Does Hinduism exist?

This is an edited version of a talk given by the writer at a discussion held at Queen Mary, University of London, 14 October 2024 on the question “Does Hinduism exist?”, in which Dr. Koenraad Elst and Dr. Rishi Handa also took part. The unsuccessful attempt to cancel the discussion is the subject of another post.

The question for discussion tonight, “Does Hinduism exist?” comes about because of my engagement over the last 15 years or so with the research programme of SN Balagangadhara at the University of Ghent in Belgium. As a result of that engagement, I became more and more interested in the kind of questions that they were raising and the answers they were giving. To my mind, that research programme is, I wouldn't even say “one of the best”; I think it's the best research programme that exists in the world on the comparative study of Europe and India or, more broadly, the comparative study of Asia and the West as larger cultural units. It is called the Comparative Science of Cultures (CSC). The kind of questions they've been asking have not been asked in other research programmes of Orientalism, its predecessor in theology, or postcolonial studies. The questions that they've asked have provoked us to think completely differently about the study of India as well as the West.

I consider it indispensable that people should acquaint themselves with the results of that research programme. It claims to be a scientific programme for justifiable reasons, and it’s also helping us to think differently about how the West or, more specifically, Europe, or even Britain should reorient its relationship with India. That's one of the big questions of our day. It's not just to do with the free trade agreement, which is, if you like, a very prosaic manifestation of a larger problem. But it's also about the understanding between different cultures. Without the fundamental questions that are being asked in this research programme, we cannot arrive at a closer understanding. We're stuck with the old models, and those are not really helping us to advance our thinking or research, or our relationship. So, I highly recommend that research programme to you.

In his book published in 1994, ‘The Heathen in His Blindness’: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, Balagangadhara makes the claim that Asia has no native religions. In doing so, he also provides an alternative theory of religion that is not dependent on the pre-existing theological default models on which all the pre-existing theories of religion depend. In other words, he provides a non-theological theory of religion. And as part of that theory, he argues that Asia has no native religions. He also says that Hinduism does not exist. Of course, that's a pretty shocking claim to many people, including the people who tried to cancel this particular event, because their [the would-be cancellers] first point of departure was to say, that to even ask the question, “Does Hinduism exist?” seems to be insulting to many millions of people around the world. Well, we want to discuss that because it arises from a very serious scientific research programme.

The majority opinion, obviously, is that something like Hinduism exists. It's the dominant religion of India and, of course, many people in other parts of the world also follow Hinduism. That's not the only take but if you work hard enough, you can see that the existence of Hinduism is the default position of their hypothesis, theorization and so on. So that is the majority or predominant view. The CSC research programme departs from that conventional account and Balagangadhara says Hinduism doesn't exist. So, what are reasons that he can make such a preposterous-sounding claim?

One of the entry points into this problem, you might say, is to ask what a theory does, let's say the theory of gravity. It helps us to pull together phenomena that we might otherwise think are disconnected. So, what does the theory of gravity do? It connects objects falling to earth, to the movement in the tides, to planetary motion. So, it makes connections between all of these different phenomena and links them under one theory. Actually, something like that has happened in the construction of Hinduism. So, is the claim that Hinduism is like gravity? No, because gravity exists, but Hinduism doesn't exist. There is a difference in the kind of claim with respect to Hinduism. It does have a theoretical background. So, it took a theory to produce the conceptualization of Hinduism. But the question is, was it a scientific theory? And the answer is no. The theoretical background to the conceptualization of Hinduism is a theoretical framework that we refer to as Christian theology. It’s Christian theology which provides the background framework for us to be able to conceive of something like Hinduism. Of course, in so doing, there is a kind of unification of different phenomena, pretty much like gravity. So, the virtue of a theory is that it links different phenomena, but the difference might be, well, is it really a scientific theory? And the argument is, no, it's not a scientific theory, but it refers back to theology. Any theory about Hinduism doesn’t help you to make predictions as a scientific theory should, do useful things, etc. Whereas theories about gravity are so different.

So, it does link disparate phenomena together under the umbrella of Hinduism. Rishi mentioned the caste system, so that could be one of those things; the ladoos in the Tirupati Balaji temple in India; the Dharma shastra literature or the Vedas. A variety of different phenomena, which you otherwise might not have found under a common designation suddenly began to find a designation, and that was under the auspices of the Western approach to India, which had as its background a Christian theological framework. It's only because of that that they managed to unite what to Indians would have seemed as completely disconnected phenomena and put them together, and said to the rest of the world, of course, to themselves as well, that here we have something which is identifiable as a coherent entity.

Now this unity is a unity only because of the Western culture and according to the understanding of the Western culture. And it took a theological framework and, in particular, the Protestant Christian theological framework. The Catholics previously didn’t say there is such a thing as Hinduism. Later, of course, they began to mimic what the Protestants said. Muslims in earlier periods hadn’t said there is such a thing as Hinduism. They identified something they thought was Indian religion, as did the Catholics, but it took the Protestant British, or the Anglo Protestant, missionaries to provide expression to an entity which they thought was Hinduism.

At this point, I want to introduce a technical term which occurs in the CSC research programme. And that is the concept of “experiential entities”. Balagangadhara says that experiential entities occur because of the effort of one or other culture. So, what we have in Hinduism is the creation of an experiential entity as a result of the kind of background framework that the Western writers, thinkers, etc. took for granted and, in that conceptualization also lies one of the other clues that we can use to figure out whether Hinduism actually exists or is just an expression of one culture when it's studying another culture. And it's the latter because it's a result of experience, the experience of a culture. What it should tell us is that people from outside their culture cannot access that experience because it's experiential. How can I access your experience as a human being? Now magnify that to a culture. It's because of your own background assumptions that you create something which you experience according to your cultural standards, presuppositions or whatever. So that's what Hinduism is.

You can put this idea to a test right now. I said earlier that almost everybody in the world thinks that there is such a thing as Hinduism. But if you start to ask Indians what they think is Hinduism, they'll give you very incoherent responses. And that's one of the tests of the theory of Hinduism and whether or not it exists. Is it accessible to everybody in the world? No, it's not. It's a thing that exists in and for the Western culture, as somebody called Edward Said once said. And of course, Edward said talks of many other types of experiential entities such as the Orient. The Orient is an experiential entity because it exists in and for the West. In the same way, a smaller part of that larger idea of the Orient is the entity of Hinduism.

Of course, many people from India say, “if you don't have Hinduism, how are we going to protect ourselves?” Even Indians abroad say, well, if you don't have Hinduism, we don't have anything. We don't have any protective framework according to which we can defend ourselves from outside attacks and so on. I find it difficult to understand that question or the conceptualization of the problem in the first place, but let me ask a further question. If something doesn't exist, how can it protect you? I would actually go further. If something is preventing you from formulating new ideas, if it's preventing you from accessing your experience, how can it help to protect you? So, I think this argument which you hear a lot, that we need something like Hinduism, how do we protect ourselves or how do we defend ourselves otherwise? doesn't hold water. Maybe I've said enough for you to acknowledge that the conception of Hinduism has been a little bit destabilized in your own thinking.

Like many research programmes or research efforts, part of what they do is to debunk pre-existing frameworks, existing theories and so on, because that's part of their job. To produce something new, you have to say why the old system is outdated or doesn't work. It doesn't last when it's been subject to testing and so on. So, in a similar way, the debunking element is being done. But then you may want to ask, “well, what is there to replace it?” So, for example, you may ask a question like “if there is no Hinduism, what is there?” In a sense, that question is meaningless because you can always ask, well, if there are no unicorns, what is there in the world? It's a kind of absurd question, right?

One of the things that we have to also acknowledge is that when the conception of Hinduism was given birth to it was also a false religion. So, the Christians said, “you are practising devil worship, you have a false religion, you have false priests”. So, all of that baggage went into making up what Hinduism is. So, Indians come along and say, well, we want to own this thing. At some point they must chip away. “You know, our beliefs are not false. Our priests are not false.” Obviously, you can't say that Brahmins are true priests because that just doesn't make sense to any Indian. So, you get into all kinds of knots because you're still trapped within the original Christian framework, the theological framework, even at the point of trying to contest it. So, what you end up doing is decorating or redecorating Orientalism. You don't displace it; you just add to its strength. I said it prevents thinking; it prevents reflection on experience. Indians anywhere in the world are in this sort of problematic situation, cognitively, that they can only think about their own traditions within the framework of something that Hinduism is or was. But they can't think outside the strictures of the Christian framework that was imposed on them. And so, I think that one of the virtues of the CSC research programme is that it breaks down and forces you to ask the kind of unicorn question.

I'll give you just one reply to that kind of [unicorn] question in a way which helps us to orient ourselves in the world going forward. And that is that the CSC research programme does provide a hypothesis for culture. It conceptualizes the Indian culture and the Western culture. It says that there are cultures in existence, but it also says why they are cultures. The standard story you have in the West in, say, Western anthropology, sociology and so on is that culture is about practices which are pursuant to certain beliefs that people hold. Well, the CSC research programme does something different. What Balagangadhara says is that cultures arise as a result of learning processes. Not only that, but the learning processes also arranged themselves. Because there are different learning processes in the world used by human communities, for a particular culture a particular type of learning process takes hold, becomes maybe dominant over the other learning processes. And what gets constituted is a culture. And I'm not going to get into the detail now, but that is partly how Balagangadhara answers the question of the cultural differences between the West and India or Asia.