Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age
    History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age
    History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age

    By Domenic Marbaniang

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    History of Hinduism: Pre-vedic and Vedic Age. This book gives latest research updates on ancient Hinduism. It surveys the Pre-vedic religion of ancient India as found in the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization, then takes a dip into the world of Vedas to discover the religion of that age.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDomenic Marbaniang
    Release dateJul 12, 2018
    ISBN9780463862315
    History of Hinduism: Prevedic and Vedic Age
    Author

    Domenic Marbaniang

    Domenic Marbaniang is Christian writer, musician, and minister.

    Read more from Domenic Marbaniang

    Related to History of Hinduism

    Related ebooks

    Hinduism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Intersecting Sects

      Oct 9, 2020

      Intersecting Sects
      19 min read

    • Article

      Review: The Indians Before India

      Dec 28, 2018

      Tony Joseph's Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From is anchored in genetics, a field that has revolutionised our understanding of the past over the past decade. Along with archaeology, history and linguistics, Joseph fleshe

      2 min read

    • Article

      3 Strands Of Ancestry

      Aug 31, 2018

      Just nine years ago, a paper in the journal Nature, 'Reconstructing Indian Population History', revolutionised the genetic understanding of the origins of the peoples of India. Examining patterns across the whole genome, the authors argued that moder

      3 min read

    • Article

      Between Fact And Fiction

      Apr 9, 2022

      THE MAHABHARATA remains one of the most compelling stories ever told and, for most Indians, it provides a common cultural vocabulary that enriches their diverse linguistic ones. It is no surprise that G.N. Devy would turn his attention to it. Scholar

      2 min read

    • Article

      Metaphors Of The Goddess

      Oct 5, 2018

      In Hinduism, god cannot be divine without the goddess. There is no Vishnu without Lakshmi. No Shiva without Shakti. No Brahma without Saraswati. But it is a mystery for many why Hindus, for whom divinity is both male and female, treat women so badly.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sanatana Dharma Vs Hinduism

      Sep 16, 2023

      ↘ The expression ‘dharmah sanatanah’, which loosely translates to an ‘eternal religious code’, finds mention in the ancient Sanskrit text Manusmriti ↘ The word ‘Hindu’ has its roots in ‘Sindhu’, and was originally used by the Persians to denote the p

      1 min read

    • Article

      Being Hindu in a Hindu Rashtra

      Nov 8, 2019

      On the face of it, being Hindu in a 'Hindu rashtra' might sound good to Hindu ears. You might think you are in a rashtra (nation) that is in sync with your faith, values and way of life. However, closer examination and some reflection on the nature o

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Evolution Of Hindusim

      Apr 8, 2022

      The Evolution Of Hindusim
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Discovery of the Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts

      Feb 5, 2019

      IN 1994, the British Library acquired twenty-eight brittle fragments of birch bark scrolls from an anonymous donor. The mystery scrolls were soon identified as the oldest known Buddhist manuscripts in the world, dating from the golden age of Gandhara

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Making Of bharatavarsha

      Sep 16, 2023

      This country has been known as Bharat or Bharatavarsha for a very long time. The span literally ranges across thousands of years. The name has two origin stories: an older Vedic one and a later Pauranic/Jain one. Interestingly, the origins of the nam

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Sun And The Moon

      Dec 16, 2021

      The Sun And The Moon
      13 min read

    • Article

      Where Olympus Meets Nirvana

      Apr 7, 2023

      Where Olympus Meets Nirvana
      7 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Sacred In Performance

      Aug 16, 2023

      During August, there is a burgeoning number of events celebrating women. For Hindus, the period is even more powerful as it overlaps with the auspicious and powerful time of Amman or Shakthi prayers. Shakthi is energy, feminine energy that is respon

      4 min read

    • Article

      One Religion, Many Gods

      Apr 8, 2022

      One Religion, Many Gods
      5 min read

    • Article

      Friends To Foes: Can China And India's Ancient Links Offer Hints On Mending Rift?

      Nov 26, 2022

      At the 1937 inauguration of the first Sino-Indian cultural centre in India, co-founder Rabindranath Tagore paid homage to a friendship that began centuries ago. The foundations of that bond, the Nobel-winning poet noted, "were laid 1,800 years back w

      4 min read

    • Article

      Bharat, Symbol Of Brute Power

      Sep 16, 2023

      After opposition parties adopted the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders attacked it as an indication of the Opposition’s colonial mindset. Followed by RSS sarsanghchala

      3 min read

    • Article

      Biting My Tongue

      Jul 9, 2019

      Biting My Tongue
      10 min read

    • Article

      Making HISTORY

      Nov 21, 2020

      In pre-colonial Persian works of different genres, India was often referred to as Hindustan, but the word Hindustan almost always existed as a compound phrase: Hindustan Jannat Nishan, or “Hindustan the sign of heaven on earth”. This Hindustan Jannat

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for History of Hinduism

    4.5/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Good reading, the author speaks in an easy language about the matter

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    History of Hinduism - Domenic Marbaniang

    INTRODUCTION

    It is generally understood that the term ‘Hindu’ was not historically associated with what is now regarded as the Hindu religion. According to Nehru, Arya dharma was the term generally used to inclusively identify all religious systems that originated in India (then known as Aryadesha, meaning ‘the land of the Aryans or the Noble Land’). Buddha is said to have always called his way to salvation ‘the Aryan Path’. The term Vedic dharma was used for religious systems that claimed to be derived from the Vedas. The term Sanatana dharma, Nehru held, could be used of any ancient religion in India, though it has been monopolized in recent times by some who claim Hinduism to be the Sanatana or ancient religion.[1] The term dharma itself didn’t mean ‘religion’ in the sense that it is used today; it meant more ‘duty’, ‘way of righteousness’, or ‘the right way of living’.

    In his A History of India, Burton Stein notes that it is important to ‘distinguish between Aryan Brahminism and the Hinduism that took its form during the early centuries of the present era.’[2] ‘Brahminism’ more relates the the caste-oriented system of religion the Brahmins to be the superior priestly class. In recent times, ‘Brahminism’ has been strongly criticized and opposed by the majority Dalits (lower class social groups considered as outcastes by the caste Hindus).

    To historians, the term ‘Hindu’ was more a geographical term denoting the land or people who lived beyond the river Sindhu or Indus. Thus, Hindu (derived from Sindhu) was the same as India (derived from Indus). The use of the word ‘Hindu’ in connection with a particular religion only occurred in recent times. John Keay in India: A History, notes that the very term sindhu means ‘river’ in Sanskrit; hence, ‘‘sapta-sindhu’ meant ‘[the land of] the seven rivers’, which was what the Vedic arya called the Panjab.’[3]  He goes on to observe:

    The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence, and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘s’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate – ‘h’. Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and sindhu is thus Hind[h]u. When, from Persian, the word found its way into Greek, the initial aspirate was dropped, and it started to appear as the route ‘Ind’ (as in ‘India’, ‘Indus’, etc.). In this form it reached Latin and most other European languages. However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial ‘h’, giving ‘Hindustan’ as the name by which Turks and Mughals would know India. That word also passed to Europe to give ‘Hindu’ as the name of the country’s indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion.[4]

    The land is twice referred to as Hoduw in the Bible, noting that the Persian King Xerxes’ kingdom, in the 5th century BC, extended to India.[5]

    Map 1: Vedic India

    Thus, the very term Hindu as referring to a religion originated through a process of geographical identification by those outside of India. However, though it may succumb to over-generalization (for instance, erroneously clumping the outcastes and tribals under Hinduism as well), the use of the term Hindu for the more popular and dominant form of faith and practice of the people beyond the river should not be considered irrational at all. For instance, we would consider the motley of polytheistic beliefs and practices in ancient Greece as Greek (for instance, when we talk about ‘Greek mythology’), but ‘Greek’ was not the name of a religion in its established form. The same holds for also Egyptian and African religions. They received their general names from their general territories. But, then in the same manner that not every Greek was a follower of the "Greek

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1