Hindus (Hindustani: [ˈɦɪndu] ⓘ; /ˈhɪnduːz/), also known as Sanatanis, are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism, also known by its modern endonym Sanatana Dharma.[16][17][18] Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent.[19][20]

It is assumed that the term "Hindu" traces back to Avestan scripture Vendidad which refers to land of seven rivers as Hapta Hendu which itself is a cognate to Sanskrit term Sapta Sindhuḥ. (The term Sapta Sindhuḥ is mentioned in Rig Veda and refers to a North western Indian region of seven rivers and to India as a whole.) The Greek cognates of the same terms are "Indus" (for the river) and "India" (for the land of the river).[21][22][23] Likewise the Hebrew cognate hōd-dū refers to India mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Book of Esther, Esther 1:1). The term "Hindu" also implied a geographic, ethnic or cultural identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent around or beyond the Sindhu (Indus) River.[24] By the 16th century CE, the term began to refer to residents of the subcontinent who were not Turkic or Muslims.[24][a][b]

The historical development of Hindu self-identity within the local Indian population, in a religious or cultural sense, is unclear.[19][25] Competing theories state that Hindu identity developed in the British colonial era, or that it may have developed post-8th century CE after the Muslim invasions and medieval Hindu–Muslim wars.[25][26][27] A sense of Hindu identity and the term Hindu appears in some texts dated between the 13th and 18th centuries in Sanskrit and Bengali.[26][28] The 14th- and 18th-century Indian poets such as Vidyapati, Kabir, Tulsidas and Eknath used the phrase Hindu dharma (Hinduism) and contrasted it with Turaka dharma (Islam).[25][29] The Christian friar Sebastiao Manrique used the term 'Hindu' in a religious context in 1649.[30] In the 18th century, European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus, in contrast to Mohamedans for groups such as Turks, Mughals and Arabs, who were adherents of Islam.[19][24] By the mid-19th century, colonial orientalist texts further distinguished Hindus from Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains,[19] but the colonial laws continued to consider all of them to be within the scope of the term Hindu until about the mid-20th century.[31] Scholars state that the custom of distinguishing between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs is a modern phenomenon.[32][33][c]

At approximately 1.17 billion,[36][37] Hindus are the world's third-largest religious group after Christians and Muslims, accounting for 14.9% of the global population. The only two Hindu-majority countries are India and Nepal and both together account for more than 95% of the global Hindu population.[38] After them, the countries with the largest Hindu populations are, in decreasing order: Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the United States, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.[39] These together accounted for 99% of the world's Hindu population, and the remaining nations of the world combined had about 6 million Hindus as of 2010.[39] In the modern era, Hindus have faced religious persecution outside India in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Myanmar.[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]

Etymology

The word Hindu is an exonym.[48][49] This word Hindu is derived from the Indo-Aryan[50] and Sanskrit[50][23] word Sindhu, which means "a large body of water", covering "river, ocean".[51][d] It was used as the name of the Indus River and also referred to its tributaries. The actual term 'hindu' first occurs, states Gavin Flood, as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus (Sanskrit: Sindhu)",[23] more specifically in the 5th-century BCE, DNa inscription of Darius I.[52] The Punjab region, called Sapta Sindhu in the Vedas, is called Hapta Hindu in Zend Avesta. The 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I mentions the province of Hi[n]dush, referring to northwestern India.[53][54][55] The people of India were referred to as Hinduvān and hindavī was used as the adjective for Indian language in the 8th century text Chachnama.[55] According to D. N. Jha, the term 'Hindu' in these ancient records is an ethno-geographical term and did not refer to a religion.[56]

Hindu culture in Bali, Indonesia. The Krishna-Arjuna sculpture inspired by the Bhagavad Gita in Denpasar (top), and Hindu dancers in traditional dress.

The earliest known records of 'Hindu' with connotations of religion may be in the 7th-century CE Chinese text Records on the Western Regions by the Buddhist scholar Xuanzang. Xuanzang uses the transliterated term In-tu whose "connotation overflows in the religious" according to Arvind Sharma.[57] While Xuanzang suggested that the term refers to the country named after the moon, another Buddhist scholar I-tsing contradicted the conclusion saying that In-tu was not a common name for the country.[58]

Al-Biruni's 11th-century text Tarikh Al-Hind, and the texts of the Delhi Sultanate period use the term 'Hindu', where it includes all non-Islamic people such as Buddhists, and retains the ambiguity of being "a region or a religion".[53][need quotation to verify] The 'Hindu' community occurs as the amorphous 'Other' of the Muslim community in the court chronicles, according to the Indian historian Romila Thapar.[59] The comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that the term 'Hindu' retained its geographical reference initially: 'Indian', 'indigenous, local', virtually 'native'. Slowly, the Indian groups themselves started using the term, differentiating themselves and their "traditional ways" from those of the invaders.[60]

The text Prithviraj Raso, by Chand Bardai, about the 1192 CE defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan at the hands of Muhammad Ghori, is full of references to "Hindus" and "Turks", and at one stage, says "both the religions have drawn their curved swords;" however, the date of this text is unclear and considered by most scholars to be more recent.[61] In Islamic literature, 'Abd al-Malik Isami's Persian work, Futuhu's-salatin, composed in the Deccan under Bahmani rule in 1350, uses the word 'hindi' to mean Indian in the ethno-geographical sense and the word 'hindu' to mean 'Hindu' in the sense of a follower of the Hindu religion".[61] The poet Vidyapati's Kirtilata (1380) uses the term Hindu in the sense of a religion, it contrasts the cultures of Hindus and Turks (Muslims) in a city and concludes "The Hindus and the Turks live close together; Each makes fun of the other's religion (dhamme)"[62][63][64] albeit Naqshbandi Indian sufi inhabitations in Constantinople were often attributed as Hindular Tekkesi in Ottoman Turkish.[65][66][67][68]

One of the earliest uses of the word 'Hindu' in a religious context, in a European language (Spanish), was in a publication in 1649 by Sebastio Manrique.[30] In Indian historian DN Jha's essay "Looking for a Hindu identity", he writes: "No Indians described themselves as Hindus before the fourteenth century" and that "The British borrowed the word 'Hindu' from India, gave it a new meaning and significance, [and] reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism."[69] In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus[69] even though in the 19th century, this term was used for Afghan-origin Muslim emperor Ibrahim Lodhi as Hindoo emperor in Encyclopædia Americana (Lieber) of 1829.[70]

Other prominent mentions of 'Hindu' include the epigraphical inscriptions from kingdoms (in present-day Andhra Pradesh) which battled military expansion of Muslim rulers in the 14th century, where the word 'Hindu' partly implies a religious identity in contrast to 'Turks' or Islamic religious identity.[71] The term Hindu was later used occasionally in some Sanskrit texts such as the later Rajataranginis of Kashmir (Hinduka, c. 1450) and some 16th- to 18th-century Bengali Gaudiya Vaishnava texts, including Chaitanya Charitamrita and Chaitanya Bhagavata. These texts used it to contrast Hindus from Muslims who are called Yavanas (foreigners) or Mlecchas (barbarians), with the 16th-century Chaitanya Charitamrita text and the 17th-century Bhakta Mala text using the phrase "Hindu dharma".[28]

The term Sanatani has often been used by traditional Hindus in the recent era in order to use an endonym (native name) to the exonym (foreign name) of Hinduism.[72][73]

Terminology

Hindus at Har Ki Pauri, Haridwar near river Ganges in Uttarakhand state of India.

Medieval-era usage (8th to 18th century)

Scholar Arvind Sharma notes that the term "Hindus" was used in the 'Brahmanabad settlement' which Muhammad ibn Qasim made with non-Muslims after the Arab invasion of northwestern Sindh region of India, in 712 CE. The term 'Hindu' meant people who were non-Muslims, and it included Buddhists of the region.[74] In the 11th-century text of Al Biruni, Hindus are referred to as "religious antagonists" to Islam, as those who believe in rebirth, presents them to hold a diversity of beliefs, and seems to oscillate between Hindus holding a centralist and pluralist religious views.[74] In the texts of Delhi Sultanate era, states Sharma, the term Hindu remains ambiguous on whether it means people of a region or religion, giving the example of Ibn Battuta's explanation of the name "Hindu Kush" for a mountain range in Afghanistan. It was so called, wrote Ibn Battuta, because many Indian slaves died there of freezing cold, as they were marched across the mountain range. The term Hindu there is ambivalent and could mean geographical region or religion.[75]

The term Hindu also appears in the texts from the Mughal Empire era. Jahangir, for example, called the Sikh Guru Arjan a Hindu:[76]

Sikh scholar Pashaura Singh states, "in Persian writings, Sikhs were regarded as Hindu in the sense of non-Muslim Indians".[78] However, scholars like Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond opine that Sikhism began initially as a militant sect of Hinduism and it got formally separated from Hinduism only in the 20th century.[79]