Exploring the archaeology of Hinduism

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3919188
AutoresNayanjot Lahiri (University of Delhi), Elisabeth A Bacus (UCL Australia), Elisabeth Bacus
Año2004
Volumen36
Número3
Páginas313-325
Fecha de publicación2004-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438240420000282768
OpenAlexW2063482062
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas13

Hinduism’ is an English word that was first used in 1816 and 1817 by Raja Rammohan Roy, an Indian social reformer. Rammohan Roy, a Hindu by birth and an eloquent critic of the faith as it was then practiced, used it to describe the religion of his ancestors who believed in the unity of God as ‘real Hinduism’ (Lorenzen 1999: 631). The word itself comes from the ancient Persian term ‘Hindu’, a derivation from ‘Sindhu’ (the name of the Indus river), which was originally used to characterize an inhabitant of the lands to the east of the Indus. How and when ‘Hindu’ with its ethno-geographical connotation came to mean a community with identifiable socio-religious beliefs and practices is less certain, although Al-Biruni in the eleventh century AD offered a precise and detailed account of such beliefs and practices. As the papers in this volume show, material traces that constitute the archaeology of Hindu worship and belief are observable in South Asia in the second half of the first millennium BC and in Southeast Asia beginning in the early–mid- first millennium AD. Hinduism remains a living religion, with more than 76 per cent of people in India, 85 per cent in Nepal and a very small percentage in Southeast Asia (as it lost its dominance in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and thus, for example, only about 5 per cent in Singapore, 2 per cent in Indonesia, though with more than 90 per cent of the Balinese, and a very small group of Chams in south-central Vietnam) continuing to describe themselves as Hindu.\nWhat are the forms of worship and ritual that mark out Hinduism as a religion

Archaeology · Hinduism · Linguistics · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · History · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies