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1. General Situation India, consisting of 26 states and 6 union territories, became an independent nation-state in 1947, when British rule ended and the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Little is known about its early inhabitants. Advanced civilization has existed in India since 3000 b.c. but has undergone much change and destruction as successive waves of immigrants invaded from the northwest. Indo-European groups entered in the second millennium b.c., and from their interming…

A first attempt at communication between Hinduism and Christianity was made by Robert de Nobili (1577–1656), who, with a view to missionary effectiveness (Mission 3), adopted the lifestyle of a sannyasin, or itinerant ascetic, in order to understand Hinduism better. Only with the Hindu renaissance in the 18th and 19th centuries (through Rammohan Ray and others; Hinduism 3.4) did a dialogic exchange begin. Hindu reformers found in Jesus a divine incarnation, gained inspiration from him, and made …

1. Characteristics Hinduism is a very complex, contradictory, yet coherent nexus of writings, rites, and ways of life. It is not an organized religion stabilized by dogmatic unity but an order that is believed and lived out as supratemporal and cosmic (as sanātana dharma, “traditional duty” or “traditional practices”) and that regulates precisely all the spheres of individual life and the arrangement of social groups (Caste). It unites in itself widely divergent religious types, from personalistic theism to a doctrine of transpersonal is…