LIVING RELIGIONS

Living Religions

Living Religions

The Impact of Hinduism on Modern India

To compose about the influence of Hinduism on the India of today is to be beset by many adversities - of delineation, of chronicled understanding, of heritage perspective- and to be hit most of all by the astonishing complexity of convictions and practices that have been encompassed under that ethnic/religious rubric.

What is Hinduism? As Marty Pat Fisher places it (2002):

"In the Indian subcontinent there has evolved a convoluted kind of devout paths. Some of these are somewhat unified devout schemes, for example Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Most of the other Indian devout ways have been categorized simultaneously as if they were a lone custom entitled 'Hinduism'. This period does not emerge in any of the vintage texts. It is drawn from a title directed by foreigners

To the persons dwelling in the district of the Indus River and presented in the Nineteenth Century under colonial British direct as a class for census-taking".

She proceeds on to add that the religious signs of what she states are better termed Sanatana Dharma ('eternal religion') "range from farthest asceticism to extreme sensuality, from the heights of individual devotion to a deity to the heights of abstract beliefs, from metaphysical proclamations of the oneness behind the material world.

She proposes that a chronicled outlook of the infinite branching of these convictions can help clarify their sources and complexity.

Listen to the chilling phrases to the British Parliament in February 1835 from the cynical Lord Macaulay, a British historian and political leader, at a time when his homeland was about to entire its conquest of the Indian subcontinent (Danino 2003): "I have journeyed over the extent and wideness of India and I have not glimpsed one individual who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such riches I have glimpsed in ...