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by Koenraad Elst, Ph. D. "Hindu" is a term introduced in India by the Muslim invaders, in the sense of "every native of India who is not a Jew, Christian or Muslim". In essence, this definition has been preserved in the Constitution of the Indian Republic, which lays down that "Hindu Law" in matters of marriage, guardianship and inheritance shall apply to all Indians except Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians or Muslims (who are allowed to follow their separate family law). It is also coterminous wth the definition of "Hindu" given by Hindu nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923: "one to whom India is both Fatherland and Holyland", thus distinguishing the Hindu from non-Indians to whom India is Holyland (e.g. Chinese Buddhists), from Indians who have their Holyland elsewhere (e.g. Indian Muslims who turn to Mecca for prayer and pilgrimage), and from outsiders with no relation at all to India. Etymologically, "Hindu" is simply the Persian form of "Sindhu", meaning generally "river" and specifically "the Indus river", hence meaning "one who lives in (or, by extension, beyond) the Indus river", "an Indian". The advantage of this definition is that it takes into account the natural tendency to associate "Hindu" with the Indian subcontinent. A Westerner who takes up yoga will not be called a Hindu unless he starts to indianize his home or clothes, take on a Sanskrit name, prefer Indian company, or otherwise do things which link him with India, and then get recognition from Indian Hindus, i.e. become an "honorary Indian". One important implication is that India has by definition always been Hindu, even if some of Hinduism's components were brought into the country by immigrant populations. That there have been immigrations is suggested by the foreign origins of the different language families in India: Austro-Asiatic comes from Indochina, Tibeto-Burman comes from China, Dravidian is closely connected with African languages, and Indo-European is often assumed to come from Russia, though recent research suggests that it has the best chance of being a native Indian language family. However, biologically and culturally, there is a distinct Indian identity, and consciousness of India as a geographically distinct area with a distinct (and superior) culture is already attested in ancient texts like the Arthashastra and the Manu Smrti. Another advantage (or, depending on your own position, disadvantage) of the India-related definition of "Hindu" is that it includes Hindu or semi-Hindu groups with a certain separate identity: Indian tribals, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs. Whether they should be called Hindus is a much-debated topic in India. However, much of Hindu lore (including the much-maligned caste system) has "tribal" origins, and neither Mahavira Jina nor the Buddha nor Guru Nanak ever stated an intention to break away from their parent civilization. They set up their own sects, true, but then Hinduism itself is organizationally composed of autonomous sects. This kind of ambiguity calls for a different type of definition, a doctrinal definition similar to those applying to Islam or Christianity, a brief credal statement summing up the essence of what all Hindus believe. But this is still difficult, because Hindus do not swear allegiance to a simple creed, the way Catholics solemnly affirm the Nicean Creed in mass, or the way Muslims affirm that "there is no God but God and Mohammed is His prophet". The most common approximation is to reduce the essence of Hinduism to a Book, the Veda collection, on the analogy of the Bible and the Quran. Thus, Bal Gangadhar Tilak defines Hinduism as: "Belief in the Vedas, variety in the means (of salvation) and infiniteness of the objects of worship". (1892) That the possible objects of worshipare without number, is a trait of Pagan religion in general, including India's tribal religions; it is what makes them "idolatrous" in Christian eyes. The "variety in the means (of salvation)" presupposes a concept of salvation, which does not exist in the more primitive Hindu and tribal traditions. "Salvation", or more precisely "liberation", is a concept developed in the Upanishads, the philosophical concluding part of Vedic literature. It does mean "liberation from sin", for sin is considered as only a side-effect of man's central problem: ignorance, especially ignorance of his fundamental nature, his forgetfulness of his divine Self. Liberation means the remembrance of the Self. As this doctrine is first developed in a part of Vedic literature, it makes sense to say that adherence to Vedic tradition is the essence of Hinduism,-- though the Vedas never make the claim of being the sole repositories of this knowledge. By Tilak's definition, non-Vedic sects like Buddhism and Jainism (but not Sikhism, which explicitly honours the Vedas) and most Indian tribes would fall outside the Hindu fold. Another problem with his Veda-centred definition is that the Vedas don't have the same status in Hinduism as the Bible or the Quran have for Christians or Muslims. Some Hindu sects do treat the Vedas as "divine revelation", on the Quranic model, most explicitly the reform movement Arya Samaj (1875), socially very progressive but doctrinally fundamentalist. But this view is refuted by the Vedic text itself, which is always in the form of a man-made hymn offered to a particular God, not in the form of a divine injunction to man. A related view, already enunciated by one of the most ancient systematic philosophers, Jaimini, is that the Vedas have existed in eternity, that they are the Word which came into existence along with the universe itself. Clearly, this exaltation of the Vedas to eternal or divine status was thought up by someone for whom the Vedas were already an old and ossified tradition, centuries after their composition, for the Vedic text itself candidly locates itself in space and time, describing battles and weddings, river-crossings and pilgrimages to sacred places, and mentioning stellar configurations which serve as chronological markers. |
