Tradition · religion · India

Hinduism

Function

Religious institution & practice

Confidence

Not assessed

Worth knowing

The word is not its own: it comes from the Persian for the people beyond the Sindhu, and was applied from outside for centuries before anyone inside used it as a name for what they were doing.

Connections (6)

• Patronage networkMānganiyār & Lāngā

  The clearest case in the repository of a religion's repertoire being carried by people outside it. The Mānganiyār and Lāngā of Marwar are Muslim hereditary musicians whose patrons were Rajput and Charan houses, and whose repertoire is therefore largely Hindu — they invoke Krishna before performing, sing to Rajput tutelary deities, and keep genealogies for families whose gods are not theirs. Patronage, not belief, decided what they learned, and five centuries later the songs are still what they were paid to sing.

• Alternative toBuddhism

  The śramaṇa challenge is what forced the older tradition to argue. Buddhism and Jainism rejected the Vedas' authority, sacrifice and the priesthood, and the answers worked out against them — the Upanishadic turn inward, the six darśanas' formal systems, Śankara's Advaita — are why Hinduism has a philosophical literature at all. Śankara was accused of being a Buddhist in disguise for how much of the method he took, which is roughly the compliment the argument deserves.

• Shared site withIslam

  The interesting thing about these two in the subcontinent is how many places refuse to be assigned to either. Hindus are a large share of the pilgrims at Ajmer Sharīf; Shirdi's Sai Baba is claimed by both and settled by neither; Bābā Budangiri is one cave held simultaneously to be Dattātreya's seat and a Sufi saint's tomb; at Odero Lal a single compound is temple and mosque with Muslim keepers and mostly Hindu pilgrims. None of this is syncretism as a programme — it is what happened where the two lived adjacent for a thousand years.

• Sacred transplantBali

  The one place outside the subcontinent where a Hindu society survived intact, and it survived by being the refuge: Majapahit's priests and nobility withdrew to Bali as that kingdom fell in the sixteenth century. What is kept there is not a copy — Sanskrit liturgy and a Brahmin priesthood, but a 210-day calendar, water-temple irrigation associations, and cremation rites that a visiting Indian priest would not recognise in detail. A religion left to itself for four hundred years.

• Court associationThe coronation of the Thai monarch

  Brahmanical ritual outlasting Brahmanical religion. Thailand is Theravada Buddhist and has been for centuries, but its kings are still crowned by the hereditary court Brahmins of the Royal Office, anointed with waters from across the kingdom and blessed with invocations to Śiva, Viṣṇu and Brahmā before the sangha gives its own blessing — and every Chakri king takes the regnal name Rama. The rite was kept because it made kings, not because anyone converted.

• Alternative toSikhism

  Nanak's position is the point, and both of the obvious readings miss it. He kept the vocabulary of nirguṇa bhakti — one formless God, the futility of ritual, the uselessness of caste — which is Hindu sant material, and he rejected the authority of the Vedas, the Brahmin and the idol, which is not. The Guru Granth Sahib then includes verse by Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Farid, Hindu and Muslim both, in a scripture that is neither.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Hinduism”. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009); Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism.

• Wikipedia — Hinduism