EARLY HINDU RELIGION

Religions of Early India: A Cultural History, 2024

This narrative history of the myriad religious cultures of early India covers a broad span of two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable religious activity: elaborate sacrificial rituals, rigorous regimes of personal austerity, psycho-spiritual experimentation, vigorous theological debate, sophisticated poetic composition, ideals of righteous kingship, flourishing arts of sculpture and architecture, fervent devotional practices, utopian visions, and energetic missionizing. It was the birthplace of the three world religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions, usually classified as “folk” or “popular” religions. To examine the historical origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, this narrative history considers them as interacting communities within a shared, changing social and political reality, in which they may compete with one another for resources and influence. In the perspective adopted here, religious cultures define and redefine themselves in relation to one another. This historical study speaks, as much as is feasible, through voices from early India. The voices are recorded in verbal works: hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, ritual guidebooks, theological discourses. The narrative also attends to voices that speak from ancient material remains, including coins, sculptures, inscribed rocks and pillars, built structures, cityscapes. All these represent intentional works of human labor, articulating distinctive voices or visions, realized at certain moments in the human past.

In Ancient Indian History and regarding Ancient Indian Literature and Languages and to the ancient Indian culture, The Ancient Indian Religion also lies in a main part. Which is the Ancient Indian Religion? Is rig book deals with that Ancient Indian religion?

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term "hindu" over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. "Hindu" is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of "hindu" and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of "hindu," part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources-in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more-that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history-including over two thousand years of using the term "hindu"-has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word "hindu" that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category.

Ancient Indian religion is said to be Vedic religion by Scholars. Is this true? The following of Sanskrit texts which were created from 4th century AD could not be taken as a scale for Summering the Ancient Indian History,-. The Ancient Indian history to be analyzed with dakshina Patha! neglecting the south India , one can not decide the Ancient Indian History, literature, culture, Indian Religion.

Hamizah Binting

2000

Placing the Buddhist and predominantly local history given in the preceding chapters within a larger political framework poses a number of problems due to the fragmentary and seemingly contradictory state of the historical evidence. This situation is a common feature of Indian history but not unique to it, there being similar gaps in the ancient Near East and elsewhere. The problem of establishing a general and workable chronology for ancient India is not insurmountable, but it does require an examination of the relevant evidence as a whole and, more critically, not treating any historical question in isolation. While the following essay is not encyclopedic in this regard, it presents an overview of the crucial data in sufficient detail to provide a viable chronology of the two centuries at the beginning of the current era. 1 There are two important starting points for an examination of Indian chronology in the centuries immediately after the start of the common era. The first is coastal western India where there was contact between the ports controlled by local Indian rulers and incoming traders from the Mediterranean world. The second is the kingdom of the Ku~iii;tas which had contacts with the Chinese military regime in Xinjiang. Both these points of contact were documented in written sources which can be dated with reasonable precision in terms of the common era.

2006

Hinduism in India : the early period, 2015

This essay is essentially review of some of the important literature on Hinduism. I have selected some from the early orientalists and some from the more recent studies. As we continually press on with new studies and approaches in the study of Hinduism it helps to take stock of the past to see how the previous scholars engaged with the subject. To do so, I have chosen a simple methodology of first closely examining some selected scholars from the early Indological and Orientalists traditions (I refer to them as classical approaches), and then examine the writings of some contemporary scholars. Some Classical Approaches to the Study of Hinduism Here I have randomly selected a few of the older books on Hinduism and see what scholars have included in it and what they have excluded. Perhaps, what is excluded has to be derived from its absence in the light of today's debate between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical traditions.