General Remarks on the Religious History of India

India, the land to the east of the river Indus, must have held great promise for anybody living in the arid regions of Central Asia or the mountains of what is today Afghanistan.

But it was not an empty country the Aryas entered. Other peoples were already Eving there, who had to be conquered or pushed into less desirable regions. Filled with an aggressive spirit and superior in terms of arms and military tactics, the Aryas appear not to have found this difficult. Yet they may not have been directly responsible for the disappear­ance of a much older civilisation, which had flourished along the river Indus (and is known accordingly as ‘Indus Civilisation’). Perhaps an inner decay of this culture made it possible for the Aryas to move south. Very little of what the archaeologist has unearthed throws light on the religion of this unknown people, and nothing can be inferred from it, as far as the later Indian religions are concerned.

The spread of these Aryas and their culture and religion over the region took hundreds of years.

What will be discussed in the following pages as the Indian religions are all the result of the interaction, in a vast number of different ways, of the Aryan heritage with local and regional traditions. In most cases, the latter are extremely difficult to identify, particularly for the earlier period—historical documentation on the whole has been produced by the Aryas alone. But what scholars have discovered during the last few decades about non-Aryan cultures and religions in India adds up to enough evidence to reject the claims that we are dealing here with a homogenous and continuous, monolinear history of religious phenomena. Sometimes very fundamental transformations occurred as a result of regional influences.

Where does our evidence for this hypothesis derive from? First, there is the presence of linguistic groups which do not belong to the Indo-European Sanskrit and its subsequent developments (or to the languages in the north-west which derive from, or are related to, Old Iranian). Of primary importance here are the Dravidian languages. The term was coined by Bishop Caldwell (who even suspected that the Hebrew words for some of the exotic articles brought to Solomon were of Dravidian origin—an assumption that today looks rather far fetched). The major lan­guages in this group are spoken in South India: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada (or Kanarese) and Malayalam (which is the mother tongue also of the ‘Syrian’ Christians in Kerala). But outside the south many other peoples also speak Dravidian languages, for example in the more inaccessible regions of central and eastern India.

Closely related to this is a second aspect. At least in one case we still possess a corpus of literature (in Tamil) which goes back to the very beginning of the Common Era. It documents for the extreme south a culture which is as yet hardly influenced by the north. The Tamils drew for centuries on this so-called cahkam literature to express their perception of Hinduism. For instance, the Alvars and Nayanars, and theBhdgavata-Purdna, bear witness to the extent of this southern transformative power.

A third aspect is important here; this could be called ‘incomplete’ or ‘multiple’ history. Whilst we are used to thinking in terms of historical processes, say the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution, which affected Western society to such an extent that (in degrees) nobody was left out of them, the case in India has been different. Whatever major historical events took place (the invasion of the Aryas, or of the Hunas in the fifth century ce, the conquest of most of the country by Muslims, or Portuguese and British colonialism), they only had a very limited effect on the Indian peoples at large, and it tended to take centuries before even this effect reached its peak. The result of this is that even today in India we can find (a few) people who belong to the Stone Age in terms of their lifestyle, and, at the other extreme of the spectrum, nuclear reactors. What lies in between is enormously variegated.

All this meant, in terms of Indian society, that many groups of people, who spoke different languages, belonged to different histories and practised different religions, over a period of hundreds of years learnt to live together and interact socially. At the same time, the mere scale of such social differentiation must have been perceived as a threat to the sense of identity of the individual group within such an amorphous whole. Whilst modes of social interaction and of sharing cultural and religious elements thus evolved, modes of maintaining a separate identity were also established. Conventionally, these two sides of the same coin are treated together under the heading of the ‘caste system’. But the social reality of India has been far more fluid and flexible, with enormous regional and historical variations. Of particular interest in the present context is the role of religion. Though almost always blamed for the negative sides of the so-called caste system, religion has in fact frequently played a very positive role by setting up new social structures designed to overcome certain repressive or discriminatory aspects of the social conventions.

In one sense, the history of the Indian religions could be described as the process of infusing the Aryan heritage into the whole of India. Except for the tribes (of which there exist even today quite a number, involving millions of people), most Indians were affected by this—though they may then have strongly reacted against it. This Aryan heritage itself, symbolised by ‘the Veda’ and the brahmin, did not however remain constant in the course of history. This latter aspect is almost totally ignored by the representatives of such a—very traditional—approach to Indian religious history. In different regions and social milieux, these symbols underwent considerable transformations and modifications. One could be tempted to describe the function of the brahmin as that of a ‘clearing-house’: he receives religious material and returns it in a form that bears the stamp of his style and values.

In another sense, the history of the Indian religions dissolves into a large number of separate histories, according to individual traditions, cultural-linguistic regions, and social groups and milieux. The conventional labels of‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ or ‘Sikhism’ neither exhaust the (very large) range of the traditions we can identify outside the most unhelpful title of ‘Hinduism’, nor do they, for the most part, even define proper ‘religious systems’. The section on Sikhism, which has evolved as perhaps the most self-contained of these ‘isms’, will illustrate this particular approach. Two further sections will demonstrate to what extent even in relatively small regions (Kashmir and Nepal) the religious scene is differentiated and yet witnesses the constant interaction of these variegated traditions.

In a third sense, writing the history of the Indian religions could mean first, to establish some kind of typology of the religious content, of fundamentally distinct expressions of the religious, and then, secondly, to trace the documentation of each of these types. Now precisely because of the ‘multiple history’ mentioned above, each subsequently documented type adds to, but does not replace, the previous ones. The sections on traditional Indian religions follow this approach, and thus it is not necessary here to elaborate on it. The four basic types which became documented at subsequent stages are: ritualism, mysticism, devotionalism and antinomianism. Systematic reflections on them appear from the last millennium bce onwards. Both our four types and also the structures of thought found in the reflective traditions cut right across the conventional four labels of‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, etc. Further initial confusion is cre­ated by the fact that, in real life, the four different types are almost always mixed up with each other, in endless forms. For example, devotion to God combines with a set of ritual practices and daily meditational exercises.

From among the four basic types of the religious, ‘antinomianism’ (usually under the title of ‘Tantrism’) has in particular attracted popular interest. Reliable and critical scholarship on this material is, on the other hand, the least readily available. In view of this situation, more space has been given to the ‘esoteric traditions’, ‘Saivismin Kashmir’ and‘the Religions of Tibet’, than could perhaps be justified otherwise.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Indians on the one hand reacted to the influx of Western ideas and criticisms (see the separate section on this). Already this reaction involved a new type of reflection on the religious heritage (e.g. what were the ‘scriptural authorities’ for the ‘orthodoxy’ of temple worship). On the other hand, Westerners also showed curiosity and interest in the Indian religions, thereby further stimulating this new type of self-reflection. Now traditionally the Indian religions had evolved their own modes of self-reflection and conceptualisa­tion (see on this in particular the sections on Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, and on Saivism in Kashmir). Whatever was still known of this older conceptualisation (it tended to be Sankara’s Advaita-Vedanta more than any of the others), was offered to the enquiring West(emer), along with ad hoc ‘explanations’, which represent more the questioner’s own prejudices than the informant’s factual and critical understanding. ‘The Hindu Trinity’, ‘idol worship’ and indeed ‘Hinduism’ are samples of this process.