A brief history of Hindu Identity & its origins

The word ‘Hindu’ is very much misunderstood and misused. Most of the people have no idea how the word originated. And people are carried away by the interpretations given by all and sundry. So I have decided to write a series of articles on the topic , exploring the historical , cultural and other different aspects of Hindu/Hinduism, sharing the little bit of knowlege that I have acquired about the vast ocean that is Hinduism as well as my own subjective insights. I hope, it will help break away several misconceptions prevalent in public regarding this topic

Hindu now generally refers to any person who regards themselves as culturally, ethnically, or religiously adhering to aspects of what presently considered as Hinduism. It has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Lets , first have a look on the historical development of the term ‘hindu’.

The words Hindū and Hind came from Old Persian hindūš , for the Sanskrit Sindhu  (the Indus river or its region). So term ‘Hindu’ initially meant to denote the land of India. So ‘Hindu’ & ‘India’ are etymlogically synonymous.

 The historical meaning of the term Hindu  has evolved with time. Starting with the Persian and Greek references to the land of the Indus in the 1st millennium BCE through the texts of the medieval era, the term Hindu implied a geographic, native ethnic or cultural identifier for native people living in the Indian subcontinent around or beyond the Sindhu (Indus) river. By the 16th century, the term began to refer to residents of the subcontinent who were not Turkic or Muslims, which included Buddhists, Jains & Sikhs as well.

The actual term ‘hindu’ first occurs, as “a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus (Sindhu)”, more specifically in the 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I.

“ Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of countries, the son of Yishtaspa, the Achaemenid. (Thus) saith Darius the king : This (is) the empire that I possess, from the Saka who are beyond Sugd as far as the Kush, from the Hindu  as far as Sparda, which Ahuramazda has granted unto me. who is the greatest of gods. May Ahuramazda protect me and my house. ”

— Darius I’s inscription (Source)

The Punjab region, called ‘Sapta Sindhu’ in the Vedas, is called ‘Hapta Hindu’ in Zend Avesta. The 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I mentions the province of  Hi[n]dush, referring to northwestern India. The people of India were referred to as Hinduvān (Hindus) and hindavī was used as the adjective for Indian in the 8th century text Chachnama. The term ‘Hindu’ in these ancient records is an ethno-geographical term and did not refer to a religion.

Another early but ambiguous uses of the word Hindu is, states Arvind Sharma, in the ‘Brahmanabad settlement’ which Muhammad ibn Qasim made with non-Muslims after the Arab invasion of northwestern Sindh region of India, in 712 CE. The term ‘Hindu’ meant people who were non-Muslims, and it included Buddhists of the region.

 Al-Biruni’s 11th-century text ‘Tarikh Al-Hind’ (History of India), and the texts of the Delhi Sultanate period use the term ‘Hindu’, where it includes all non-Islamic people such as Buddhists, and retains the ambiguity of being “a region or a religion”.  There are some instances where the Buddhist monks have been described in a seperate terminology from the common public, but the laymen were all defined as ‘Hindu’. The ‘Hindu’ community occurs as the amorphous ‘Other’ of the Muslim community in the court chronicles. Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that ‘Hindu’ retained its geographical reference initially: ‘Indian’, ‘indigenous, local’, virtually ‘native’. Slowly, the Indian groups themselves started using the term, differentiating themselves and their “traditional ways” from those of the turco-persian invaders.

Al Biruni refers Hindus as “religious antagonists” to Islam, as those who believe in rebirth, presents them to hold a diversity of beliefs, and seems to oscillate between Hindus holding a centralist and pluralist religious views. [These features are present in buddhism and jainism as well] .

In the texts of Delhi Sultanate era, states Sharma, the term Hindu remains ambiguous on whether it means people of a region or religion, giving the example of Ibn Battuta’s explanation of the name “Hindu Kush” for a mountain range in Afghanistan. It was so called, wrote Ibn Battuta, because many Indian slaves died there of snow cold, as they were marched across that mountain range. The term ‘Hindu’ there is ambivalent and could mean geographical region or religion or ethinicity.

When Bakhtiyar Khilji ransacked Nalanda,in around 1193CE, the persian historian, Minhaj-i-Siraj, described that incident in his book, ‘Tabaqat-i-Nasiri’.
Minhaj-i-Siraj wrote of this attack as follows:-

“Muhammad-i-Bakht-yar, by the force of his intrepidity, threw himself into the postern of the gateway of the place, and they captured the fortress, and acquired great booty. The greater number of the inhabitants of that place were Brahmins, and the whole of those Brahmins had their heads shaven; and they were all slain. There were a great number of books there; and, when all these books came under the observation of the Musalmans, they summoned a number of Hindus that they might give them information respecting the import of those books; but the whole of the Hindus had been killed. On becoming acquainted [with the contents of those books], it was found that the whole of that fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindui tongue, they call a college [مدرسه] Bihar.”

—‘Tabaqat-i-Nasiri’ by ‘Minhaj-i-Siraj’ (Source)

This passage refers to an attack on a Buddhist monastery (the “Bihar” or Vihara) and its monks (the shaved Brahmans) and states “Hindus had been killed” .

The term Hindu appears in the texts from the Mughal Empire era. It broadly refers to non-Muslims. Pashaura Singh states, “in Persian writings, Sikhs were regarded as Hindu in the sense of non-Muslim Indians”. Jahangir, for example, called the 5th Sikh Guru Arjan, a Hindu:

“There was a Hindu named Arjan in Gobindwal on the banks of the Beas River. Pretending to be a spiritual guide, he had won over as devotees many simple-minded Indians and even some ignorant, stupid Muslims by broadcasting his claims to be a saint. […] When Khusraw stopped at his residence, [Arjan] came out and had an interview with [Khusraw]. Giving him some elementary spiritual precepts picked up here and there, he made a mark with saffron on his forehead, which is called qashqa in the idiom of the Hindus and which they consider lucky. […]”

— Emperor Jahangir, Jahangirnama, 27b-28a (Source)

The land which had originally been called Hindūstān (Persian: هندوستان‎) lay to the east of the Indus river and south of the Himalayas. Emperor Babur said, “On the East, the South, and the West it is bounded by the Great Ocean.” Hind was notably adapted in the Arabic language as the definitive form Al-Hind (الهند) for India, e.g. in the 11th century Tarikh Al-Hind  (“History of India”). In Islamic literature,  ‘Abd al-Malik Isami’s Persian work,  Futuhu’s-salatin, composed in the Deccan in 1350, uses the word ‘hindi’ to mean Indian in the ethno-geographical sense and the word ‘hindu’ to mean ‘Hindu’ in the sense of a follower of the Hindu religion”.

A well-known text of mughal period is the ‘Dabistan-i-mazahib’, which attempts an overview of the religious landscape of the empire. In the chapter 2 of the book the author describes the religion of Hindus (using it as an ethno-geo-cultural umbrella term), in which he included different denominations, including Sikh(known as NanakPanthi back then), Jains, Jangama, Cārvāka, humanists,  etc. and also various folk cults and Bhakti Saint traditions.  The author of Dabistan-i- Mazahib struggles to describe what the beliefs of a Hindu are and ultimately he takes shelter in a very convenient position-Hindus are those who have been arguing with each other within the same framework of argument over the centuries. If they recognise each other as persons whom we can either support or oppose in a religious argument, then both parties are Hindus. These traditions although rejected each other beliefs, were still Hindus because they were arguing and polemicising with Brahmins. Such arguments were not taking place between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslims did not share any basic terminology with the others. Muslims had their own framework, an ideological framework, the semitic framework …

There’s a misconception about the term ‘Hindu’ that it was imposed/coined by muslim invader, namely mughals. But as shown above , the term goes back to milleniums before Islam, and was a persian version of the term ‘Sindhu’ and is also mentioned pre-islamic arab literature. Infact The terms ‘Indus/India’ have been derived from the term ‘Hindu’ only. The achaemanid empire at its prime spanned upto europe and Anatolia in the NorthWest. The Greeks came to know about India through Persians only. It was Scylax of Caryanada, who explored the Indus river for the Achaemenid Emperor, Darius I used the term ‛Indus’ for the river as well as an Indian. The loss of the aspirate /h/ was probably due to the dialects of Greek spoken in Asia Minor. So the terms ‘Hindu’ and Indian are literally  & etymollogically synonymous.

During the colonial era, the term Hindu had connotations of native religions of India, that is religions other than Christianity and Islam. Beyond the stipulations of British law, colonial  orientalists and particularly the influential Asiatick Researches founded in the 18th century, later called The Asiatic Society, initially identified just two religions in India – Islam, and Hinduism. These orientalists included all Indian religions such as Buddhism as a subgroup of Hinduism in the 18th century. These texts called followers of Islam as Mohamedans, and all others as Hindus. In early colonial era Anglo-Hindu laws and British India court system, the term Hindu referred to people of all Indian religions as well as two non-Indian religions: Judaism and Zoroastrianism. In the 20th-century, personal laws were formulated for Hindus, and the term ‘Hindu’ in these colonial ‘Hindu laws’ applied to Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in addition to denominational Hindus. In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions  collectively as Hindus, in contrast to Mohamedans for Mughals and Arabs following Islam.   The colonial laws continued to consider all of the indian religions to be within the scope of the term Hindu until about mid-20th century. 

In the Constitution of India, the word “Hindu” has been used in some places to denote persons professing any of the Indian traditions/religions.

The Republic of India is in the peculiar situation that the Supreme Court of India  has repeatedly been called upon to define “Hinduism” because the Constitution of India, while it prohibits “discrimination of any citizen” on grounds of religion in article 15, article 30 foresees special rights for “All minorities, whether based on religion or language”. As a consequence, religious groups have an interest in being recognised as distinct from the Hindu majority in order to qualify as a “religious minority”. However the Hindu Code Bills passed in the parliament in the 1950s, which formulate the Hindu perosnal law in independent India , included all the indian religions/traditions or all those who aren’t Muslim, Jew, Zoroastrian, Christian under its jurisdiction, much like its predecessor the Anglo-Hindu Laws imposed by the British. 

The Supreme Court observed in a judgment pertaining to case of Bal Patil vs. Union of India: “Thus, ‘Hinduism’ can be called a general religion and common faith of India whereas ‘Jainism’ is a special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu religion. 

Supreme Court had observed Sikhism and Jainism to be sub-sects or special faiths within the larger Hindu fold, and that Jainism is a denomination within the Hindu fold. The Court however left it to the respective states to decide on the minority status of Jain religion. However, some individual states have over the past few decades differed on whether Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are religious minorities or not, by either pronouncing judgments or passing legislation. One example is the judgment passed by the Supreme Court in 2006, in a case pertaining to the state of Uttar Pradesh, which declared Jainism to be indisputably distinct from Hinduism, but mentioned that, “The question as to whether the Jains are part of the Hindu religion is open to debate.

So overall throughout the history , the term Hindu was synonymous to anything natively Indian and meant as geo-ethno-cultural identity of the Subcontinent. So how, why  and when did jainism , buddhism, Sikhism, become separate? are they offshoots or subtraditions? I will try to throw some light on that in the subsequent blog in this series.

Read :A basic outlook of what is contemporarily considered as Hinduism