Introduction

Summary

The roots of the notion of a Hindu religious identity is traceable to the nineteenth century when the colonial state and its administrative apparatus codified and reified the religious and caste divisions prevalent in India. The beginning of the census operations in 1872, the application of categories of “Hindus” and “Muhammadans” to classify and divide the people of the Indian colony on religious lines and to keep these religious groups constantly at loggerheads arguably played a crucial role in creating the notion of a Hindu identity as distinct from Muslim or Christian. But an equally, if not more, important factor in the initial phase of its construction was the acceptance and dissemination of the term “Hindu” by religious thinkers and reformists of the nineteenth century. Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, vindicated Hinduism against the expansion of Christianity, even though he was in favour of certain Western reformist ideas such as the abolition of sati. The religion based on the Vedas and Upanisads, he argued, was monotheistic and egalitarian, and it was only over the course of time that decline set in and retrograde practices such as polytheism, the caste system and the suppression of women crept into it. The notion of the Vedic age as a “golden age” was thus “embodied in the doctrine of the Brahmo Samaj” (Jaffrelot 2007: 7–8) and it anticipated the ideas of subsequent religious reformers.