Reddit reviews India: A History. Revised and Updated
We found 8 Reddit comments about India: A History. Revised and Updated. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Reddit reviews India: A History. Revised and UpdatedWe found 8 Reddit comments about India: A History. Revised and Updated. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Most of the answers here are providing opinions, rather than actual historical context. I am a practicing Hindu, so let me add my own voice to this.
Most Hindus believe in the supreme authority of the Vedas, the four sacred books written in Sanskrit. There are many other supplementary works around them.
The three main concepts are
The religious belief and practices can be divided into roughly four categories -
Hindus believe there are 330 million gods, which is assumed that it is the founder's estimate of number of unique creatures in nature.
Most Hindus will consider either Shiva or Vishnu or one of Vishnu's incarnations - Krishna, Ram etc. to be supreme. Among others, most will consider the goddess Durga in that position
All belief systems in Hinduism can be seen through this lens. Some like Swami Vivekananda tried to thread the needle by saying it is hard to envision and believe in a formless omnipresent being so most people find it easier to worship through a physical form, like an idol, with the thought of eventually graduating to more complex forms of worship.
Such a complex belief system means Hindus just assume they are Hindu at birth. There was no process of converting to Hindu (which has changed with ISKCON and some other institutions having rituals to convert people to Hinduism) When Hinduism is under threat, they simply absorb the other religion's ideas. When Buddhism was on the rise, Hindus decided being vegetarian was an important part of the religion and Buddha was made into one of the Avataras(appearings) of the God Vishnu. Hindus will also go and worship in a mosque or church or have the idol of Mother Mary or Jesus Christ next to their own religions idols in their house place of worship.
Lastly, this post is not really worthy of being in r/history but hope the mods will let it stand or at least inform me before deleting.
I am from Goa, a state in India which was ruled by the Portuguese, rather than the British. While the Portuguese managed to convert most people to Christianity, some people escaped by going deep in the jungles and establishing their temples and deities there. You can see it today, with most temples within a few square miles of each other.
Here are some sources
I find history is deeply murky on Hinduism and pre-colonial India but this is what I could find.
Personally, I am a follower of Vivekananda.
Edit - Edited for formatting.
Edit 2 - Adding a link to the Goa Inquisition by the Portuguese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_Inquisition This was used to punish those who had been converted to Christianity but had secretly returned to their original rituals and beliefs. I don't know about Muslims but converting Hindus was relatively easy. The Brahmins of the time believed in the superiority of their own religion and had numerous restrictions on the populace and ways one could be outcast. For example, traveling by sea or drinking tea in a porcelain cup or even eating bread. The Portuguese and the British missionaries would simply drop bread in the community village and whoever drank water from that would be ostracized by their own brethren and considered to have converted to Christianity. Ironically, it took the British unification of India and the liberalization of the religion to enable it to survive the onslaught.
Even today, in Goa, if someone visits the temple and mentions their overseas trip, they have to go through a purification, involving a ritual bath, cleansing chanting by a priest and being sprinkled with a drop of cow urine before entering the inner sanctum and worshipping.
For modern India, Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi. The dude digs up every memo, every administrative note, personal letter available, to narrate the story of India from around independence till current times (still have to get there). Lots of details, but it is sometimes quite gripping. The whole correspondence between Chou En Lai and Nehru, culminating in the War of '62, is particularly worth reading. Highlights the different governance of the two countries, and causes for India's defeat. There's a lot more. The story of Partition, and how Vallabhai Patel and his secretary (VP Menon) worked to accomplish the daunting task of integrating the over 500 princely states into one, democratic Indian Union is essential.
For ancient India, I am just starting. I just got into John Keay's India: A History. This is a beautiful book. Starts with India's most ancient known civilisation, the Harappas, and proceeds to chronicle the evolution of the country ever since, from the consequential "invasion" of Arya, to the skirmish with Alexander, the rise of Mauryan empire (and Ashoka the great) and the Indian "Dark Age" (that's as far as I have gotten!), and beyond (emergence of the Gupta empire is just around the corner). It is pragmatic, unbiased, thorough narrative of this subcontinent. I really enjoyed the chapter on Vedic era; finally got to know what is reliable and what isn't from that era, and a brief glimpse into how historians work to check the veracity of all the bold claims in the two great epics of Indian literature, Mahabharata and Ramayana. There is also frequent mention of the lineage of kings in Puranas (it is mostly unreliable, with little to know details of the time periods).
This is a novice beginning for me, and I will have to re-read these two books alone several times, to cement any idea of the complexity and diversity of Indian history. Maybe someday, I will get to move on to European history and everything in between!
It was suggested I post here. I have to say it's pretty outside of my location and timeframe. Most of my reading is centered around Buddhism and what I know about India that's not political in nature is mostly centered around Buddhism. Even the concepts I know of Hinduism are usually through a Buddhist lens.
What I do know about the development I also can't provide a source. I studied at the Royal Thimphu College and once sat down with a Bengali professor who explained her own dissertation to me about the development of the Varna system in India, which ended up being a primer on "Brahmanism." (Which then led to a long discussion on the inaccuracy of the term "Hinduism" which was developed post-independence as a response to the development of Pakistan for Muslims, India for Hindus. When I presented the irony that "India" and "Hindu" both stem from the "Indus River" which is currently in Pakistan, Runa, aforementioned professor, winked at me and said "Exactly. Hindus are political, Brahmanists are religious." The logic being that Brahmanists derive religious authority from the Brahmin Varna, just as Christians derive religious authority from Christ, and Muslims from submission to God.)
Anyway, I'll just point out some of the books that have helped me in understanding this complex religion and maybe you can go on with your search from there.
Originally I was interested in Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History but found out it was full of selective information and skewed perspectives. I was more interested in a general history of India and fell upon John Keay's India: A History which he describes as "A historiography of India as well as a history." And he does go over developments of Brahmanism threaded with the rise and fall of conquerors through the region.
My introduction to Brahmanism (though he DOES refer to it as Hinduism) was Huston Smith's The World's Religions which doesn't go over the history as much of any of the religions, but is a nice starting point, especially when comparing say Buddhism with Brahmanism, which most people regularly do. It's also a good outliner for the different Brahmanist traditions (or at least the major trends in Brahmanism).
Finally, probably the most accurate to your original question though it has a broader focus and a point to make, Karen Armstrong's *The Great Transformation remains one of my favorite books on the Axial Age in which she covers the religious shifts that occurred more or less simultaneously in Greece, the Levant, India, and China. Of interest to you would be the Vedic response to the growth of Buddhism and Jainism, the development of the Mahabharata, and the changing understandings of the Vedas and Upanishads. It's a pretty great book, and Karen Armstrong can of course lead you further down the path of Indian religious history.
Hope that helps at all.
I am a Historian I think many of those books highlighted are not really a master list but a good jumping off point to delve into the region. I would suggest for India to read " India after Gandhi" http://www.amazon.com/India-After-Gandhi-History-Democracy/dp/0060958588.
Also a good primer would be: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802145582/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944579842&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0060958588&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1NYR2DTB6GR13K5JBN1S
For history of India .. a good place to start is john keay's India
http://www.amazon.in/India-History-Revised-John-Keay/dp/0802145582
John Keay covers this in his book, India: A History. Whenever this fact is mentioned I feel the urge to post because he makes it clear that the mistake was remedied ASAP but the pre-existing sentiment caused rumors to linger.
China: A History and India: A History by John Keay.
http://www.amazon.com/India-A-History-Revised-Updated/dp/0802145582