Hinduism: The World's Oldest Living Family of Traditions

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How the Sacred Texts Were Written. Companion pieces: Adi Shankara: The Non-Dual Reality of Advaita Vedanta, Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart, Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places, If I Was Born in India, and the Religions long reads on Buddhism and on Jainism and Sikhism.

In 1966 the Supreme Court of India faced an awkward question. A group of followers of the Swaminarayan movement in Gujarat argued that they were not Hindus, so a law opening Hindu temples to all castes did not apply to their temples. To rule, the judges first had to say what a Hindu is. They found it hard, perhaps impossible, to define the religion at all: it has no single founder, no single book that all accept as final, no one creed, no central authority. Even so, they ruled that the Swaminarayan followers were Hindus after all.

Sixty years later, the same puzzle survives in a survey. When the Pew Research Center interviewed almost 30,000 Indian adults between November 2019 and March 2020, it asked Hindus which god they felt closest to. Shiva came first (44 percent), then Hanuman (35 percent) and Ganesha (32 percent). Yet 84 percent of Hindus named more than one god or said they had many, and the most common view, held by 61 percent, was that there is one God with many manifestations.

Many gods and one God, many paths and one goal: that tension is not a confusion inside Hinduism. For many Hindus it is the point. This long read follows the tradition from the cities of the Indus to the hymns of the Vedas, the forest teachings of the Upanishads, the epics and the Gita, the great devotional movements, the six schools of philosophy, the long argument over caste, the daily life of worship, the medieval and colonial centuries, the global spread of yoga, and the politics of Hindu identity in India today.

A note on approach: this piece describes Hindu traditions as their followers understand them and sets beside that what historians, archaeologists and geneticists have found. Where these differ, both are given, and neither is treated as the last word on the other. Where scholars disagree (on dates, on caste, on the Indus, on modern politics) the main positions are stated, as fairly as possible. Nothing here ranks Hinduism against any other religion. Quotations from scripture come from public-domain translations: Ralph Griffith's Rig Veda (1896), Max Müller's Upanishads (1879, 1884), Georg Bühler's Laws of Manu (1886) and Edwin Arnold's Song Celestial (1885).

In this long read

1. One religion or many? The name and the argument
2. Before the Vedas: the Indus cities (c. 2600–1900 BCE)
3. The Vedas: fire, hymn and sacrifice (c. 1500–500 BCE)
4. The Upanishads: brahman, atman, karma, rebirth and release
5. The epics and the Bhagavad Gita
6. The Puranas, the gods and the rise of devotion
7. The great traditions: Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta
8. The six schools of philosophy, Vedanta and Yoga
9. Caste: scripture, history and the census
10. Caste reformers, Ambedkar and the argument today
11. Living it: the day, the year and a lifetime
12. The medieval centuries (c. 600–1750)
13. The colonial encounter and the reformers (1750–1948)
14. The diaspora and the global life of yoga
15. Hindu nationalism and its critics
16. Hinduism today and its open questions

Part 1 — One religion or many? The name and the argument

The word "Hindu" was not originally a religious word, and it was not originally an Indian one. It comes from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the Indus river. Persian speakers, who pronounced an initial s as h, turned it into Hindu, and the inscriptions of the Achaemenid king Darius I list Hi(n)dush as a province of his empire: the land beyond the Indus. For centuries "Hindu" meant roughly "Indian", a geographical label used by outsiders.

When did it become a religious label? Scholars disagree, and the disagreement matters.

One view holds that "Hinduism" as a single religion is largely a modern construction. The historian D. N. Jha wrote that no Indians described themselves as Hindus before the fourteenth century, and that the British "reimported" the word as a reified system called Hinduism. On this account, colonial officials, census-takers and Orientalist scholars, used to religions with one book and one church, grouped hundreds of distinct cults, sects and local practices under a single heading, and Indians then came to see themselves through it.

Another view, argued by David Lorenzen in a well-known 1999 essay, "Who Invented Hinduism?", holds that a shared Hindu identity is centuries older than British rule. Texts from the late medieval period already set Hindu against Turk (meaning Muslim). The poet Vidyapati, writing around 1380, describes Hindus and Turks living side by side. Kabir, Tulsidas and the Marathi saint Eknath contrasted Hindu dharma with Turaka dharma. People who worshipped Shiva and people who worshipped Vishnu, on this view, knew they belonged to a common world of gods, texts, pilgrimage places and rites, even when they argued fiercely with each other.

"Hinduism" may be a modern word, but the family it names is not modern. The argument is about how tightly its members were ever bound together.

Many Hindus prefer an older name for what they practise: Sanatana Dharma, often translated "the eternal way" or "the eternal order". Dharma itself is a word with no exact English equivalent. It means the order that holds the world together, and also the duty, ethics and right conduct by which a person upholds that order. To call a tradition a dharma is to say that it is less a set of beliefs than a way of living in accord with how things are.

What holds the family together?

If there is no single creed, what makes something Hindu? Scholars and Hindu thinkers have offered several answers, none accepted by all:

Indian law, for its own purposes, takes a very wide view. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 applies to Hindus "in any of its forms or developments", including Lingayats and members of reform movements such as the Arya Samaj, and also to Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. Many Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs object to being grouped in this way, a debate the Jainism and Sikhism long read takes up.

The most useful picture may be the one the 1966 court reached for: not a single religion with one essence, but a family of traditions that share ancestors, a vocabulary and many habits, and that recognise one another, sometimes affectionately and sometimes in argument, as kin.

Part 2 — Before the Vedas: the Indus cities (c. 2600–1900 BCE)

Long before any Vedic hymn, the plains of the Indus and its neighbouring rivers held one of the world's first urban civilisations. At its height, roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE, the Indus or Harappan civilisation spread across hundreds of sites in what are now Pakistan and northwest India. Its largest cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, may each have held tens of thousands of people.

These were carefully planned places, with streets laid out in grids, brick drains and standard weights. At Mohenjo-daro a large brick tank with steps leading down into it, the so-called Great Bath, has fascinated visitors since it was excavated.

What is known and what isn't

The honest summary is that we know a great deal about how these people lived and almost nothing certain about what they believed, because their script has never been deciphered. Many short inscriptions survive, mostly on small stone seals, but no bilingual text like Egypt's Rosetta Stone has been found.

The horned seated figure is the most famous case. Soon after the seal was found at Mohenjo-daro in 1928–29, the archaeologist John Marshall suggested it showed a "proto-Shiva", a three-faced lord of animals sitting in a yogic posture. The idea is attractive and widely repeated, but it is a reading of an image without words. Other scholars have read the same figure as a goddess, a buffalo-man or a different deity entirely, and most now treat every identification as speculation. It is fair to say that some later Hindu practices, such as ritual bathing, may have deep roots in the region. It is not established that they come from the Indus cities.

The migration debate

What happened between the Indus cities and the Vedic hymns is one of the most charged questions in South Asian history.

For over a century, most linguists have argued that the language of the Vedas, an early form of Sanskrit, belongs to the Indo-European family, and that its speakers, or at least their language, came into the subcontinent from the northwest during the second millennium BCE. The old idea of a violent "Aryan invasion" that destroyed the Indus cities has been abandoned: the cities declined for other reasons, and the evidence points to gradual migration and mixing rather than conquest.

Many Indian writers reject even the migration model. They argue for an indigenous origin: that Vedic culture developed within India, perhaps among the descendants of the Indus people themselves, and that the migration theory was a colonial idea used to cast Indian civilisation as borrowed.

Ancient DNA has added a new kind of evidence. In 2019 two large studies, one in Science sequencing 523 ancient individuals and one in Cell reporting the first genome from an Indus-period individual at Rakhigarhi in Haryana, found that the Indus-period people sampled descended mainly from ancient groups related to early Iranian hunter-gatherers and to South Asian hunter-gatherers, with little or no ancestry from the steppe herders of Central Asia. That steppe ancestry appears in northern South Asia after about 2000 BCE, and the Science authors linked it to the spread of Indo-Iranian languages.

The genetic studies agree on one point that both sides of the old argument can accept: the people of the Indus cities were ancestors of today's South Asians, and the steppe component arrived later and mixed in.

Proponents of indigenous origin point out that genes are not languages and that one genome from Rakhigarhi is a small sample. Most geneticists and linguists, for their part, read the evidence as supporting a migration of steppe-related people in the second millennium BCE. The debate continues, though the space for the strongest versions of either side has narrowed.

Part 3 — The Vedas: fire, hymn and sacrifice (c. 1500–500 BCE)

The Rig Veda is the oldest text in Vedic Sanskrit, among the oldest in any Indo-European language, and verses from it are still recited at Hindu weddings and rites today. It holds 1,028 hymns in about 10,600 verses, arranged in ten books. Most scholars, working from its language, date the bulk of the hymns to roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, though the dating is debated, and place their composition in the northwest of the subcontinent. Books 2 to 7, each linked to a family of poet-seers, are the oldest; books 1 and 10 are the youngest.

Hindu tradition does not regard the Vedas as human compositions. They are shruti, "what is heard": eternal truth perceived by the ancient seers, the rishis. Everything later, including the epics, the law books and the Puranas, is smriti, "what is remembered", authoritative but secondary.

Four Vedas, four layers

There are four Vedas. Each grew in layers over many centuries.

Around each collection of hymns (samhita) grew prose texts explaining the rites (the Brahmanas), "forest" texts with more speculative interpretations (the Aranyakas), and finally the philosophical Upanishads, the subject of the next part.

A religion of fire

At the centre of Vedic religion was the yajna, the sacrifice: offerings of clarified butter, grain, milk and the juice of the mysterious soma plant, poured into a sacred fire while priests chanted. The fire god Agni carried the offerings to the gods. Indra, the storm god who slays the serpent Vritra and releases the waters, is the most frequently mentioned god, with about 250 hymns of his own. Varuna guards the cosmic order, rita. An entire book of the Rig Veda, the ninth, is devoted to Soma, both the plant and the god.

The hymns are not only praise. They contain some of the earliest recorded philosophical questioning anywhere. One famous verse insists that the many gods are names for something single:

"To what is One, sages give many a title: they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan." — Rig Veda 1.164.46 (Griffith)

And the creation hymn of the tenth book, the Nasadiya Sukta, ends not with an answer but with a doubt:

"Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world's production." — Rig Veda 10.129.6 (Griffith)

Its last line wonders whether even the highest being, who oversees the world "in highest heaven", knows how it began: "he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not."

Memory as scripture

For more than two thousand years the Vedas were carried almost entirely by memory. Brahmin families developed recitation methods of extraordinary precision, chanting the text word by word, in overlapping pairs and in complex patterned sequences, so that any error would show. The oldest surviving written manuscripts date only to around 1040 CE. In 2007 UNESCO added thirty Rig Veda manuscripts held in Pune to its Memory of the World register. (The library's How the Sacred Texts Were Written tells this story in more detail.)

The Vedic world was also a social world. Its priests, the Brahmins, held the knowledge of the rites. One late hymn, which will matter a great deal in Part 9, describes society as the body of a cosmic person, Purusha, offered in the primordial sacrifice.

Part 4 — The Upanishads: brahman, atman, karma, rebirth and release

Somewhere in the first millennium BCE, the questions of Indian religion turned inward. The Upanishads, whose name is often explained as "sitting down near" a teacher, are dialogues, stories and riddles in which teachers, kings, wives and students ask what lies behind the ritual and behind the world itself.

More than two hundred texts carry the name, and a traditional list gives 108, but about a dozen are regarded as the principal ones. The oldest, the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya, are dated by the scholar Patrick Olivelle to around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, give or take a century, before the time of the Buddha.

Five words that changed Indian thought

"Thou art that"

The most famous teaching comes in the Chandogya Upanishad. The young Shvetaketu returns home after twelve years of study, proud of his learning. His father, Uddalaka, asks whether he has learned the one thing by which everything else is known. He has not. So his father teaches him with objects from the kitchen.

He asks his son to put salt in a cup of water overnight and bring it back in the morning. The salt has dissolved; Shvetaketu cannot find it. His father has him taste the water from the top, the middle and the bottom. It is salty everywhere. In the same way, the father says, the true reality cannot be seen in the body, "but there indeed it is". Then comes the refrain repeated through the chapter:

"It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." — Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 and 6.13 (Müller)

In Sanskrit, the last words are tat tvam asi, "you are that". How to read them became the central question of later Hindu philosophy. Does it mean the self is identical with ultimate reality, as Adi Shankara taught (the library's piece on him gives his answer)? Or that the self is a part, a mode or a servant of a God who is always greater, as Ramanuja and Madhva later argued? Part 8 returns to this argument.

Karma and what follows death

The early Upanishads tie what happens after death to what a person does and desires in life. The Chandogya puts it in terms of will:

"Now man is a creature of will. According to what his will is in this world, so will he be when he has departed this life." — Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.1 (Müller)

Karma here is not a cosmic punishment system run by a judge. It is closer to a law of moral cause and effect: desire shapes action, and action shapes what a person becomes, in this life and the next.

The Katha Upanishad frames the question as a story. A boy named Nachiketas is sent, in his father's anger, to Death himself. Death, impressed by the boy, offers him three wishes, and the third is to know what happens to a person after dying. Death tries to buy him off with wealth and long life; the boy refuses. So Death teaches him:

"The knowing (Self) is not born, it dies not; it sprang from nothing, nothing sprang from it." — Katha Upanishad 1.2.18 (Müller)

The same text offers one of the most enduring images of the inner life: the self as the master of a chariot, the body as the chariot, the intellect as the charioteer, the mind as the reins and the senses as horses (1.3.3–4). The person whose mind holds the reins steady "reaches indeed that place; from whence he is not born again."

A world of renouncers

The Upanishads belong to a time of great religious ferment along the Ganges. Wandering ascetics, the shramanas, left home to seek release through austerity and meditation. From this world came the Buddha and Mahavira, the great teacher of the Jains (see the Buddhism and the Jainism and Sikhism long reads). Karma, rebirth and liberation became the shared problem of all of these movements, which answered it in different ways. Hindu thought absorbed the renouncer's ideal, and later codified it as the last of four stages of life (Part 11).

The Upanishads did not abolish the old rituals. They asked what the rituals were for, and answered: for knowing the self.

Part 5 — The epics and the Bhagavad Gita

If the Upanishads are the philosophy of Hinduism, the two great epics are its memory, its theatre and its moral education. Hundreds of millions of people who will never read a Vedic hymn know their stories from childhood.

The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is among the longest poems ever composed: its longest versions run to more than 100,000 verses in eighteen books. Tradition ascribes it to the sage Vyasa, who also appears in it as a character. Scholars see it as the work of many hands over centuries, with the bulk compiled between roughly the third century BCE and the third or fourth century CE.

Its core story is a war of succession between two sets of cousins, the five Pandava brothers and the hundred Kauravas, culminating in an eighteen-day battle at Kurukshetra that destroys almost everyone. Around that story the epic gathers genealogies, philosophy, law, and dozens of embedded tales. Its central concern is dharma, and especially how hard it is to know: good people do terrible things, the virtuous lose, and the rules conflict.

The Ramayana

The Ramayana, ascribed to the poet Valmiki, has about 24,000 verses in seven books. The scholar Robert Goldman dates its oral core to roughly 750–500 BCE, with later layers added for centuries afterwards. Prince Rama, heir to the throne of Ayodhya, is exiled to the forest for fourteen years with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana. Sita is abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka; Rama, helped by the monkey hero Hanuman, rescues her and returns to rule.

Rama became the model of the righteous king and Sita of the faithful wife, and both models have been honoured and argued over. The epic has been retold in dozens of languages: in Tamil by Kamban in the 12th century, in Hindi by Tulsidas in the late 16th century (his Ramcharitmanas is one of the most widely recited religious texts in northern India), and across Southeast Asia, in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and beyond. Some versions, especially in the south, tell the story from other angles, including sympathy for Ravana or for Sita, whose later abandonment by Rama has troubled readers for centuries.

The Gita: a conversation on a battlefield

The Bhagavad Gita, "the Song of the Lord", is a short section of the Mahabharata: 700 verses in eighteen chapters, set in the sixth book. As the armies face each other, the warrior Arjuna sees his teachers, cousins and friends on the other side and refuses to fight. His charioteer, Krishna, answers him, and by the end reveals himself as God.

Krishna's first argument is about the self. The true self cannot be killed:

"Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; / Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!" — Bhagavad Gita 2.20 (Arnold)

His second is about action. Arjuna must do his duty, but without attachment to the result:

"Let right deeds be / Thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them." — Bhagavad Gita 2.47 (Arnold)

The Gita weaves together three paths, or yogas, that later Hindus would treat as complementary routes to liberation:

In its later chapters the Gita turns increasingly to devotion. Krishna promises that God takes visible shape "from age to age" whenever righteousness declines (4.7–8), that the simplest offering made with love is accepted (9.26), and finally asks Arjuna to give up every other duty and take refuge in him alone:

"Make Me thy single refuge! I will free / Thy soul from all its sins!" — Bhagavad Gita 18.66 (Arnold)

How should a scripture set on a battlefield be read? Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each wrote commentaries that read it through their own philosophies. In the 20th century the nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak read it as a call to righteous action against British rule. Gandhi, who knew the closing verses of its second chapter by heart and kept them as a companion through his campaigns, read the battle, as many modern Hindus do, as an allegory of the struggle within every person, and drew from it a gospel of non-violent, selfless action. Both readings have large followings. The text supports more than one.

Part 6 — The Puranas, the gods and the rise of devotion

The gods most Hindus worship today, Vishnu and his avatars, Shiva and his family, and the Goddess in her many forms, take their full shape not in the Vedas but in a vast later literature called the Puranas, "ancient tales".

Tradition counts eighteen great Puranas (Mahapuranas) and eighteen lesser ones, together more than 400,000 verses, attributed to Vyasa. Scholars think they were composed by many authors, with first versions from roughly the third to the tenth centuries CE and continual revision after that; manuscripts of the same Purana can differ greatly. Each traditionally covers five topics: the creation of the universe, its dissolution and re-creation, the genealogies of gods and sages, the great cosmic ages, and the histories of royal dynasties. Most centre on Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess.

The gods in brief

Vishnu preserves the universe. When order is threatened, he descends in an avatar (literally "descent"). A common list gives ten, from a fish and a tortoise to Rama and Krishna and the future Kalki, though the lists vary.

Shiva is the great ascetic and the dancer whose dance creates and destroys worlds, worshipped above all in the form of the linga, an aniconic pillar. His consort is Parvati; their sons are the elephant-headed Ganesha, remover of obstacles, and Skanda, also called Murugan, especially loved in Tamil Nadu.

Devi, the Goddess, appears as gentle Parvati and Lakshmi, as learned Sarasvati, and as the warrior Durga and the fierce Kali. In Shakta theology she is not merely a consort but supreme reality itself.

The Puranas also tell of a trinity of creator Brahma, preserver Vishnu and destroyer Shiva, the trimurti. It is often presented to outsiders as the heart of Hinduism, but in practice relatively few temples are dedicated to Brahma, and most Hindus treat either Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess as the highest God, with the others as aspects or companions.

Temples and images

The Vedic religion had no temples; its fires were built and taken down. The age of the Puranas is also the age of the temple: from the Gupta period onwards, stone temples rose across India, becoming the homes of the gods in their images (murti). For the worshipper, the image is not a mere symbol. After rites of consecration, the deity is believed to be present in it, to be woken, bathed, dressed, fed and put to sleep each day, and above all to be seen. The central act of temple worship is darshan, seeing the god and being seen in return.

Bhakti: the religion of love

From around the sixth century CE, in the Tamil country, wandering poet-saints began to sing ecstatic hymns to Vishnu and Shiva in the people's own language rather than Sanskrit. The Vaishnava Alvars (traditionally twelve) and the Shaiva Nayanars (traditionally sixty-three) came from many social backgrounds, including the lowest castes, and some were women. Their message was that God is reached through love, bhakti, more than through ritual, learning or birth.

The movement spread north over the following centuries and reached its height between the 15th and 17th centuries:

The Bhagavata Purana, perhaps the most beloved of the Puranas, gave this devotion its great story: the childhood of Krishna in the cowherd village of Vrindavan, the butter-thief and flute-player loved by the cowherd women, whose longing for him became the model of the soul's longing for God.

In bhakti, the question is no longer how to escape the world, but how to love God within it.

Was bhakti a social revolution, a protest against caste and priestly power? Its poets often said so, and it opened religious life to women and low-caste people in ways Sanskrit ritual had not. But many historians point out that it mostly left the social order intact, and they debate how far it was a response to the arrival of Islam, as was once commonly said. It is perhaps best seen as a revolution of the heart that changed religion more than it changed society.

Part 7 — The great traditions: Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta

Hinduism has no "denominations" in the Western sense, with membership rolls and separate churches. But most Hindus belong, by family or by choice, to one of several broad streams, each with its own theology, scriptures, temples, teachers and festivals.

These are not sealed boxes. A Vaishnava family may visit a Shiva temple on the night of Maha Shivaratri; almost everyone honours Ganesha before beginning anything; a Shakta may keep a picture of Krishna. The Pew survey found that Hindus' favourite deities cut across these lines. Regionally, too, the picture changes: Shiva and Murugan loom large in Tamil Nadu, Durga in Bengal, Ganesha in Maharashtra, Krishna in Gujarat and the Braj country, Jagannath in Odisha.

Beneath all of these lies what scholars call village Hinduism: local goddesses who guard against smallpox or drought, deified heroes, serpent shrines, sacred trees and ancestor rites, often with priests who are not Brahmins. For many rural Hindus these local powers are the gods of daily life, and the great Puranic deities are more distant.

Most Hindus do not experience their religion as a choice between gods, but as a household of them, with one at the head of the table.

Some groups at the edges of the family debate whether they belong inside it. Many Lingayats in Karnataka argue that Basava founded a separate religion. The Swaminarayan followers in the 1966 case argued that they were distinct, and lost. Movements such as the Arya Samaj (Part 13) reject image worship altogether while insisting they are the purest Hindus. The family is large enough to contain its own arguments about who belongs.

Part 8 — The six schools of philosophy, Vedanta and Yoga

Classical Indian philosophy was organised into darshanas, a word that means "viewpoints" or "ways of seeing". Those schools that accepted the authority of the Vedas were called astika, orthodox; Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Charvaka school, which did not, were nastika. Six orthodox schools came to be counted, usually in pairs.

Yoga before yoga mats

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are 195 short aphorisms. They cannot be dated exactly; most scholars place them in the first centuries CE, and no later than the fifth century. The second sutra defines the subject: yogas chitta vritti nirodhah, yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind. Patanjali's "eight limbs" run from ethical restraints and observances, through posture, breath control and withdrawal of the senses, to concentration, meditation and absorption (samadhi).

Philosophically, classical Yoga rests on Samkhya's dualism. Its goal is not health or flexibility but kaivalya, the isolation of pure consciousness from the restless world of matter. Patanjali devotes only three short sutras to asana, a word that in premodern usage generally meant a seat for meditation. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, the modern focus on bodily postures is "essentially a modern Western phenomenon" (Part 14 follows that story).

Vedanta: three answers to one question

Vedanta, "the end of the Veda", became the most influential school, and its internal argument is the one that still shapes Hindu theology. All its thinkers commented on the same three foundations: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and the Gita. They disagreed about what those texts say about the relation between the self, the world and God.

The library's piece on Adi Shankara sets out his rope-and-snake argument. Ramanuja's objection was, in essence, that a God who is pure undifferentiated consciousness cannot be loved, and that the Upanishads also describe Brahman as having infinite good qualities. Madhva went further: worship needs a worshipper and a worshipped, eternally two. For the many devotional traditions that follow Ramanuja, Madhva or Chaitanya, liberation is not dissolving into the absolute but an eternal relationship of love with a personal God.

The argument between Shankara and Ramanuja is one of the great debates of world philosophy: is the deepest truth that you are God, or that you belong to God?

Modern Hindu thought, especially the version that reached the West through Vivekananda, drew heavily on Advaita, so that many outsiders take non-dualism to be "the" Hindu philosophy. Among practising Hindus, devotional theologies that keep God and the soul distinct are at least as widespread.

Part 9 — Caste: scripture, history and the census

No subject about Hinduism is argued over more fiercely, inside India and outside it, than caste. It is worth separating several things that are often run together: what the texts say, how caste actually worked in history, what British rule did to it, and how it lives today.

Two words, two systems

Varna ("colour" or "class") is the textual scheme of four orders: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), Vaishyas (traders and farmers) and Shudras (labourers and servants). Jati ("birth") refers to the thousands of endogamous groups, often linked to a traditional occupation and region, into which people are actually born and within which they have traditionally married. There are four varnas and thousands of jatis; the historian A. L. Basham estimated "3,000 or more castes" in modern India. Outside the four varnas altogether were the groups treated as "untouchable", whose work (handling the dead, leather, waste) was considered polluting. Many of them today call themselves Dalits, "the broken" or "the oppressed".

What the texts say

The first textual statement of the fourfold scheme is in the late Rig Vedic hymn to the cosmic person:

"The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. / His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced." — Rig Veda 10.90.12 (Griffith)

The law books (dharma-shastras), of which the Manusmriti is the most famous, turned this into a system of duties. Manu repeats the image of the four orders coming from the creator's mouth, arms, thighs and feet (1.31), assigns the Brahmins teaching and sacrifice, and says the creator prescribed to the Shudra "one occupation only... to serve meekly even these (other) three castes" (1.91). Elsewhere it lays down harsh penalties tied to caste and restrictions on women.

Hindu responses to these texts vary widely. Some traditionalists regard varna as a divinely ordained division of labour. Many modern Hindu thinkers, including Vivekananda and Gandhi, argued that varna was originally a matter of character and aptitude, not birth, and that hereditary caste and untouchability were corruptions. The Gita itself says that Krishna created the four orders according to qualities and actions (4.13), a line read in both directions. Many reformers, and many Dalit thinkers, reject the authority of these passages entirely.

How old is caste as we know it?

Here historians and geneticists have added evidence of their own.

A 2013 genetic study by Priya Moorjani and colleagues found that the two ancestral populations of India mixed widely between about 4,200 and 1,900 years ago, after which mixing even between closely related groups became rare: in the authors' words, the region shifted to one in which mixture "became rare because of a shift to endogamy". In other words, marriage within closed groups, the core of jati, hardened at least 1,900 years ago, long before any European arrived.

At the same time, many historians argue that caste was more fluid in practice than the law books suggest: groups rose and fell, kings of humble origin claimed Kshatriya status, and local hierarchies varied enormously.

What the British did

The most influential modern argument about caste concerns the colonial period. The anthropologist Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), argued that British rule made caste into the defining category of Indian society. Colonial administrators relied on Brahmin pandits and Sanskrit law books to understand Indian custom, codified those texts into law, and above all counted caste.

The decennial census, beginning in the late 19th century, asked every Indian's caste. Herbert Risley, who directed the 1901 census, treated caste as a matter of race and claimed that a caste's social standing could be read from its members' nose shape, theories historians now classify as scientific racism. Because the census recorded and classified caste, groups lobbied officials for more favourable listings. What had been local, negotiated and varied became fixed, written and all-India. Caste was last fully counted in 1931.

Critics of Dirks's argument accept much of this but argue that he overstates it: caste hierarchy, endogamy and untouchability were deeply rooted long before the British, as the genetic and textual evidence shows, and the colonial state hardened an existing system rather than inventing one.

The debate is not only academic. If caste is a colonial artefact, then it is not "really" Hinduism; if it is scriptural, then reforming Hinduism means confronting its texts. That was exactly the argument of the man who did more than anyone to change caste in modern India.

Part 10 — Caste reformers, Ambedkar and the argument today

Protest against caste is as old as caste. The Buddha and Mahavira rejected birth as a measure of worth. Many bhakti saints, from Basava to Kabir and Ravidas, mocked the pride of high-caste priests. Modern reform movements took the argument into politics.

In Maharashtra, Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890), from a gardener caste, opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848 with his wife Savitribai, founded the Satyashodhak Samaj ("Society of Truth-Seekers") in 1873, and in the same year published Gulamgiri (Slavery), which compared caste to American slavery.

Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, into the Mahar caste, then treated as untouchable, and grew up facing its daily humiliations. He went on to earn doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. At Columbia in May 1916, at the age of 25, he read a paper on the origins of caste that went straight to its mechanism:

"Endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to Caste." — B. R. Ambedkar, Castes in India (1916)

"A caste," he wrote, "is an enclosed class."

Back in India, he organised. In 1927 he led thousands of untouchables to drink from the public water tank at Mahad, and on 25 December that year his followers publicly burned a copy of the Manusmriti. In 1930 he led a campaign to enter the Kalaram temple at Nashik.

His conflict with Gandhi is one of the defining arguments of modern India. Gandhi opposed untouchability passionately, called untouchables Harijan, "people of God", and worked to open temples to them, but he defended varna as a non-hierarchical division of duties and opposed treating untouchables as a separate political community. When the British granted untouchables separate electorates in 1932, Gandhi began a fast unto death in prison. Ambedkar, under enormous pressure, signed the Poona Pact on 24 September 1932, giving up separate electorates in exchange for reserved seats. He never forgave the pressure. Many Dalits today regard Gandhi's approach as paternalism; many Gandhians see the Pact as a compromise that kept the national movement united.

In 1936 Ambedkar wrote a speech for a Hindu reform society in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, which argued that caste could not be abolished without destroying belief in the sanctity of the scriptures that upheld it, they withdrew the invitation. He published it himself as Annihilation of Caste. A year earlier, at Yeola, he had announced that although he was born a Hindu, he would not die one.

He chaired the committee that drafted independent India's Constitution, appointed on 29 August 1947. Its Article 17 abolished untouchability and made its practice an offence; other provisions allowed reserved places in legislatures, government jobs and universities for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a system of affirmative action later extended to "Other Backward Classes". He resigned from the cabinet in September 1951 when his Hindu Code Bill, reforming marriage, divorce and inheritance, stalled (it later passed in parts from 1955). On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, he converted to Buddhism with his wife and a vast crowd of followers, often estimated at half a million. He died seven weeks later.

Ambedkar's question to Hinduism was simple and has never gone away: can a religion be reformed if the texts it treats as sacred are part of the problem?

Caste today

Caste remains part of Indian life. In Pew's 2019–20 survey, 98 percent of Indians identified with a caste; Indians as a whole described themselves as 25 percent Scheduled Caste, 9 percent Scheduled Tribe, 35 percent Other Backward Class and about 30 percent General Category (including 4 percent Brahmin). Most said there was not a lot of caste discrimination in India, but large majorities said it was very important to stop people of their community marrying outside their caste: 64 percent for women, 62 percent for men.

Reservations remain contested: supporters see them as overdue redress for millennia of exclusion; critics argue they entrench caste identity or benefit the better-off within eligible groups. That argument is now headed for new data. India's 2027 census, which began its first phase on 1 April 2026, will count every individual's caste for the first time since 1931, after the government decided to include it on 30 April 2025. Supporters, including the economist Ashwini Deshpande, say that without such data policymakers are "flying blind"; opponents argue that counting caste hardens identities and divisions, a view the BJP itself long held before agreeing to the count.

Within Hinduism, attitudes run from orthodox defenders of varna, to reformers who say caste has nothing to do with "true" Hinduism, to Dalit and Ambedkarite thinkers who say the two cannot be separated. All three positions are held by sincere people, and the argument between them is one of the most important religious debates in the world.

Part 11 — Living it: the day, the year and a lifetime

For most Hindus, Hinduism is not first of all a set of doctrines. It is something done: at home, at the temple, at the river, in the kitchen, at births and weddings and funerals.

An ordinary day

In many Hindu homes the day begins at a household shrine, which may be a whole room or a single shelf with a few images and pictures. A typical puja (worship) treats the deity as an honoured guest: the image may be bathed or sprinkled with water, offered flowers, incense and food, and honoured with aarti, the waving of a lit lamp in circles before the god, often while a hymn is sung. The food offered is then received back as prasad, the god's blessed leftovers, and shared. In Pew's survey, most Indian Hindus said they perform puja daily, at home or in a temple.

Other daily acts are smaller. Many households keep a holy basil (tulsi) plant, sacred to Vishnu, and water it each morning. Many recite a mantra, such as the Gayatri, a verse of the Rig Veda (3.62.10) traditionally chanted at dawn. Food rules vary: 44 percent of Indian Hindus told Pew they are vegetarian, and another 33 percent avoid certain meats; 72 percent said a person who eats beef cannot be a Hindu.

A visit to a temple is above all for darshan, seeing the deity. The devotee rings a bell, makes an offering through the priest, receives prasad and a mark on the forehead, and often walks clockwise around the shrine.

The year

The Hindu calendar is lunar-solar, so festival dates move against the Western calendar. Festivals vary by region, but some are celebrated almost everywhere:

Many Hindus also fast on particular weekdays or lunar days, and women in many regions keep vows (vrata) for the welfare of husbands, children or households.

A lifetime

Classical texts describe a series of life-cycle rites, the samskaras, from rites before birth through a child's naming and first solid food, to the sacred-thread ceremony (upanayana) that traditionally began a high-caste boy's study of the Veda, to marriage and death. The wedding, with the couple walking around a sacred fire, and the funeral are the two that almost every Hindu family still performs. Cremation is the norm; the eldest son traditionally lights the pyre, and the ashes are given to a river, ideally the Ganges.

The classical texts also describe four aims of life (purusharthas): dharma (righteousness), artha (prosperity), kama (pleasure and love) and moksha (liberation). They describe four ideal stages of life (ashramas): student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer. Few people follow the stages literally, but the idea that each part of life has its own duty, and that worldly success and spiritual release both have a place, runs deep.

Rivers and journeys

Hindu sacred geography covers the subcontinent: holy rivers and sacred cities, the "four abodes" (char dham), the great shrines of Shiva's light (jyotirlingas), the seats of the Goddess (shakti pithas). Varanasi on the Ganges is the most famous; to die there, many believe, is to be liberated. In Pew's survey, 81 percent of Indian Hindus said the Ganges has the power to purify.

The Kumbh Mela, a bathing festival that rotates among four river sites, is the largest religious gathering on earth. For the 2025 Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj (13 January to 26 February), officials claimed more than 660 million visits, a figure some observers called implausible, and a crowd crush on 29 January killed at least 30 people by the official count. The library's piece on pilgrimage tells that story.

Hindu practice asks less "what do you believe?" than "what do you do, for whom, and when?"

Part 12 — The medieval centuries (c. 600–1750)

The thousand years after the Gupta empire saw Hinduism take much of its present form: great temple-building dynasties in the south, the systematising of Vedanta, the spread of bhakti, and a long and complicated encounter with Islam.

Temples, kings and conquest

In the south, dynasties such as the Pallavas and Cholas built temples that were also the centres of towns, economies and royal power, and great Shaiva and Vaishnava institutions grew around them.

From the 11th century, Turkic and Afghan armies raided and then conquered the north. The Delhi Sultanate was founded in 1206, the Mughals arrived in 1526, and for much of the next five centuries most of northern India was ruled by Muslim dynasties. How to describe this period is today a matter of fierce public dispute.

The historian Richard Eaton, in a widely cited 2000 study of temple desecration, argued that the destruction of temples by Indo-Muslim rulers was real but more limited and more political than often claimed: conquerors targeted royal temples that embodied the sovereignty of defeated Hindu kings, much as Hindu kings had sometimes carried off or destroyed the temple images of their own rivals. Critics counter that his count rests only on cases he considered firmly documented and therefore understates the scale, and that the destruction of temples such as Somnath and, under Aurangzeb, the Vishvanath temple in Varanasi in 1669, left deep wounds in Hindu memory. Both points can be true: the destruction was real and remembered, and its causes were often political as well as religious.

The same centuries also produced deep exchange. From 1575 Akbar's "House of Worship" at Fatehpur Sikri hosted debates among Sunni, Shia and Sufi Muslims, Hindus of Shaiva and Vaishnava schools, Jains, Parsis, Jews and Jesuits. His great-grandson Dara Shukoh translated fifty Upanishads into Persian in 1656, a translation that, rendered into Latin in 1801–02, introduced them to European philosophers such as Schopenhauer. Bhakti poets drew followers across religious lines; Sufi shrines drew Hindu pilgrims; Kabir sang to both. In the Punjab, Guru Nanak founded a new tradition that drew on both and belonged to neither (see the Jainism and Sikhism long read).

Aurangzeb's reign remains the most argued over. Many historians see in it a turn away from Akbar's pluralism: the reimposition of the jizya in 1679, the destruction of prominent temples, and the execution of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675. Others, such as Audrey Truschke, argue that his policies were driven as much by politics and finance as by religion, that he also endowed some temples, and that the share of Hindus among his senior officials actually rose.

Survival and renewal

In the south, the Vijayanagara empire, founded in 1336, became a great patron of Hindu temples; its ruined capital near Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the west, the Marathas under Shivaji (17th century) built a state that later dominated much of India and is celebrated today as a Hindu revival. Throughout, Brahmin scholarship, temple ritual, pilgrimage and village religion carried on, often under Muslim rulers who governed through Hindu officials and left local religion largely alone.

The medieval centuries were neither a simple story of persecution nor one of harmony. They were both, at different times, in different places, under different rulers.

Part 13 — The colonial encounter and the reformers (1750–1948)

The British East India Company took control of Bengal after 1757 and, over the next century, of most of India. British rule brought Hindus face to face with Christian missionaries, European science and scholarship, and a colonial state that both studied Hinduism and passed judgement on it. The response was a century of reform movements that reshaped how Hindus understood their own religion.

Ram Mohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj

Ram Mohan Roy (c. 1772–1833), a Bengali Brahmin scholar, argued that the Upanishads taught the worship of one formless God and that image worship and many customs were later corruptions. He founded a society for reasoned worship in 1814 and the Brahmo Sabha, later Brahmo Samaj, in 1828. He campaigned against sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, which the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 outlawed, and travelled to Britain in 1830 to defend the ban. He died near Bristol in 1833.

Dayananda and the Arya Samaj

Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in Bombay on 10 April 1875. His was a different reform: back to the Vedas, which he held to be infallible, and away from everything he considered later accretion, including image worship, which is strictly prohibited in the Samaj; in the early 20th century it also campaigned against caste discrimination. The Samaj developed shuddhi ("purification") ceremonies to bring converts to Islam and Christianity back into Hinduism. Its ten principles were settled in Lahore in 1877. Dayananda died in 1883.

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda

Ramakrishna (died 1886), a priest at a Kali temple near Calcutta, was a mystic who reported experiencing God through Kali, through Krishna, through Advaita meditation and even through Islamic and Christian practice, and concluded that all religions lead to the same goal. His disciple Narendranath Datta, who took the name Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), carried that message to the world. On 11 September 1893 he addressed the opening of the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago:

"Sisters and Brothers of America... We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true." — Swami Vivekananda, Chicago, 11 September 1893

Vivekananda presented Hinduism, and Advaita Vedanta in particular, as a rational, universal and tolerant spirituality. He founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894 and the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897, combining monastic life with social service. His birthday is National Youth Day in India. His vision of Hinduism as the "mother of religions" profoundly influenced both Indian nationalism and the Western view of Hinduism. Some scholars argue that it also flattened the tradition's diversity into a single philosophy shaped for Western audiences, a criticism his admirers reject.

Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (born 2 October 1869 in Porbandar) drew his politics from religion. From the Gita he took the ideal of selfless action; from a devout Vaishnava home and from Jain teaching, the centrality of non-violence (ahimsa); from his friend the Jain teacher Rajchandra, whom he called his refuge in moments of spiritual crisis, a model of the religious life. His nonviolent campaigns against British rule were framed as satyagraha, "holding to truth". His ideal of a just society, Ram Rajya, borrowed the name of Rama's kingdom.

He was a devout Hindu who prayed with Muslims and Christians, opposed untouchability while defending varna, and fought the partition of India along religious lines. On 30 January 1948, at an interfaith prayer meeting in New Delhi, he was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune who had been a member of the RSS. (Godse said he had left it; a government commission later found that the RSS "as such" was not responsible for the murder.) Gandhi's Hinduism and Godse's are still two poles of the argument in Part 15.

The reformers disagreed about almost everything except one thing: that Hinduism had to answer the modern world, and that it could.

Part 14 — The diaspora and the global life of yoga

According to the Pew Research Center's 2025 global estimates, 95 percent of the world's Hindus live in India, and 97 percent live in the world's two Hindu-majority countries, India and Nepal. But the remaining few percent have carried Hinduism to every continent, and its ideas and practices have travelled further still.

Indenture: the first great migration

After Britain abolished slavery, plantation colonies needed labour. From 1834, when a ship carried Indian labourers to Mauritius, until the system ended in 1917, about 1.6 million Indians, most of them Hindus, went abroad as indentured workers: to Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Suriname, Fiji, Natal in South Africa, Jamaica and elsewhere. They kept their festivals, their Ramayana recitations and their temples under harsh labour contracts. Today Hindus form large communities in all of these places, with forms of Hinduism shaped by the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh from which most came, and by a century of separation from India.

The second wave

After the Second World War, and especially after the United States and Canada opened immigration in the 1960s, a second wave of mostly professional migrants built temples, cultural centres and student associations across the English-speaking world.

In Harrow, in northwest London, more than a quarter of residents (25.8 percent) identified as Hindu in 2021. Diaspora Hinduism has often been more organised than village Hinduism, more focused on temples as community centres, and more concerned with explaining itself to neighbours and to children growing up as a minority.

Hinduism as a missionary movement

Hinduism has rarely sought converts, but some modern movements do. ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, was founded in New York on 13 July 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who had arrived the year before. Its saffron-robed chanters of the Hare Krishna mantra, rooted in Chaitanya's Bengali devotion, became a familiar sight in Western cities. Other teachers, from Vivekananda's Vedanta societies to Paramahansa Yogananda and the Transcendental Meditation movement, brought Hindu meditation and philosophy to Western seekers, many of whom never thought of themselves as Hindu.

Yoga goes global

The yoga practised in gyms from London to Lagos is related to Patanjali's yoga, but it is not the same thing. Patanjali was concerned with stilling the mind; his few lines on asana concern a stable seat for meditation. Historians of modern yoga, such as Mark Singleton, argue that the flowing sequences of postures familiar today developed largely in the 20th century, drawing on medieval hatha yoga texts but also on modern physical culture and gymnastics, and were spread worldwide by Indian teachers and their Western students.

On 11 December 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 69/131 declaring 21 June the International Day of Yoga, a proposal from India endorsed by a record 175 member states. The UN describes yoga as "an ancient physical, mental and spiritual practice that originated in India."

Yoga's success abroad raises a question its practitioners answer differently: is it a Hindu practice, a universal one, or both?

Some Hindu organisations in the diaspora have argued that yoga is being stripped of its Hindu roots and sold as fitness. Some Christians and Muslims have argued the reverse, that yoga is too Hindu for them to practise. Many practitioners, including many Hindus, see it as a gift from Indian tradition to anyone who wants it. Each view has serious defenders.

Part 15 — Hindu nationalism and its critics

The most consequential argument about Hinduism today is political: what is the relationship between Hindu identity and the Indian nation? It is told here in dated steps, with the strongest case of each side.

The idea

In 1923 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar published Essentials of Hindutva. "Hindutva", Hindu-ness, was in his telling not a religion but a national and civilisational identity: a Hindu was someone who regarded India as both fatherland and holy land. On that definition, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, whose faiths were born in India, were included; Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands lay elsewhere, were not unless they embraced that identity. Savarkar himself rejected caste hierarchy.

In September 1925 K. B. Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, "National Volunteer Organisation") in Nagpur. Organised in local branches (shakhas) with daily drills and discussion, it grew into a vast network (it keeps no membership register; estimates run to millions) and the parent of a family of affiliated groups, the Sangh Parivar, including the Vishva Hindu Parishad and, in politics, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Key dates

The case its supporters make

Supporters of Hindu nationalism describe it as the cultural self-respect of a civilisation that, in their view, was subjugated for centuries, first by Muslim conquerors and then by the British, and was then governed by a secular elite that treated majority sentiment with suspicion. They argue that India's secularism became "pseudo-secularism", indulging minority religious law and politics while disparaging Hindu tradition; that Hindus should not have to apologise for wanting their holiest sites restored; that a common civil code and an end to religious conversion by inducement would make citizens truly equal; and that Hindutva is inclusive, since anyone who honours India's civilisation can belong. Many point out that the BJP has won repeated national elections, including among large numbers of lower-caste and poorer voters, and that in Pew's survey 64 percent of Hindus said being Hindu is very important to being truly Indian.

The case its critics make

Critics, among them scholars such as Christophe Jaffrelot, opposition parties, civil-liberties groups, and many Hindus, argue that Hindutva defines the nation by religion, against the secular and pluralist Constitution written by Ambedkar and his colleagues; that it treats India's Muslims (172 million at the 2011 census) and its Christians as second-class or suspect citizens; that its rise has been accompanied by communal violence (Human Rights Watch counted at least 44 people killed by cow-protection vigilantes between May 2015 and December 2018, 36 of them Muslims) and by pressure on journalists, universities and minorities; and that it rewrites history, presenting a single Hindu nation that never existed. Many Hindu critics add a religious objection: that Hindutva turns a tradition of extraordinary inner diversity and spiritual depth into a political identity, and that Gandhi, a Hindu killed by a Hindu nationalist, represents a truer Hinduism.

The argument is not between Hindus and non-Hindus. It runs through Hindu families themselves.

These are not abstract disputes. Laws restricting religious conversion, the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (which offered faster citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries), cow-protection laws and history textbooks are all live political battles in 2026. Readers will find supporters and opponents of each, and each will say the other side is the danger to India.

Part 16 — Hinduism today and its open questions

By the numbers

Those figures carry a caution. India has not had a census since 2011, so the 2011 shares remain the latest official count until results from the 2027 census appear; and survey figures describe India's Hindus, not the diaspora.

Questions inside the tradition

What counts as Hindu? From the 1966 court case to the Lingayat debate and the place of Dalit Buddhists, the boundaries of the family are still being drawn. The answer has legal consequences, for temple law, personal law and minority status.

Caste. Whether caste can be reformed from within, as Gandhi hoped, or only abandoned, as Ambedkar concluded, remains the deepest moral question in modern Hinduism. The 2027 census will put new numbers on it.

Women and ritual. Hindu goddesses are among the most powerful divine figures in any religion, yet women's access to priesthood, Vedic study and some temples has long been restricted. Women now train as priests in some traditions, and court cases over temple entry have divided believers between those who see tradition as binding and those who see equality as itself a Hindu value.

Scripture and history. How should Hindus read the dating of the Vedas, the migration debate, the historicity of Rama and Krishna? For many believers the epics are history; for many scholars they are sacred literature with historical layers. Some Hindus hold both views at once.

Religion and nation. Is Hinduism a religion among others in a secular state, or the civilisational identity of India itself? That question, set out in Part 15, will shape India's politics for decades.

The sacred and the environment. Rivers revered as goddesses, the Ganges and the Yamuna above all, are heavily polluted. Hindu environmentalists argue that reverence for nature in Hindu tradition must become action; others note that ritual practices, such as immersing images and ashes, are part of the problem.

A tradition that has argued with itself for three thousand years is unlikely to stop now. Its arguments are part of what keeps it alive.

The takeaway

"Hinduism" is a modern name for a very old family of traditions with no single founder, book or creed. Its oldest layer, the Vedic hymns, was carried by memory for over two thousand years; the Upanishads turned ritual inward, asking how the self relates to ultimate reality and giving the world the ideas of karma, rebirth and liberation; the epics, the Gita and the Puranas made those ideas into stories, gods and devotion that a billion people live by. Its philosophers argued for centuries over whether the self is God or belongs to God. Its social order, caste, is rooted in scripture and ancient custom, was hardened by colonial counting, was fought by reformers from the Buddha to Ambedkar, and is still argued over today. Through conquest, colonialism and migration it has adapted again and again, and in 2026 its biggest arguments, about caste, about who belongs, and about religion and the nation, are being had in public by Hindus themselves.

Try this: spend ten minutes with one passage, read slowly: the salt-in-water lesson in the Chandogya Upanishad (chapter 6, section 13), or the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Then, if you can, visit a Hindu temple near you at the time of the evening aarti. Most welcome respectful visitors; take off your shoes, watch, and ask afterwards what you saw. You will have met the tradition in both of its forms, as an idea and as a practice.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (29 June 2021; survey of 29,999 adults, Nov 2019–Mar 2020): deity preferences, karma, Ganges, vegetarianism, caste identification and attitudes, Hindu identity and nationalism.
- Pew Research Center, "Religious Composition of India" and "Population growth and religious composition" (21 September 2021): census shares 1951 and 2011.
- Pew Research Center, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020" (9 June 2025): 1.2 billion Hindus, 14.9%, 95% in India; Pew, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study (February 2025): U.S. Hindus 0.9%.
- Census of India 2011 (religion tables); Statistics Canada, 2021 Census (26 October 2022); Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021.
- Shinde et al., "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers", Cell 179 (2019); Narasimhan et al., "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia", Science 365 (2019); Moorjani et al., "Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India", American Journal of Human Genetics 93 (2013).
- World History Encyclopedia, "Indus Valley Civilization" (dates, script, debates over religion and decline).
- Primary texts: R. T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1896); F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Sacred Books of the East 1 and 15; G. Bühler, The Laws of Manu, SBE 25; Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (1885, Project Gutenberg); B. R. Ambedkar, Castes in India (1916, Project Gutenberg); Swami Vivekananda, address of 11 September 1893, Complete Works, vol. 1.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Advaita Vedanta" and "Yoga" (Patanjali's dating, the eight limbs, modern postural yoga).
- David N. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?", Comparative Studies in Society and History 41:4 (1999); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, 2001); Richard M. Eaton, "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States", Journal of Islamic Studies 11:3 (2000).
- United Nations, International Day of Yoga (resolution 69/131, 11 December 2014); Al Jazeera, "History's biggest census" (1 April 2026), on India's 2027 census and caste enumeration.
- Dates for reformers, the Ayodhya dispute, the 2002 Gujarat riots, the 2024 election and the 2025 Kumbh were cross-checked against standard reference summaries; casualty figures are given as official counts, with other estimates noted.

Go deeper
- 📘 An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood (Cambridge University Press; the standard scholarly introduction, clear and balanced on every period in this piece)
- 📘 The Upaniṣads — translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford World's Classics; the most reliable modern translation, with an introduction on dating and context)
- 📘 The Bhagavad Gita — Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial is free on Project Gutenberg; Eknath Easwaran's and Laurie Patton's modern translations are easier reading
- 📘 India: A Sacred Geography — Diana L. Eck (how rivers, mountains and pilgrimage towns bind the tradition together)
- 📘 Annihilation of Caste — B. R. Ambedkar (the undelivered 1936 speech; read it alongside Gandhi's replies, which most editions include)
- 📘 The Hindus: An Alternative History — Wendy Doniger (a provocative history centred on women, lower castes and dissent; admired by many scholars and strongly criticised by many Hindus, which is itself instructive)
- 🌐 Pew Research Center — Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (the largest recent survey of what Indians of every faith believe and do)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Adi Shankara: The Non-Dual Reality of Advaita Vedanta; Kabir: The Weaver of the Heart; Meditation, Without the Woo; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; If I Was Born in India; and the Religions long reads on Buddhism and on Jainism and Sikhism