The History of Hinduism

This page covers the history shared by Hinduism's many traditions, described on the Branches page, and names the tradition where accounts differ. "Hinduism" is an umbrella term for many related traditions.¹

How did Hinduism begin?

Hindu tradition and historians answer this question differently, so both accounts appear here side by side. Neither names a single founder: the tradition holds that its truth has no beginning, and historians describe a gradual blending of many sources.²¹

What is the debate over the Indus Valley and the Vedas?

Scholars disagree over whether the people who composed the Vedas came into South Asia from outside or were native to it. The migration view is the majority one: Akhilesh Pillalamarri, in The Diplomat, writes that most modern scholars hold it, and Michel Danino, who rejects it, calls the later dating of Vedic culture the dominant opinion.¹¹¹² The Indus Valley Civilization flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BCE. Its signs have not been deciphered, and some scholars, Witzel among them, doubt that they form a full script, so its people's language is unknown.¹¹¹

The migration view. Witzel holds that the Vedas were composed by Indo-Aryan speakers newly arrived in the northwest.¹ A 2019 genetic study by Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues reports that ancestry from the Central Asian steppe reached South Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE. Groups who are traditional keepers of Sanskrit texts tend, with exceptions, to carry more of it than expected. The authors argue that these movements were likely routes for the spread of Indo-European languages, the family that includes Sanskrit.¹³

The indigenous view. Supporters of this view hold that Vedic culture was native to India and older than the mainstream dating. Danino, an independent scholar and guest professor at IIT Gandhinagar, notes that the Rig Veda praises the Sarasvati as a mighty river. Archaeologists, he says, date the drying up of the river usually identified with it, in its central basin, to around 1900 BCE. He argues that the Rig Veda was composed while the river was in full flow, which he says points to a date before 2600 BCE, when the river first broke up.¹²

Danino also points to fire altars at Indus sites and other links between Indus and Vedic culture, and reports horse remains at over a dozen sites.¹²

The Rakhigarhi genome. In 2019, a team led by the archaeologist Vasant Shinde, with Narasimhan among its coauthors, published the genome of a person buried at Rakhigarhi, an Indus site. It showed no steppe ancestry, and the authors wrote that their findings suggest farming in South Asia was begun by hunter-gatherers, without a large-scale movement of people from the first farming cultures of the Fertile Crescent.¹⁴¹⁵

Readers drew opposite conclusions from the study. The Quint reported that some news stories said the study disproved the migration theory, while the writer Tony Joseph argued that it fits that theory, which places the migration after the Indus period.¹⁵

The politics. The question also carries political weight in India. Akhilesh Pillalamarri, writing in The Diplomat from the migration side, says many Hindu nationalists hold the indigenous view, and that the debate touches India's demographic, religious, and ethnic origins.¹¹ Danino, from the other side, objects that critics present the Sarasvati identification as a recent Hindutva theory, when a French geographer first proposed it in 1855 and European scholars soon accepted it.¹²

What are the key periods in Hindu history?

When	What happened
3102 BCE, by the Puranas' reckoning	The Kali Yuga, the present age, begins.101
About 2600 to 1900 BCE	The Indus Valley Civilization flourishes.1
About 1500 to 500 BCE, by historians' dating	The Vedas are composed.1
From 320 CE	The Gupta period; the great Puranas set history within cyclical time.19
6th or 7th century CE (sources differ)	The Devi Mahatmya presents the Goddess as supreme.1617
5th to 9th centuries CE, in Carman's dating	Tamil poets compose devotional hymns to Shiva and Vishnu.18
788 to 820 CE in the Sringeri monastery's account; the 8th century, as many scholars believe, or the 9th in other accounts	Shankara, regarded as the promoter of Advaita Vedanta as a distinct school, lives and, by Sringeri's account, founds its monastery.19202122
1017 to 1137 CE by tradition; 1077 to 1157 CE in recent scholarship	Ramanuja, the chief teacher of Vishishtadvaita, lives.23
1238 to 1317 CE in one account; 1296 to 1386 CE in another	Madhva, from whom the Dvaita school began, lives.219
From the 13th century CE	Islam's influence grows, under the sultans and later the Mughals.124
1828 and 1875 CE	Two reform movements, the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj, begin.1
1893 CE	Vivekananda speaks at the Parliament of Religions.2
From the 1920s	The Hindutva movement takes shape.1
1960s	ISKCON is founded in the United States.25

How did devotion change Hinduism?

Devotion, called bhakti, became one of the main paths of Hindu practice. John Carman, in the Encyclopedia of Religion, describes the path of bhakti as exclusive devotion to a figure who embodies ultimate reality. Its followers hold that ultimate reality is a personal Lord who both transcends and creates the universe. Historians find traces of it in a few Upanishads and strong expression in the epics, including the Bhagavad Gita.¹⁸

Carman dates the earliest devotional poetry to about 200 CE, in praise of the Tamil god Murukan. He dates two great bodies of Tamil hymns, one to Shiva and one to Vishnu, to between the fifth and ninth centuries. Tradition dates these poet-saints to the early Kali Yuga, within its first five thousand years. Carman ties this dating to a common theme: devotion is an easier path suited to a weaker age.¹⁸

The twelve Tamil poet-saints devoted to Vishnu are called Alvars. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, Vasudha Narayanan writes, the Sri Vaishnava community that revered their poems held them equal to the Sanskrit Vedas.⁹ Ramanuja became that community's leading philosopher.²³ Witzel traces the devotional movement northward, to texts such as the Bhagavata Purana, and east, to Jayadeva's Gita Govinda (12th century). In eastern India, Chaitanya (1486 to 1533, in Witzel's dating) spread devotion to Krishna.¹⁹

How did Hinduism spread beyond India?

Hindu traditions reached Southeast Asia early. By the fifth century CE, Narayanan writes, Vishnu was worshiped in Cambodia, where Vishnu temples flourished.⁹

From about 1838, Indians crossed the sea as indentured laborers to work the sugar plantations of Guyana, and many stayed.²⁶ In 2020, Hindus were the largest religious group in Mauritius, as well as in India and Nepal. In 2020, by Pew Research Center estimates, about 95 percent of the world's Hindus lived in India. Outside Asia and the Pacific, the United States had the most Hindus (3.0 million), followed by the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates (1.1 million each).²⁷

Hindu teachers also found Western followers. In the 1960s, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a Gaudiya Vaishnava teacher, founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in the United States.²⁵ The spread map shows these changes over time.

How did Islam and British rule shape Hinduism?

Each brought new influences, in Witzel's account. From the thirteenth century, Islam's influence grew, and the boundaries between communities stayed soft. Muslim Sufi saints and Hindu devotees overlapped.¹

There was conflict too. In a 2024 interview, the historian Richard Eaton described the desecration of temples under the sultans and the Mughals, and also by Hindu kings. He argues that the targets were royal temples linked to defeated or rebellious rulers, for political rather than religious reasons.²⁴ The writer Girish Shahane disputes this, arguing that Eaton counts the demolition of dozens of shrines as single cases, and that some orders were driven more by religious doctrine than politics.²⁸

Under the influence of British rule and Christian missionaries, reform movements arose, which Witzel groups under his label "Neo-Hinduism." He names reformers such as Dayanand (1827 to 1883) and Vivekananda, who in his account often drew on Christian or Western ideas.¹ Vivekananda himself presented the religion he spoke for as resting on the Vedas.² The Brahmo Samaj (1828) began with social reform, and the Arya Samaj (1875) called for a return to Vedic values.¹

What shaped Hinduism in the modern era?

In the modern era, Hinduism spread worldwide and also became a force in Indian politics. Hindutva, or "Hinduness," is a movement active since the 1920s, whose aims were set out by writers such as Savarkar (1923) and Golwalkar (1939). Political parties drawing on it have been active since the 1980s.¹

By the Pew Research Center's count, there were 1.2 billion Hindus in 2020, 14.9 percent of the world's population.²⁹ For more on Hindus today, see the Today page. The comparison Christianity vs Hinduism sets the two traditions side by side, and the Resources page lists the books in the series.