Has Hinduism had the Longest Tradition of Continuous Religion?

Can Hinduism legitimately claim to have had the longest tradition of continuous religion?

Hinduism has not been uniform and never had a continuous tradition. It was actually a shifting label that had meant many different things at different times over the 3000 years since Cyrus the Great first used the word Hindu to define the people living beyond the river Sindhu or Indus. While the old religious traditions of Egypt and Babylon died out the Zoroastrian faith, preserved by a small community of Parsees is probably the oldest surviving unbroken religious tradition. The Chinese and Jewish traditions also have as long a continuous religious tradition as Hinduism.

Hinduism, as generally practiced in India today, is very different to the forms of religion of earlier times. The dedicated Brahmin priests, however, managed most of India’s religious evolution for roughly 3,000 years. In the beginning, as in all religions, this tradition was oral but put to writing from about the time of Christ. Their deities, beliefs and customs steadily evolved over the years as they assimilated many local customs over the centuries.

The evolution of worship in India evolved through several distinct stages:

1. The earliest was the tribal tradition of worshipping the spirits or ‘jivas’ believed to inhabit every mountain, river, tree, rock and other object. These animists had no priests but ‘Shamans’ who would organise sacrifices, including blood sacrifices of buffaloes, goats, or chickens to gain the blessings of the spirits. These customs still survive in most of India’s remote tribal and hill areas.

2. Then there was the Vedic tradition of the Aryas with their elemental gods of the sun, storms, earth, waters, fire, etc., with Brahmin priests chanting Vedic hymns and performing great sacrifices at fire altars with magnificent ceremonies. There was no philosophy except for great sacrifices in exchange for boons.

3. Buddhist and Jain philosophy co-existed with Arya forms of worship in the beginning but Brahmin priests and their patrons were more forceful than the gentle Buddhist Monks and Buddhism was successfully erased in India by the 9th Century AD. Both Buddhists and Jains believed in peace, harmony and the sanctity of all forms of life. Their beliefs of reincarnation, Karma, Dharma and Ahimsa later became an intrinsic part of Hindu belief.

4. During the 1000-year period of Buddhist supremacy, came another form of Hinduism that was a religion of the Puranas. It introduced a huge multitude of new deities with vastly elaborated beliefs and customs. Shiv and Vishnu only now emerged as great gods with new companions like Ganesh, Lakshmi, Parvati, Saraswati, Devi, Kali, etc. The elaboration of great myths like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were accorded near religious importance and were raised to become the sacred tenets of religion. Inspired by Shankaracharya there was now a strong Brahminical revival that tried to assimilate many local customs and eliminate competing faiths. This was also the period of India’s great temples.

5. In the late Mughal period, the almost forgotten legendary heroes, Ram and Krishna were elevated to Man gods and became objects of deep personal devotion in the style of the adoration of Jesus. This was unlike the abstract and distant deities of the past. They had initially been the deities of the underprivileged and were later assimilated into the evolving Hindu belief. The Bhakti devotional cults like Vedanta, and Sufiism continued to be preached by individual sages requiring no idols or places of worship.

6. After the 19th century, when the British had superseded the Mughal rulers and most of their customs, the increasing numbers of educated Hindus, began to be aware that there was little knowledge about their own history, culture and religion. Little was known about any great Hindu king, and many religious scriptures like the Vedas, the Upanishads or even the Bhagavat Gita that were mostly in the secret records of Brahmin pundits were just not known. Only the Ramayana and Mahabharat were widely enacted folktales.

The Upanishads were first discovered and translated into Persian by Dara Shikoh around 1650 from where it was translated into French and English before becoming more widely known in India. The Rigveda was extracted from a reluctant Brahmin in Benares by Coerdeveaux in 1767 and was eagerly studied by German scholars before being known in popular Indian languages. Even the Bhagavat Gita was first translated by Charles Wilkins in 1787 and was virtually unknown to most Indians till a century ago.

There was now a strong hankering for a unifying Hindu religion and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, in 1826, first began the use of the word Hindu to describe a religion instead of a name for the local people. Hinduism, as a religion, was only now born. This label, that tried to unify India’s numerous local religious practices, needed a common scripture comparable to a Bible or Quran and the Bhagavat Gita was clearly the best choice. If Shankaracharya’s Bhasya is traditionally regarded as the earliest commentary on the Gita it must have been added to the Mahabharata at a very late stage. The voluminous original text of the Gita was compressed and edited by many Indian philosophers like Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Tilak and others and Radhakrishnan’s version only appeared in 1948. Under the influence of now popular European standards of ethics and morality, many casteist and obscurantist sections were deleted and its inspiring philosophical core was strongly promoted.

7. A virulently revivalist Hinduism began with the freedom movement and increasingly strident Hindu leaders began to view India’s religion, culture and history in a much more emotionally charged manner. As the history of the Harappans, Mauryas, Sungas and Guptas began to emerge and people became aware of their great historic and literary heritage there was a growing belief that Hindu greatness had been deliberately suppressed by foreign invaders.

V. D. Sarvarkar (1883 -1966) whose militant hostility led to a prison sentence of 50 years followed by K. B. Hedgewar (1925 -40) and M. S. Golwalkar (1940 -73) were to add fuel to the flames especially among followers of linguistic groups like the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. Their glorified Brahmanism bitterly opposed anything to do with Muslims or Christians as well as their languages and culture. They began to ape Christianity with a vigorous evangelical campaign to bring millions of tribal people into the fold of their religious convictions. They also tried to ape Muslim fundamentalism by promoting a Jehadi fervor. Unlike the ’gentle Hindoo’ of colonial times groups of fanatical Hindus began to assert themselves. An expansion into politics followed with the formation of the RSS whose political arm the Jan Sangh evolved to become the BJP.

Many of these overlapped each other and the practiced forms of Hinduism contain many of these elements simultaneously. As the Brahmins assimilated the many traditions they wove a complex tapestry of mythology including the mythification of historical events and personages. These with elaborate rituals made a shallow and often baseless religiosity triumph over India’s rich and pluralistic heritage of religious philosophy and tolerance. The advent of cinema and TV allowed many producers to also elaborate and exaggerate many religious themes.