Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online

Hijṛās are defined in India as neither man nor woman, an alternative gender role that largely derives its power and meaning from Hinduism. Hijṛās are born males or, less commonly, hermaphrodites, who become hijṛās by adopting women’s clothing and behavior, and by formally joining the hijṛā community. As devotees of the Mother Goddess or Great Goddess (Mahādevī), impotent men are called to undergo the surgical removal of their genitals, an operation defined as nirvāṇ (lit. extinction [of desire]; h. emasculation operation). As devotees of the Mother Goddess and v…

The Himalayas span a vast geography that includes regions within the present-day countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan. The highest snow peaks are mostly situated along the southern border of Tibet, though some run through Kashmir. These snow peaks demarcate the northernmost extent of purely Hindu cultural practice. Beyond them, in Tibet and in parts of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, Tibetan Buddhist practices predominate. In this way, Hindu populations are largely l…

Hinduism and Buddhism: Ancient Period Hinduism and Buddhism: Modern PeriodBibliography

Of all the religions that have developed on South Asian soil, Hinduism and Buddhism have been the most often compared and their interrelations the most often studied. The cultural plurality that assumes such interrelation is evidenced already in the earliest Sanskrit literature (1200 BCE onward), but it becomes especially prominent in early Buddhist and Jain literature as well as in the Upaniṣads and then with considerable force in the Sanskrit epics and much subsequent Sanskrit and vernacular l…

Buddhism flourished in India for more than 15 hundred years. It gradually disappeared from the areas that today are defined by the modern nation of India, with its final disappearance probably from around the 12th century CE. During these more than 15 hundred years, Buddhist and Hindu traditions influenced each other in numerous ways, both because of disagreements and exchange of ideas and because of competition for power and ritual clients. However, Buddhism never disappeared from South Asia an…

The spiritual and religious traditions today known as "Hinduism" and "Christianity" developed through history largely apart from and knowing little of each other until the time of Western colonialism in Asia that started at the end of the 15th century. Neither of the two words "Hinduism" or "Christianity" is found in the original sources of its respective traditions. "Christianity" apparently emerged during the European Renaissance, and around the 16th century it became a common word to refer to…

English education had produced strange monsters…Strangest of all is the attempt to blend a selection of the guesses of modern European Scholars with the beliefs and prejudices of modern Indian devotees of particular sects. One such recent attempt is to weld the European theories…in violation of the conclusions of Indian scholarship, with the condemnation of the age long traditions of Brahmana scholars, characteristic of certain modern Saivas, the whole veneered with wild speculations of untutored ingenuity. (cited in Sambasiva Pillai, 1926, 1) This above excerpt is from a let…

Hinduism and Film: Bollywood Hinduism and Film: Tamil CinemaVijay Sharma, Vijay Devadas, and Selvaraj VelayuthamBibliography

At one point in the Mahābhārata, the great Indian epic, we come across a declaration so unusual that we pause to take in its dramatic import: yad na iha asti na tat kvacit (“what is not here is nowhere else to be found"; MBh. 1.56.34). The assertion is forthright, it lacks qualification, and, being part of an epic, has no ironic modality. It means what it says for in the Mahābhārata, which the text itself declares as a fifth Veda, all that is known and all that is yet to be written down are present. If this is a declaration of theme or substance, of content, there…

Tamil cinema with few exceptions is thoroughly rooted in Hinduism. Like the other cinemas of India, it is a cinema for the most part made by Hindus for a Hindu audience. Other religious denominations or identities are largely absent on screen and exist at the margins of popular Tamil cinema. Hinduism, therefore, is both a dominant and hegemonic force within Tamil cinema. By acknowledging that Tamil cinema is inherently Hindu at its core, we want to suggest that it has had an intimate and long-st…

Hinduism and Islam: Medieval and Premodern Period Hinduism and Islam: Modern Period North IndiaHinduism and Islam: Modern Period South India

This article examines the relations between Muslim culture and the Indian world, focusing primarily on the trends, intellectual approaches, and reactions in this regard that arose in the Muslim contexts of South Asia. It does not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of the topic, of which many important aspects have in fact hardly been studied, but is mainly concerned with the examination of three subject areas that are of central importance for the study of such contacts. The first section …

Under the thumb of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), Hindu–Muslim relations became strained as ambitious Islamic rulers groped through North India toward riches and fame in the south. The Rajput Chauhan Empire (8th–12th cents.) – led most notably by Pṛthivī Rāj III (1149–1192) – and a handful of other Hindu and Buddhist princely states had fallen to the Turkic Mamluks whose Muslim successors eventually set up their capital in Delhi in 1206, only to fall themselves three centuries later to the Tim…

Years of plundering by North Indian Muslims under the aegis of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) imperiled South India, exacerbating Hindu–Muslim relations in many precincts. By 1565, the culling of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara at the hands of Bijapur and Golconda Muslims – bolstered by North Indian sultanates – heeled lines of Hindu rule that had succeeded the once-glorious Kakatiyas and Yadavas in northern South India and the Pandyas and Hoysalas in the southern reaches. On the heels of the …

Jainism emerged around the 6th or 5th century BCE in the Gaṅgā basin of eastern India as a non-Brahmanical renunciatory tradition that advocated a strongly ascetic regimen as the means to obtain omniscience and liberation from rebirth. By approximately the 5th century CE the Jain community had bifurcated into two sectarian groups still in existence today, the Śvetāmbaras (whose male renunciants wear white robes) and the Digambaras (whose male renunciants are naked). Scholarly discussion of the r…

The term “Judaism” refers to the religion and culture whose teachings and practices are derived from the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition. Contrary to popular views that see Hinduism and Judaism at opposite ends of the religious landscape, there are compelling symmetries and affinities between Veda and Torah, and between rabbinic and Brahmanical traditions. Interactions between Hindus and Jews can be traced back in Jewish sources to the Hebrew Bible. Jews and Judaism represent one of the …

Shifting from Tradition to Modernity Until the 19th century, themes, motifs, and forms in the literature composed in modern languages in India were largely traditional. Artistic refinement and literary individualism were achieved through the ways and means of how given subjects were treated, and how repetition and mannerism were avoided in dealing with them. Subjects were mostly taken from the huge stock of religious imagination developed in the Sanskrit Purāṇas and in Sanskrit epic literature or from the bardic and folklore tradition.Within the framings of tradition, a hig…

The relationship between Hinduism and Sikhism is close, complex, and controversial and requires understanding of South Asian and, in particular, Punjabi religious culture (see below). The brief definition of Sikhism below introduces the challenges inherent in terminology and is followed by an impression of the religiosity of Punjabi people and an account of the varying perceptions of the relationship between Hinduism and Sikhism. This relationship is then mapped in terms of their interconnected …

Hinduism has never been a monolithic discourse; rather, it represents a confluence of diverse cults and sects, such as Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, Tantrism, and Śaktism, reflecting Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic practices, oral and textual traditions, and village and urban cultures. Indian local communities shape their identity around caste and tribe, for while anthropologists have considered the boundaries between these presumably discrete identities to be porous, allowing individuals to shift between …

The term “Zoroastrianism,” coined in the 19th century in a colonial context, is inspired by a Greek pseudo-etymological rendering (Zoro-astres, where the second element is reminiscent of the word for star) of the ancient Iranian name Zaraϑuštra (etymology unclear apart from the second element, uštra [camel]). This modern name of the religion reflects the emphasis on Zarathustra (Zoroaster) as its (presumed) founding figure or prophet.Zoroastrianism and Hinduism share a remote common original ancestry, but their historical trajectories over the millennia have…