suchandra 1 Report post Posted August 19, 2008 Who Invented Hinduism? http://sahoo.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/who-invented-hinduism/ August 19, 2008 at 6:38 am · Filed under Identity, Culture and Society, Religion Hinduism, I had thought, is a very old religion. To my disbelief, it is actually not. Many have claimed that Hinduism is a colonial construction/invention and was non-existent before the colonial times. W.C. Smith, who is identified as the pioneer, cites the year 1829 before which “Hindooism” did not exist. As John Hawley (1991) writes, “Hinduism – the word perhaps the reality too – was born in the nineteenth century, a notoriously illegitimate child. The father was middle class and the British, and the mother, of course, was India”. Similarly Brian Smith (1989) has argued that “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 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”. The question however is if Hinduism is an illegitimate invention of colonialism, what was it called before the British gave it this name? Contrary to the above claims Many argue that variants of the word Hindu were existent in Persian and vernacular Indian languages long before nineteen the century. The religious sense also coexisted and overlapped with an ethnic and geographical sense. It is commonly agreed that the word Hindu is derived from the name “Sindhu” to refer to the inhabitants of the lands near and to the east of the Indus. If the word “Hindu” had a purely geographical sense up until the nineteenth century, then why were the foreign Muslims, who permanently settled in India, or at least their descendants born in India, not called Hindus? Heinrich von Stietencron answers this by insisting that the Muslim rulers persistently maintained a foreign self-identity for generations, while the Hindus, i.e. native Indians, just as persistently maintained a separate, indigenous identity. Addressing some of these contentious and controversial issues, David N. Lorenzen argues that the claim that Hinduism was invented or constructed by European colonizers, mostly British, sometime after 1800 is false. The evidence instead suggests that a Hindu religion theologically and devotionally grounded in texts such as the Bhagabad-gitas, the Puranas, and philosophical commentaries of six darshanas gradually acquired a much sharper self-conscious identity through the rivalry between Muslims and Hindus in the period between 1200 and 1500, and was firmly established firmly before 1800. who-invented-hinduism hindu-hinduism-hindutva Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
