These days, there is a debate on the word ‘Hindu’. In its place, some people prefer Sanatan Dharma—the eternal faith. Both are valid, but I want to, in particular, respond to those who say that there is no such word as ‘Hindu’, and therefore Hinduism itself, and the civilization that was its consequence, is not an ancient but a relatively modern notion.
These days, there is a debate on the word ‘Hindu’.
To my mind, such a claim is prima facie facile. If a people, with a verifiable philosophical vision, religious practice, social norms, kinship rules, creative expression, political thought, ethnic overlap and geographical location, have been aware from time immemorial of their unified identity and can differentiate themselves from others on this basis, does a name tag alter the fact of their existence? Most of the ancient religions of the world, which have been identified as such today and given labels to describe them, were not, at the time of their origin, self-consciously aware of—or concerned about—by what name they would be known to posterity.
Historical evidence clearly shows the recognition by outsiders of a people called ‘Hindu’. Upinder Singh, in her magnum opus, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India, testifies to this. It is important to remember that Dr Singh is no ultra-right demagogue. She is a professional of impeccable credentials, and the daughter of Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister of India.
Dr Singh writes that the words ‘India’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindustan’ originate from the river Indus or Sindhu. Ancient Chinese sources refer to the land of ‘Shentu’, Greek texts mention ‘India’, and Persian manuscripts describe the ‘Hidu’ as one of the subject countries of the Achaemenid king, Darius I. These terms initially referred only to the lower Indus valley, but their connotations expanded rapidly. For Megasthenes, who visited the court of Chandragupta Maurya in the 4th century BCE, ‘Hindu’ meant the entire subcontinent. When exploring the ancient history of South Asia, she argues, it is necessary to ignore modern political boundaries and to treat the Indian subcontinent and its many regions and subregions as a single canvas.
In spite of this, American Indologist Wendy Doniger condescendingly asks: ‘If we can agree that there is something out there worth naming, what shall we call it? The main objections to calling it Hinduism or to calling the people in question Hindus are that those were not always the names that Hindus used for themselves or their religion and that they were geographical names’. But even she cannot overlook the historical evidence. Even if Hindu is not a ‘native word’—as she describes it—it comes, she concedes, ‘from a word for the “river” (Sindhu) that Herodotus (in the 5th century BCE), the Persians (in the 4th century BCE), and the Arabs (after the 8th century) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the Northwest of the subcontinent’. Her conclusion is that it is ‘not uncommon for one culture to take from another a word to designate a concept for which the original culture had a concept but not a word’. The Hindus recognized themselves as such, irrespective of where the word originated.
But other scholars still argue that even if the word ‘Hindu’ existed, and a civilization was verifiably hyphenated with it, why should it be called Hindu, and not Buddhist, or Jain, or any other name, so long as it is not labelled ‘Hindu’? This is the argument of those who believe that accepting the fact that a dominantly Hindu civilization existed would embolden Hindu revivalism and therefore be inimical to ‘secularism’. In my view, this is a rather immature argument on the grounds of factual and historical veracity.
Amartya Sen, for instance, takes this fear to unsustainable lengths. According to him, the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. The truth is that Buddhism, and indeed Jainism, were remarkably enlightened offshoots of Hinduism, one of the many examples of significant heterodoxy permitted by Hinduism itself. Philosophically, Hinduism and Buddhism had so much in common that Adi Shankaracharya, rightly credited with reviving Hinduism in the 8th century CE, was described by his Hindu critics as being a ‘klepto’ Buddhist! Sen argues that Nalanda University was a Buddhist university, but Xuanzang, the Chinese traveller who studied at Nalanda, says that the Vedas and Hindu philosophy were studied and taught there, and that many Hindu kings were among its patrons.
Unfortunately, although a Sanskrit scholar himself, Sen’s laboured attempt to puncture the claim of Hindu civilization sometimes assumes laughable proportions. Panini, the great grammarian who lived in the 4th century BCE, was, he says, an Afghani because his village was on the banks of the Kabul River! Does Sen not know that at that time, large parts of modern Afghanistan were part of an Indian empire and closely integrated with Hindu civilization?
True, signs of modern-day Hindu supremacism are wrong; but the way to counter them is not to deny the name Hindu, or Hinduism, or Hindu civilization.
(Pavan K Varma is an author, diplomat, and former member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). The views expressed are personal)
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