Hinduism

Hinduism has no founder and no founding day. It is the name, given from outside, for the many related traditions that grew in the Indian subcontinent over more than three thousand years. Many Hindus prefer to call it Sanatana Dharma, “the eternal order”.

Its oldest layer is the religion of the Vedas, hymns composed in an early form of Sanskrit in the north-west of India from about 1500 BCE. Vedic religion centred on fire sacrifices led by priests (brahmins) to gods of nature such as Agni, the fire, and Indra, the storm.

From around 800 BCE, on the Ganges plain, the Upanishads turned inward: behind all things stands one reality, Brahman, and the deepest self, atman, is one with it. In the following centuries the great epics, the law books and the Puranas gave Hinduism its familiar shape: devotion to personal gods, worship in temples, and duties fitted to one’s place in life.

Through trade and royal courts, Hindu gods travelled to Southeast Asia, where kings built Angkor and Prambanan in their honour. Bali remains Hindu to this day. In the 19th century indentured labourers carried Hinduism to Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean and Africa, and in the 20th century migrants took it to Britain and North America.

When the Vedic age gave way to the age of the epics and Puranas, Hinduism was already less a single religion than a web of related traditions. Its later history is a story of kings, poets and reformers who reshaped that web again and again. The Maurya emperors of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE supported Buddhists and Jains as well as brahmins, and for several centuries the newer movements of renunciation competed with the older sacrificial religion for royal favour.

The Gupta dynasty, which ruled much of northern India from about 320 to 550 CE, is often described as a classical age. Its kings called themselves devotees of Vishnu, the Puranas took much of their familiar form, and builders began to raise temples in stone. In the south the Pallavas and later the Cholas built great temple cities; Rajaraja I completed the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur in 1010. The same centuries carried Hindu kingship across the sea, and in the 12th century the Khmer king Suryavarman II dedicated Angkor Wat to Vishnu.

Between about the 6th and 9th centuries the Tamil poet-saints, the Alvars devoted to Vishnu and the Nayanars devoted to Shiva, sang of passionate love for God in the language of the people. Their bhaktibhakti Loving devotion to a god, expressed in song, prayer and service. Glossary, or devotion, spread north over the following centuries. Philosophers gave it intellectual form: Shankara, traditionally dated to the 8th century, taught Advaita, the non-duality of self and Brahman, while Ramanuja in the 11th–12th centuries and Madhva in the 13th defended a personal God distinct from the soul. In the north, Chaitanya in Bengal, the poet Mirabai and Tulsidas, whose Ramcharitmanas retold the story of Rama in a form of Hindi, made devotion the heart of popular religion.

From the early 11th century, raids by Mahmud of Ghazni, including the sack of the Somnath temple in 1025, opened a long period of Muslim rule in northern India under the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughals. Historians describe a mixed picture. Temples were destroyed in war and some rulers taxed non-Muslims, while others, above all Akbar, welcomed Hindu scholars and nobles, and many Hindus served in Mughal government; Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya tax in 1679. In the south the Vijayanagara empire, founded in 1336, was a great Hindu power until its defeat in 1565, and in the 17th century Shivaji built a Maratha state in the west.

British rule brought missionaries, printing presses and Western scholarship, and with them a new wave of reform. In Bengal, Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, arguing for a rational worship of one God and campaigning against sati, the burning of widows, which the British banned in 1829. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, called Hindus back to the Vedas alone. Vivekananda, a disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and presented Vedanta as a universal spirituality. In this period “Hinduism” came into wide use as the name of a single religion.

In the 20th century religion and politics became closely entwined. Mahatma Gandhi drew on the Bhagavad Gita and on ahimsaahimsa Non-violence: not harming any living being in thought, word or deed. Central to Jainism. Glossary, non-violence, in the struggle for independence, and campaigned against untouchability. V. D. Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva, “Hinduness”, set out in 1923, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, became the roots of Hindu nationalism. The partition of 1947 created a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan amid mass violence. India’s constitution of 1950 abolished untouchability and guaranteed freedom of religion.

Since then Hinduism has been both a living faith and a contested political identity. The demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 and the consecration of a temple to Rama on the site in 2024 marked the growing strength of Hindu nationalism, which Indians judge in very different ways. Meanwhile movements such as ISKCON, founded in New York in 1966, and a large diaspora have made temples, festivals and yoga part of life on every continent.

At the heart of Hindu life stands dharmadharma Duty, law and the right order of things. For Hindus it is the moral order and one’s duties in life; for Buddhists, the teaching of the Buddha. Glossary: the right order of the cosmos and the duty each person has within it. Classical texts name four goals of a good life: dharma itself, prosperity (artha), love and pleasure (kama), and, above them, liberation (mokshamoksha Liberation from the cycle of rebirth, the highest goal of life in Hinduism and Jainism. Glossary).

Liberation is freedom from samsarasamsara The cycle of birth, death and rebirth, from which the Indian religions seek release. Glossary, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. What carries a being from one life to the next is karmakarma Action and its consequences. Good and bad deeds shape a person’s future, in this life and in lives to come. Glossary: every intentional act leaves traces that shape future experience.

Hindu thought offers several paths to liberation, often presented as four yogas: selfless action, knowledge, loving devotion to God, and meditation. The Bhagavad Gita weaves them together. Schools of philosophy differ on what liberation is: some speak of realising that the self is Brahman, others of an eternal relationship of love with a personal God.

Much Hindu worship happens at home. A family shrine holds images of chosen deities, who are honoured each day with pujapuja Worship: offerings of flowers, food, light and incense to a deity, at home or in a temple. Glossary: flowers, water, light, incense and food. In temples, priests wake, bathe, feed and adorn the deity, and worshippers come for darshan, the blessing of seeing the god and being seen.

Life is marked by rites of passage (samskaras), from the naming of a child to marriage around the sacred fire and cremation after death. Pilgrimage to sacred rivers, mountains and cities is a deep part of the tradition: millions bathe in the Ganges at Varanasi, and the Kumbh Mela draws vast crowds.

Practice varies widely by region, caste, family and sect. A Bengali Goddess worshipper, a Tamil devotee of Shiva and a Vaishnava monk in Vrindavan may share few rituals, yet recognise one another as Hindu.

Hindus divide their sacred texts into two kinds. Shruti, “what is heard”, are the Vedas, including the Upanishads, held to be revealed rather than composed. Smriti, “what is remembered”, includes the epics, the Puranas and the law books, composed by sages and poets.

For many centuries the Vedas were transmitted orally, with techniques of recitation precise enough to preserve them almost unchanged. In everyday life, the epics and the Bhagavad Gita are better known than the Vedas themselves, through retellings, festivals, temple art and, today, television.