ThunderCat
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2009
- Messages
- 3,533
- Reaction score
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The term "religion," with all its
variety of meanings, has no exact equivalent in India (South Asia).
Moreover, the roles of religion and history in India are almost
impossible to disaggregate.
Nevertheless, at the heart of virtually
all interactions between history and religion during the past century has been one overarching conceptualization. However casually and carelessly used, it has come to dominate discourse,
contributing more than any other term to misunderstandings
about the nature of important events.
As a consequence, claims
in its name can also be credited with having added, in some
measure, to human misery. This soft concept, this jumble of inner
contradictions which has existed at the nexus of history and religion for hardly 200 years, is "Hinduism."
Hinduism lies at the center of any attempt to understand
India today.
It not only provided the eventual excuse (if not
foundation) for the creation of Pakistan, but has also played a
pivotal role within and around all that India has become since the
eighteenth century.
Yet, all of the elements in that loose and
undefined complex of ideologies and institutions, which have
been brought together under this name, together with all of the
aggregate collage of what has also been "organized" and "syndicated" under its banner, did not just gradually (or naturally)
evolve. Nor did Hinduism simply spring, full-blown, into being.
Rather, it was constructed, piece by piece. At times and, in part,
this was done inadvertently; and, at times or, in part, deliberately;
out of materials and precedents which had already existed for a
long time. As a concept, it is India's twin
