Hinduism

By Phiroz Mehta

A peninsula of South Asia was destined to become the cradle of four of the Great Religions of the world and to mother all the others in course of time. It was a great forest land. West and south and east of it was the ocean. The north-east and north were hemmed in by the world’s mightiest mountains, the Himalayas. But in the mountains on the north-west there were a few passes which afforded convenient routes of entry.

The earliest immigrants

Now a forest land with warm, wet summers and several great rivers is very suitable for human settlement. There is fertile soil, good pasture for cattle, and an assured water supply. The earliest settlers came about seven thousand years ago from far-away Africa and Western Asia. They were black-skinned people, the rather short Negritos and the taller proto-Australoids. They made little clearings all over this forest land and settled down to a simple village life.

Some of these people believed in a Supreme God. Others believed in a Supreme Goddess, who, they felt, must necessarily have a husband, a God-Consort. Rather more intriguing were their ideas of the soul. They believed it was shaped like a little man, a manikin, and was situated inside the head. It was made of invisible soul-matter, or life-essence, which could not be destroyed. After death, this indestructible life-essence passed into the earth, fertilized the crops, and when food containing such soul-matter was eaten by your wife, it appeared again when she had her baby. This idea is one of the sources of the later popular belief that an undying part of yourself, your soul, lives again and again in this world in new bodies.

About two thousand years passed by before brown-skinned settlers from Sumeria and Armenia came into this land of villages. They built the first well-planned cities with good roads and drainage systems. Their houses were made of large, well-baked bricks and had bathrooms and indoor sanitation. They traded with the inhabitants of their old home cities such as Elam and Kish, Sumer and Akkad, along the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris and by the shores of the Persian Gulf. They made beautiful ornaments of gold, silver and ivory, pottery painted mostly with geometrical patterns, vessels, tools and weapons of copper and bronze, and children’s toys of metal and terracotta. They had a pictographic script; but unfortunately we have not yet learned how to decipher it. They had some knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and music. In fact, a civilization as advanced as any other in that age flourished there five thousand years ago.

Several of their old cities, such as Harappā and Mohenjo-dāro, which in course of time got buried under desert sands, have been excavated since 1922. Many small, carved or moulded figures and ornaments worn as charms were unearthed. They give us a clue to some of the religious beliefs of the people. They believed in a Mother Goddess, and also in many animal-gods and tree-gods. They had their own system of prayer and worship. It is likely that they knew Yoga. They may have associated this with a Supreme Being, who, much later, came to be called Śiva.

The Aryans, and how the word ‘Hindu’ arose

After another thousand years or so of this civilization had rolled by, tall, virile, haughty, fair-skinned people came southwards through the Central Asian steppe lands into Afghanistan. They were warrior herdsmen, who rode horses and had iron swords. Some went westwards and established dominion in Western Iran. Others turned eastwards over the mountains. Through the deep defiles they swept, and rode as conquerors into the vast, fertile plainland watered by the mighty Sindhu river and its four great tributaries, the land we call the Punjab to this day. Their Iranian cousins spoke of them as the settlers on the banks, not of the Sindhu but of the Hindu River. Thus, these settlers came to be known as Hindus, the land they ruled as Hindu-stan (that is, the standing place, or place of establishment of the Hindus), and their religion as Hinduism, after it had gone through certain changes. The original language of these people is quite lost. It is said to be the parent of Vedic and Sanskrit in Hindustan, of Avestan in Iran, of Greek and Latin and of the Slavonic and Teutonic languages in the Western World. Together, they all make up the Indo-European family of languages.

Hitherto, the peninsula had seen two stages of development; first, the village settlements; second, the rise of city-states. The new settlers ushered in the third stage; the establishment of great kingdoms. These conquerors called themselves Aryans, that is, the noble or the worthy ones. The country under their lordship they named Āryāvarta, and also Bhāratavarsha. Their own Aryan society was composed of three main groups; the Rājanyas who were the rulers and all those engaged in the task of government; the Brahmins, who were the saints and sages, teachers and priests; and the Vaiśhyas who were the merchants and traders. The conquered dark-skinned people were called Dasyus, that is, servants who performed all the menial tasks.

Continued in part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6

Comments

This article is a good one as it brings up some of the most important highlights of Hinduism — how it is not just a system to take one to heaven or some such wishes of the ego.

T. C. Gopalakrishnan, 9^th November 2011