Religion in India: A Historical Introduction

2 Sources of Indian Religion

Hunting communities

Agricultural communities

The “Indo-European” influence

The Vedic period

The ritual system

Hymns and commentaries

Recommended reading

The question as to the “origins” of Indian religion and culture is still a hotly
debated topic on the subcontinent, just as it was in Europe in the nineteenth
century. If part of the European fascination with India had to do with
Europe’s search for its own origins, the “essence” of its own character, and
a rationale for its own “superiority,” so the concern for “origins” in India has
to do with self-definition and the affirmation of a certain superiority based
on antiquity. So Hindu nationalists speak of sana ̄tana dharma, or “eternal
dharma,” an ideology that presumes its sources are rooted in a pristine
past. The same ideology argues for the indigenous antiquity of the “A ̄ryan,”
or “Vedic” culture, that period in Indian history from which all else is
presumed to spring. Many non-brahman communities, on the other hand,
claim their cultural roots precede those of brahmanic culture and are
therefore more ancient and superior to those “later” developments. Many
Europeans, for their part, at least until the archaeological work of the 1920s
in the Indus Valley, had assumed that such culture as existed on the sub-
continent was the product of external sources, generally characterized as
the Indo-European migration.
We know, of course, that this search for “origins” is rather fruitless. Much
archaeological work remains to be done as to the earliest nature of Indian
civilization, and archaeologists are not agreed on the meanings of artifacts
that have been unearthed. Nor is it the case that there is any single origin