‘Hinduism’ is an English term coined in the nineteenth century to designate the religious traditions of the non-Muslim majority of *South Asia. The term has no exact and well-established equivalent in Indian languages. The word ‘Hindu’ was originally used by Muslims as an ethnographic term to describe the non-Muslim inhabitants of the lands beyond the Indus river; its marriage to the English suffix ‘-ism’ was a joint product of *Orientalist scholarship, British administrative convenience, and the responses of some Indian intellectuals to the challenges of *colonial rule. About 83 per cent of the population of the Republic of India and a majority of the population of Nepal may be said to be Hindu as the term is normally used; significant numbers of Hindus have also migrated from South Asia to other regions of the world.
The traditions falling under this general label are derived historically from Indo-Europeans who first arrived in the subcontinent in the second millennium BCE and from the peoples already present at the time they came. The result of the mixture and interaction over subsequent centuries is a multi-levelled and highly diverse patchwork of sects and traditions. At the subcontinental level we find a textualized religious culture, itself immensely variegated, carried in Sanskrit texts and propagated mainly by Brāhman priests and other religious specialists. Here are to be found the abstruse philosophies and great sectarian theologies for which India is justly famed. While no single philosophy or belief system predominates at this ‘Sanskritic’ level, the soteriologies, deities, values, and ritual styles associated with the texts enjoy great prestige and constitute a pan-Indian framework for more parochial traditions. The several major linguistic regions of India (roughly comparable to European nations in size) have produced their own distinctive high religious cultures expressed in regional literatures. Coexisting with these textual traditions, and always interacting with them, are the largely unsystematized local traditions of India’s mostly rural masses.
Underlying the diversity of these traditions are certain widely shared concepts and themes that impart some unity to an otherwise fragmented picture. One such concept is that of the soul’s rebirth after death. Associated with rebirth is the concept of karma, the idea that one’s destiny in this and future lives is influenced by one’s actions. The idea of the liberation (moksa) of the soul from the cycle of transmigration, the cycle seen as a concatenation of karmic effects, is the common goal of all Hindu soteriologies. Asceticism is not a universal value among these traditions, but the world-renouncer—the spiritually disciplined ascetic who achieves liberation by inwardly attaining what is regarded as the changeless, and thus deathless, true self—commands nearly universal respect.
The worship of deities, seen as powerful beings who can respond to supplications with both worldly boons and help in achieving salvation, is central to most Hindu traditions. Deities in great profusion populate the Hindu world; some are figures of subcontinental renown whose attributes and deeds are celebrated in well known texts; others are regional or local figures. At the apex of a subcontinental pantheon are the male deities Brahmā, Vişņu and Śiva together with their goddess-consorts. Brahmā, the creator of the world, is rarely worshipped, but Vişņu and Śiva, presiding over the preservation and destruction of the world respectively, are the foci of two predominant sectarian traditions: the vaisnavas (worshippers of Vişņu) and śaivas (worshippers of Śiva). Vişņu periodically appears in the world in the form of avatāras, (descents), of which the best known are Rāma and Krşņa. Śiva, usually worshipped in the form of the phallic linga, is a paradoxical figure whose character combines asceticism and eroticism, and who is associated with creative energy as well as destruction. Hindu goddesses, whose worshippers are often called śāktas, are viewed as embodiments of Śakti, divine energy, which underlies fertility and abundance but is also manifested as disease, destruction and death.
Religious symbols express and support crucial features of social rank in Hindu society. The varna system, the ancient idealized scheme of four ranked classes—Brāhmans (priests), Kşatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaiśyas (husbandmen and traders) and Śūdras (servants)—is sanctioned in religious texts and focuses on the relationship between Brāhmans and Kşatriyas as performers and sponsors, respectively, of sacrificial rites. Contrasting with the all-India varna system are regional and local hierarchies of *castes (known as jātk in Indic languages); these local ranking systems are at least partly ordered on a continuum of ritual *pollution and purity, with the Brāhman, seen as a mediator between the human and divine worlds, at the system’s top, and the polluted ‘untouchable’ at its nadir. The concepts of transmigration and karma are sometimes treated as a †theodicy of rank, with one’s position in the hierarchy of beings in the world (of which the human social hierarchy is only a part) interpreted as an outcome of one’s actions in previous existences.
The degree to which Hinduism corresponds to any social or political reality is a hotly contested matter. Common themes and a web of historical connections are sufficient to justify the idea that Hinduism is a cultural entity of some sort. The idea of Hindus constituting an actual confessional community is a purely modern concept and meshes poorly with the highly fissured traditional religious landscape of South Asia. Hindu nationalists, however, vigorously promote the notion that Hindus constitute the ‘majority community’ of the Republic of India.
