What is Hinduism, really?

For most of my life, I understood Hinduism as one single set of practices. As a child, I was sent to Hindu Sunday school where I learned about Hindu philosophies, stories, holidays, rituals, and more. It was only after turning 17 that I realized that my family practiced something entirely different than what Sunday school had been teaching me. I had been talking to my dad about non-dualism, the philosophical idea that the divine life was present within all beings, something that my religious teachers had ingrained in me. My dad interjected with an entirely different idea. He informed me that our family believed in a dualistic philosophy, where the divine life is separate and you achieve a state of divinity and spirituality through the grace of God. This discussion sparked a curiosity in me and in the months following, I dedicated my spare time to the pursuit of understanding Hinduism in all of its diversity, contradictions, and cultural contexts. While Hinduism is frequently viewed like the Abrahamic traditions, with a single, unified belief system, the sheer diversity of practices and experiences labeled as Hindu shows that the reality is far more complex. 

My family belongs to a movement called Shaiva Siddhanta (named after the Lord Shiva), most popular in the south of India and Sri Lanka. This practice and set of beliefs is primarily derived from a collection of 5th-9th century Tamil devotional poems while additional aspects are taken from other Hindu texts. While Shaivism is a large and popular branch of Hinduism, Shaiva Siddhanta was born specifically out of Tamil literature and is largely practiced by Tamil people. As a child, I can recall my cousin’s wedding where the service was given in Tamil instead of Sanskrit and the scripture came from the Agamas, rather than the more mainstream Vedas.

While still the tradition of a dominant caste, I use this example to point out how my family’s understanding and practice of Hinduism could be fundamentally distinct from another family’s due to our ethnic lineage. There are countless diverging practices across South Asia rooted in regional folk religions, ethnic texts, and historical ideas that have been adopted, syncretized, or shifted into Hinduism over time. Some traditions, belonging to oppressed castes and tribal communities, were even forcibly brought into Hinduism over time and to this day, their practitioners continue to resist this rejection of their history.

There is an imperative to highlight these spiritual genealogies, especially marginalized ones, not only to give others a better understanding of Hinduism but as a way of refusing the erasure of local traditions in service of religious nationalism. This suppression of diversity is a calculated means of formulating Indian Hindu identity in opposition to the “other”, which, in this case, is the Muslim identity. As I’ve navigated the Hindu-American community, it has become clear that this view of Muslims as malicious outsiders is prevalent.  

But even this purported dichotomy between Hindus and Muslims is more complicated and less accurate than people believe. In a 2015 piece for The New Yorker, historian William Dalrymple gives a few examples of the fluid relationship between India’s religious communities. One could look to the Sufi mystics that regarded Hindu scriptures as “divinely inspired,” the Sultan that was seen by South Indian Hindus as an incarnation of the God Vishnu, or even the folk traditions where “the practice of the two faiths came close to blending into one.” But beyond theological overlaps, Dalrymple discusses how India’s residents had never grouped themselves by religious identity before colonial rule. He writes that a “Sunni Muslim weaver from Bengal would have had far more in common in his language, his outlook, and his fondness for fish with one of his Hindu colleagues than he would with a Karachi Shia or a Pashtun Sufi from the North-West Frontier.” 

Hinduism is a vast religious, political, and cultural movement spanning endless miles, languages, countries, and people. My responsibility, as someone raised under its banner, is to grapple with that vastness and refuse to let hundreds, possibly thousands, of traditions be shrunk down into a singular identity that is meant to connect me to some but isolate me from others. The community that I hope for is not one of a consolidated Hindu people whose paranoia seeks to violently defend its identity but of a democratic, egalitarian one where all people are protected and a free-flowing exchange of religious and philosophical ideas is uplifted. As we engage with Hinduism in domestic policy, interfaith dialogue, and progressive agendas, it is vital that we acknowledge these complexities and work intentionally to uplift marginalized South Asian identities most harmed by such homogenization, particularly religious minorities and the caste-oppressed.

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