Hinduism. The answers to these questions will depend upon the historical period
in question and the methods employed in their study. Closely connected to the
scope of the field are questions about how to study Hinduism, whether anthro-
pology, philology, history of religions, theology, literary studies, archaeology, or
art history are appropriate methods, and questions about the different theoreti-
cal assumptions and implications of their use. The purpose of this introduction
is therefore both to problematize “Hinduism” and to provide a context for the
essays that follow.
What is Hinduism?
A simple, if perhaps deceptively simple, response to this question is to say that
Hinduism is a term denoting the religion of the majority of people in India and
Nepal and of some communities in other continents who refer to themselves as
“Hindu.” There are approximately 700 million people classed as Hindu by the
census in India, which is 83 percent of the population, the remainder being clas-
sified as Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, Jew, Parsee, and tibal people
(a ̄diva ̄sı ̄). This is in a vast continent with 18 official languages and many dialects.
But if we begin to dig deeper, we see that the question is not so straightforward.
Because the term denotes such a striking variety of beliefs, practices, and his-
torical trajectories, some would wish to claim that the abstraction “Hinduism”
is fairly meaningless and without referent. But others, and this is particularly
important in the contemporary politics of Hindu identity, would claim that
Hinduism is indeed a unified field of belief, practice, and history, intimately linked
to nationhood and the historical struggle of a people against its colonizers. On
this view, Hinduism has an essence manifested in multiple forms. Others argue
that while Hinduism does not denote a religion with clearly defined boundaries
in a way that we might be able to define Christianity or Islam, it nevertheless
denotes a group of traditions united by certain common features, such as shared
ritual patterns, a shared revelation, a belief in reincarnation (sam.sa ̄ra), libera-
tion (moks.a), and a particular form of endogamous social organization or caste.
This family resemblance approach nevertheless still requires judgments about
which forms are prototypical and which are not, judgments which are them-
selves based on some pre-understanding of the tradition. Many would wish to
claim, for example, that caste is not a necessary part of Hinduism whereas some
other features are. “What is Hinduism?” is therefore a complex question the
response to which ranges from claiming that Hinduism in a unified, coherent
field of doctrine and practice to claiming that it is a fiction, a colonial construc-
tion based on the miscategorization of indigenous cultural forms.
Defining the parameters of the term is not simply an exercise for scholars but
is closely related to the questions, as Brian Smith observes, of “who speaks for
Hinduism?” and “who defines Hinduism?” (Smith 2000: 741–2). This debate
2 gavin flood