The Impact of Hinduism on Modern India

To write about the impact of Hinduism on the India of today is to be beset by numerous difficulties - of definition, of historical interpretation, of cultural perspective

- and to be struck most of all by the amazing complexity of beliefs and practices that have been included under that ethnic/religious rubric.

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

ôIn the Indian subcontinent there has developed a complex variety of religious paths. Some of these are relatively unified religious systems, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Most of the other Indian religious ways have been categorized together as if they were a single tradition named æHinduismÆ. This term does not appear in any of the old texts. It is derived from a name applied by foreigners

to the people living in the region of the Indus River and introduced in the Nineteenth Century under colonial British rule as a category for census-takingö.

She goes on to add that the spiritual expressions of what she says is better termed Sanatana Dharma (æeternal religionÆ) ôrange from extreme asceticism to extreme

sensuality, from the heights of personal devotion to a deity to the heights of abstract philosophy, from metaphysical proclamations of the oneness behind the material world

to worship of images representing a multiplicity of deitiesö - 333 million, to be exact (ibid.).

She suggests that a historical view of the infinite branchings of these beliefs

. . .
n cultural tradition and thereby deprive the people of their heritage, replacing it with Western individualism, consumerism, racism, capitalism, and an exclusivist Christian ideology. Listen to the chilling words to the British Parliament in February 1835 from the cynical Lord Macaulay, a British historian and politician, at a time when his country was about to complete its conquest of the Indian subcontinent (Danino 2003): ôI have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we will ever conquer this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient educational system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nationö. In Michel DaninoÆs brilliant article ôEffects of Colonization on Indian Thoughtö from which the above quotation is derived, he ou
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1595
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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