The Hindu World

Sushil Mittal, Gene Thursby, Sushil Mittal, Gene Thursby

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134608751
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Teología y religión
• Thema: Religión

The Hindu World is the most complete, authoritative and up-to-date one-volume guide to Hindu faith and culture available today. With twenty-four dedicated chapters written by the world's leading Hinduism scholars, it elucidates the history, philosophy and practice of one of the world's great religious traditions. The perfect reference for all students of Hinduism, it is ideal for both for introductory-level study and for use as a definitive reference source. Proving invaluable for its wealth of historical material, in addition, The Hindu World also offers new insights into all aspects of Hindu life, ranging from the devotional texts of the Vedas and Ramayana to current perspectives on dharma and kama, temple architecture, sacred food, ritual, caste, cosmic philosophy, history and modernization.
The Hindu World emphasizes Hinduism's classical heritage and daily practice as well as contemporary approaches to Hindu scholarship. Exploring the enormous diversity of Hindu devotion whilst considering Hinduism's academic status as a category for analysis, the book achieves a distinctive creative balance between the beliefs and values of Hindus themselves, and scholarly 'outsider' perspectives.

PART I

INTRODUCING THE HINDU WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

ON HINDUISM AND HINDUISMS: THE WAY OF THE BANYAN

Julius Lipner

THE NATURE OF OUR TASK

The purpose of this chapter is not to attempt some comprehensive account of what Hinduism is. The remaining chapters of this book will give a clearer picture of that. My task is one of orientation: to attempt a constructive critique of what various commentators have considered Hinduism to be, and to suggest what I believe to be a fruitful approach to the totality we call “Hinduism.” I cannot, of course, claim that the approach outlined in this chapter is the only fruitful way of understanding Hinduism. Such a vast, multifaceted record of the way in which many millions of human beings, over many centuries, have shaped their lives, both as individuals and as groups, demands for its understanding an open-ended methodology that accommodates a variety of disciplines and points of view. What we call Hinduism today has always included, under its broad canopy, features of life that may be described not only as religious but also as social, political, economic, rational, aesthetic, environmental, and so on. And just as there is not only one way culturally of expressing what it is to be human, so also the sheer complexity, the multi-layeredness of the Hindu phenomenon allows one to be Hindu in a variety of ways.

Still, there are some approaches to our subject that are more fruitful than others. I shall argue that the one outlined here has particular advantages and that there are other approaches that are unhelpful: they do not seem to square with how the majority of people we have called Hindus over the ages have behaved or with what they have claimed their basic values and purposes in life to be. As my thesis unfolds, I hope the reader will be placed in an advantageous position to follow the various topics pursued in the rest of this book. One needs to face the right way if one is to reach one’s goal.

But first we may ask: is there such a thing as “Hinduism” at all? And if so, what kind of “thing” is it? What are the pitfalls of using the term “Hinduism” unwarily? A historical perspective of the task at hand will provide a useful starting point.

THE ISSUE: ITS HISTORY AND POLITICS

The English word “Hinduism” is of fairly recent coinage, not much more than a couple of centuries old (see Sweetman 2000). It is not a translation of some early Indian term purporting to give a self-description of Indian religion or culture. It is a Western invention, created for a specific purpose. But it was not entirely plucked out of thin air. Part of this name—the “Hindu” element—is derived from the name of the great river, the Indus, which runs along the northwest of the subcontinent with its tributaries. The word “Indus” itself seems to have been derived from the description which ancient inhabitants of this region, the so-called Āryans, gave to this riverine system, recorded at least as long ago as the second millennium BCE. This area is historically important for our purposes because along its banks (or former banks) there are sites where civilization in the Indian subcontinent had an early flowering, in the technical sense of “civilization,” with urban centers and their civic, sociopolitical, and communicational infrastructure, together with various forms of architectural, commercial, artistic, and ritual expression. We have archaeological records of this civilization known as the Indus Valley or Harāppan from about 3000 BCE. The precise ethnic and cultural relationship between the “Āryans” from whose description of the river we have derived the present name, on the one hand, and the great civilization mentioned above, on the other, is part of the issue we are considering.

In their multidialect language which they described as sa

skimg

ta (meaning “refined, polished,” and which has been anglicized as “Sanskrit”), the former peoples called the rivers of the northwest, especially its main artery, sindhu (sindhava

in the plural). Subsequent invaders or immigrants from beyond the northwest, for example, the Persians (c.550 BCE), the Greeks (from the early fourth century BCE), and the Muslims (eighth to ninth century CE onwards), used the element “ind” from sindhu in their names for the land and/or the peoples to the east of this river. Thus the Greeks spoke of Indikoi (“Indians”), while Arabic-speaking Muslims referred to the land as al-Hind. Gradually, after the arrival of the British, who assumed prominence in the subcontinent from the middle of the eighteenth century, the terms “India” and “Hindu”/”Hinduism” became current.¹

In Sanskrit, which progressively became the language of cultural self-expression of the male-orientated elite, the “Āryans” referred to their geographical heartland as Āryāvarta, which in time was more or less supplanted by Bhārata. The variant “Bhārat” is the name by which Indians often refer to their country, and it is the Indian word that appears on the country’s postage stamps. Āryāvarta means “land of the Āryans,” while Bhārata alluded to the territory over which the Bhārata clan, a preeminent lineage in ancient India, held sway. Today “Bhārat(a)” stands for the political entity that is India.²

There is a vigorous ideological debate current as to who the Āryans originally were and where their homeland was. Ārya means “noble” in Sanskrit, so, by way of self-description, the Āryans were the noble ones, those whose language and lifestyle were superior to the culture of non-Āryans. It is not difficult to see then that any debate about the Āryans’ ethnicity can have strong political overtones. Were these “noble” people(s) whose developing language and culture gradually dominated civilized India, indigenous inhabitants historically, namely, in some sense “locals” or native, or did they come from elsewhere? In other words, is “traditional” Indian civilization, with its reputation today of being artistically highly developed, linguistically sophisticated, mythologically rich, and philosophically and theologically profound, rooted originally in the soil—or not? The political implications are not hard to see.

Members of one group argue that the Āryans were indigenous, that they constituted or were part of the first, older Indus civilization, rather than supplanting it by some form of intrusion. They are not happy with the view that the Āryans were originally from outside the subcontinent whose culture took over from the Indus culture and created a substantial part of the infrastructure we call Hinduism today. They are not hospitable to “outside” influences affecting in any significant way what they regard as the “core” or essentials of “the Hindu way of life.” The main reason seems to be that they wish to draw lines of exclusion between what they regard as their own cultural domain and that of others, especially Muslims and Christians (mediated by British colonial rule), who entered India in significant numbers for long periods of hegemonic rule (about six hundred years where the Muslims are concerned, and two hundred years in the case of the British). We note that a particular view of Hinduism prevails here: that “it” is a kind of block-reality with discernible essentials or an identifiable core. This perception can then be manipulated for certain ends, for example, for determining who is a true son or daughter of the soil and for prescribing what the outsider must do to be accepted. Some of these ideologues even argue that the heartland of the Indus civilization was the original home of the Āryans who then spread to other parts of the world.

Members of another group also favor the conclusion that the Āryans were indigenous, but interestingly for other reasons. If it can be agreed that so-called Āryan culture originated in the subcontinent, then subsequent distinctive socioeconomic discriminations which have been embedded within the system for nearly three millennia and which were from early times reckoned to be congenital—they are referring to the phenomenon of “caste”—have in fact no real historical ethnic basis. If the Hindu caste structure was originally superimposed from within the system, then it can be removed from within the system in favor of modern perceptions of a more egalitarian way of life. In short, Hindus can clean up their own act without violating the essential integrity of their cultural roots. These are two tendentious positions which for separate sets of reasons favor the indigeneity or nativeness of Āryan ethnicity and culture.

But there is a third position which is argued almost exclusively on archaeological grounds. Let us call it “the Archaeological Stance.” This position is dismissive of the arguments of the so-called historical linguists whose case rests mainly on the way they perceive speech patterns to migrate, based on comparative philological analysis. According to these language experts or comparative philologists, there is strong evidence for an Āryan incursion—here “Āryan” refers primarily to modes of speech and culture—from beyond the northwest into the Indus Valley during the later phases of the Indus civilization (c. 1500–1200 BCE) (see e.g. Witzel 1995).

It is these language specialists who have had the main influence hitherto in shaping the received scenario of Āryan presence in India (to which we sh...