A synthesis of Indian traditions, not a single founding
Hinduism’s history gathers related Indian subcontinent traditions from Iron Age roots, with strands that may reach prehistoric and Indus Valley cults. Scholars treat it as fusion rather than one founder’s creed, even when Puranic chronologies claim millennia of genealogy.
Periodizations run pre-Vedic, Vedic Indo-Aryan introductions in the north, then classical Puranic Hinduism as Buddhism declined in India. From about 1200 to 1750 under Hindu and Islamic rulers, Bhakti rose; Adi Shankara was later cast as Advaita’s champion against Vaishnava bhakti success.
Colonial reform movements borrowed from Unitarianism and Theosophy; 1947 Partition left a Hindu-majority Republic of India, and diaspora carried the faith global in the twentieth century.
The roots are tangled. Wendy Doniger points to possible links with Mesolithic religion seen in the Bhimbetka rock shelters, painted about 10,000 years ago. Indus Valley seals show swastikas, animals and a horned figure seated in a pose resembling the lotus position, and phallic objects have been read as forerunners of the linga. Many scholars infer a fertility mother goddess from the abundant figurines, but S. Clark disputes that reading, and no Harappan temple has been securely identified, although one house in Mohenjo-daro's Lower Town may have been one. The later Vedic religion was a sacrificial cult of early Indo-Aryans descended from Bronze Age steppe peoples, itself already a blend of Indo-Aryan and Harappan culture, and it grew into the Brahmanical ideology of the Iron Age Kuru kingdom alongside the renouncer, or Śramaṇa, movements of the northeast.
What scholars call the Hindu synthesis took shape between roughly 500–200 BCE and 300 CE, when the Epics and the first Puranas were composed and Buddhist and renouncer ideas were absorbed along with early bhakti. Its reach then extended into the Indian south and much of Southeast Asia, where rulers adopted Brahmanical culture, granted land to Brahmin settlers and folded local non-Vedic gods into the fold. Eliot Deutsch stresses that Brahmins, fluent in both their local tongue and Sanskrit, acted as translators between regional life and the wider tradition. One common periodisation runs from the Indus era to about 1750 BCE, through a Gupta golden age of about 320 to 650 CE and Puranic Hinduism until 1200, to a modern period starting around 1850.
Source: History of Hinduism
