason why in 1927 the Tablighi Jamaat was founded; not for proselytization but to teach people who considered themselves Muslims but didn’t know much about Islam or what the Tablighis thought Islam was.
The British came to India first as traders in the shape of the East India Company (EIC). But in 1765 they received a Farman from the Moghul emperor that allowed them to collect taxes from the territories they controlled. That was the beginning of the EIC becoming an administrative body, its administrators started looking at Indian society and practices more closely trying to understand it in order to get the maximum benefit out of it. With regard to religion in the 18th century, the British were both appalled and fascinated by the excess of gods, sects and cults they found in India. The interpretation of indigenous religious beliefs and practices on the part of the British became a natural result of direct contact with a different culture and society.
In addition, in Europe Enlightenment had brought a new world view to Europeans; they recognized that there was one humanity and that all humans had to start from the same point called barbarism and go all the same way towards a goal called civilization. Only that some people Europeans and British in the first place had reached a further than others like Indians who remained behind in development. This new world view among others created a new science called Anthropology where one tried to measure the status of a people on the ladder towards civilization. Anthropology became a tool to categorize people and societies. Many of the British administrators were hobby anthropologists and put much effort into categorizing Indian society and practice. The categories employed were of course European ones. They looked for ‘religion’ not for ways of life, for unitary creeds like Christianity. Islam they knew and disliked from their European experience. Now they started to categorize the unruly religious practice they found apart from Islam.
Only a tiny minority of upper-caste Indians had known much about the Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas until the 18th century, when they were translated by British scholars and then presented as sacred texts from the paradisiacal age of this “Hinduism”. British started looking for a sacred book comparable to the bible that would help sorting out the mess. But all texts were written in Sanskrit that nobody knew. Therefore, it was necessary for high-caste Brahmins to first translate the Sanskrit into Persian, and from this translated Oriental scholars translated them into English. That turned out to be a revolution comparable to the translation of the bible from Latin into local languages. The sacred texts that had been out of reach for most became now available at least to those who learned English. And English was adopted by the British as the only possible medium of instruction to teach modern knowledge as against irrational mumbo-jumbo of Indian tradition. From the middle of the 19th century onwards British educational institutions were founded in order to “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”, to quote Thomas. B. Macaulay in 1835. Thus English language and the introduction of European categorization became the basis of the extraordinary makeover undergone by Indian religion since the 19th century, when India first confronted the west and its universalist ideologies of nationalism and progress and in the process of which Hinduism was created. Soon after that movements dedicated to reforming newly invented “Hinduism” and recovering its lost glory grew rapidly, inspired by the ideas of progress and development that British utilitarian’s and Christian missionaries aggressively promoted in India.
There is still another element that contributed greatly to the categorization of Hinduism and other religions, castes and social entities: the introduction of census. A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. The British by the late 19th century. thought that in order to better control and rule they need better accountancy of their subjects. This quantitative approach was a European idea that as a consequence had created the idea majoritarian rule. In 1872 the first incomplete census was taken and in 1881 the first complete head count that also specified the religious belonging of the counted people as Muslims or Hindus. With a new census after every ten years until 1941 the idea of Hinduism as a religion was well entrenched by the time India became independent.
Contributed by:
Dr. Bettina Robotka, formerly of Department of South Asian Studies Humboldt University, Berlin)
