The word 'Hindu' began as a Persian name for a river
Hinduism is followed by roughly 1.17 billion people, yet its name was coined by outsiders. 'Hindu' comes from Sindhu, the Indus River, and for centuries it simply meant someone living beyond that river. The word 'Hinduism' itself first shows up in a letter from 1787, and it still struggles to contain what it describes.
The name travelled through Persian. An Iranian sound shift that turned s into h, dated to between 850 and 600 BCE, changed Sindhu into forms like Hindush, which appears in a 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I listing his provinces. In these early uses, and later in Arabic 'Hind', the word was purely geographical, according to historian Romila Thapar. Religious meanings surface gradually, possibly first in Xuanzang's 7th-century Chinese account of the western regions, and more clearly in 14th-century texts that contrast Hindus with Muslims.
Europeans hardened the label. From the 17th century merchants and colonists used 'Hindoo' for India's inhabitants as a religious group, and Charles Grant wrote 'Hindooism' in 1787. Raja Ram Mohan Roy may have been the first Indian to use 'Hinduism', around 1816 to 1817, and by the 1840s Indians resisting British rule adopted it to distinguish themselves from Muslims and Christians. Before strict colonial categories, identity in India rested more on locality, language, caste, occupation and sect than on belief alone.
Scholars describe Hinduism as a synthesis of Brahmanical practice with many Indian cultures, with no single founder, taking shape roughly between 500 BCE and 300 CE, when the epics and first Puranas were composed. It has no central doctrinal authority. Its scriptures include the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Mahabharata with its Bhagavad Gita, and shared ideas include karma, the cycle of rebirth called samsara, and moksha, liberation from that cycle. Four major denominations are recognised by scholars: Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism and Smartism.
The range of belief is remarkable. Hindus may be monotheists, polytheists, monists, agnostics or even atheists; Gandhi said a person could reject God and still be Hindu. Many prefer the term dharma, meaning the right way to live, to the narrower Western word 'religion'. Today Hinduism ranks as the world's third-largest faith, around 15 percent of humanity, concentrated in India, Nepal, Mauritius and Bali.
Source: Hinduism
