goes way beyond academic formulations and arguments in the academy into the
politics of cultural identity and questions about power. But before we inquire into
these questions of value, what of the term itself?
“Hindu” comes from a Persian word hind, or in Arabic al-hind, for the area of
the Indus valley. This word is in turn derived from the Indo-Aryan sindhu
meaning “ocean” or “river,” and from the eighth century, when Muslims settled
in the Indus valley, Persian authors distinguished between Muslims and the
non-Muslim “Hindus,” although it is not strictly true that the term was not
used by those non-Muslims themselves. Sanskrit sources, however, are much
later. In fifteenth-century Kashmir the term Hindu is employed by the S ́aiva
historian S ́rı ̄vara to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims (see Sanderson
forthcoming) and the term was used in Sanskrit and Bengali Vais.n.ava sources
in the sixteenth century to denote those who were not “Yavanas” or Muslims
(O’Connell 1973: 340–4). In these sources it seems to refer to groups united by
certain common cultural practices, such as cremation of the dead and venera-
tion of the cow, not practiced by the Muslims (Sanderson: 1). Towards the end
of the eighteenth century “Hindu” or “Hindoo” was adopted by the British to
refer to the people of “Hindustan,” the area of northwest South Asia, who were
not Muslim, Sikh, Christian, or Jain, and the “ism” was added to “Hindu” in the
early nineteenth century. Indeed, Rammohun Roy was probably the first Hindu
to use the term in 1816 (Killingley in this volume: 513). The term became widely
adopted during the nineteenth century in the context of establishing a national
identity that would become opposed to colonialism and in the creation of a
religion that could match Christianity and meet it on a basis of equality (see
Killingley and Viswanathan in this volume).
Many scholars have argued that the ascription of “Hinduism” to the multi-
plicity of South Asian traditions was an exercise in power and that the repre-
sentation of India in western scholarship in terms of mysticism, caste, and
kingship is an expression of the West’s desire for domination. On this view India
as the West’s exotic other became identified with despotism, imagination, super-
stition, and irrationality in contrast to the democracy, reason, and science of the
West arising out of the Enlightenment (Balagangadhara 1994; Inden 1990;
King 1999). This postcolonial reading of Western scholarship’s engagement
with India reveals a complex history, traced by Gauri Viswanathan in the present
volume, which shows both positive and negative evaluations are nevertheless
based on foundational assumptions about the nature of the West’s other. Others
have argued not from the perspective of postcolonialism, but on the foundation
of Western, philological scholarship itself, that the term “Hinduism” is a mis-
nomer, an attempt to unify into a single religion what in fact is a number of dis-
tinct religions (for example, von Stietencron 1997: 32–53). Yet others argue that
part of this “error” lies in the inappropriate use of the category “religion” in rela-
tion to the diversity of South Asian cultural forms, for that term has particular,
Christian theological connotations (Fitzgerald 2000: 134–55; Staal 1989:
388–406). On this view, religion is a category that entails assumptions that
belief has primacy over practice, that a person can only belong to one religion,
introduction: establishing the boundaries 3