Part one · What it is

Tying Hinduism into one definition is very hard. There is no single founder here, no single birth date, no single central institution, no single creed, and no single book. Yet it has been a living tradition for centuries, and some thread runs through it that holds it together.

Where the name came from

In the beginning, Hindu was a word of geography, for the people across the Sindhu. In the colonial period this same word settled into being the name of a religion. Romila Thapar calls this gathering of scattered local traditions into one census category syndicated Hinduism: many streams collected under a single name.

What holds it together

The thread that very nearly holds it together, according to Brian K. Smith, is accepting the Veda, even if only in name, as the authority. The shared vocabulary is dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha. The shared practice is puja, reverence for the word that was heard (shruti) and the word that was remembered (smriti), and reaching the Supreme through many forms and many names. This thin thread is what gives so much variety one name.

The variety within

The spread within is large. Julius Lipner offers the image of a banyan for it: one tree, but many trunks, rising from roots that reach into the ground. The streams of bhakti (devotion) are Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, and Smarta. There are six classical schools of philosophy, from Dvaita to the Advaita Vedanta tied to Shankara. And practice stretches from the renunciate’s austerity to the glow of festival.

Part two · The hard parts

Now to those parts that must be spoken of with courtesy, but without averting the eyes. The work here is simply to say plainly what happened, and alongside it the inner reform that rose against these things from within the tradition itself.

Caste and untouchability

The varna scheme appears in the Purusha Sukta (Rigveda 10.90), and grows harsher through the Dharmashastra, above all in the Manusmriti. The sharpest critique from within is B. R. Ambedkar’s, Annihilation of Caste (1936). Untouchability is now illegal under India’s Constitution, and it still survives in social practice. Scholars debate how much caste is a specifically Hindu doctrine and how much a broader South Asian social formation.

The treatment of women

Sati, the burning of a widow on her husband’s pyre, was a reality: contested, and at times forced (Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions). The devadasi custom in its degraded forms. Child marriage, and harsh restrictions on widows. Against these, reformers rose from within: Rammohan Roy, and the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, who set Hindu sources themselves before Hindu custom.

Communal and political violence

The ideology of Hindutva, set out by V. D. Savarkar in the 1920s, is distinct from Hinduism as a religion and draws material from it. The documented events include the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Gujarat violence of 2002 (Christophe Jaffrelot). The work here is to lay out documented events and scholarship, not to pass verdicts on the larger political debates.

The recurring stories of gurus

The abuse of the deep authority handed to a living guru has also surfaced again and again. Asaram Bapu, convicted of rape in 2018. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, convicted of rape in 2017 and later of murder. Swami Nithyananda, accused of abuse, who left the country. These are abuses of the authority that gets entrusted to a living guru.

The countercurrents within the tradition

Alongside these run the currents within the tradition that flowed against them. The medieval bhakti movements, Kabir, Raidas, and Mirabai, struck at caste and ritualism. Centuries earlier, the Buddha had rejected the Vedic yajna (fire-rite) and rank fixed by birth. And it is also true that every great tradition carries weaknesses of this kind, but that fact should not be taken as an excuse for them.