Unit 11 · Hindu Texts in History

Around 2600 BCE, large planned cities rose along the Indus River and its neighbors, in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. The best known are Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Scholars call this the Indus or Harappan civilization.

The cities had brick houses, drains, wells and workshops. Traders sent beads and seals as far as Mesopotamia. Around 1900 BCE, the big cities declined. Scholars link this to changing rivers and climate, though they still debate the causes.

What did these people believe? We do not know for sure. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro may have been used for ritual washing. Many clay female figures may be linked to worship. But the Indus script is still undeciphered, so no text tells us directly.

Some features seem to echo later Hindu life. The seated figure on the famous seal reminds many people of Shiva as lord of animals. Ritual bathing is important in Hinduism today. Some see the pipal leaf on seals as a sacred plant.

Other scholars are careful. They say we cannot prove what any symbol meant without reading the script. The Pashupati idea came from reading the seal in light of much later texts. It may be right, or it may not.

Good historians label their claims. What is known: the cities, the seals, the Great Bath. What is inferred: possible links to later practice. What is unknown: the language and the beliefs. This habit helps in every part of history.

After the Indus cities declined, a different world appears in the texts. Scholars call c. 1500–500 BCE the Vedic period, after the Vedas. The Rig Veda describes cattle herders, chariots and fire rituals in the northwest.

Over time, Vedic culture spread east along the Ganges River. People farmed rice, raised cattle and built towns. New texts appeared: the other Vedas, the Brahmanas, and then the early Upanishads.

Scholars debate how Vedic culture began, including whether its language came from outside South Asia. Most say it did. Others disagree. Many Hindus hold that the Vedas are eternal. This course names these views without deciding between them.

Around the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, northern India had growing cities, kingdoms and trade. It was also an age of seekers. Some left home to wander and think. They were called shramanas, strivers.

Two of them founded lasting traditions. Mahavira taught the Jain path of nonviolence and self-discipline. The Buddha taught a middle way to end suffering. Their dates are debated; many scholars place the Buddha in the 5th century BCE.

The early Upanishads come from the same broad age. All these traditions spoke of karma, rebirth and freedom, but in different ways. Scholars study how they shaped one another. Hindus, Buddhists and Jains each tell this history from their own view.

The epics did not appear all at once, most scholars say. Bards retold them for generations, adding stories and teachings. By about 400 CE, they were close to their present form. The Bhagavad Gita is often dated to about the 2nd century BCE or later.

Hindu tradition tells the history differently. It places Rama’s life in the Treta age and the Mahabharata war at the end of the Dvapara age. Many traditional reckonings begin the present age, the Kali Yuga, in 3102 BCE, near the time of Krishna’s departure.

These are different kinds of dating. One is based on language and layers in the text. The other is based on traditional reckoning of cosmic ages. Knowing both helps you understand Hindu classmates and scholarly books.

The Manusmriti, or Laws of Manu, is a dharma-shastra, a book of rules about duty and law. Scholars date it to about 200 BCE–200 CE. It covers daily life, rituals, kingship, marriage, crime and punishment.

Some of its rules rank people by varna and limit women’s independence. In the 1700s and 1800s, British colonial courts treated it as Hindu law, which gave it more power than it had held in many parts of India.

Many Hindus have rejected those rules. In 1927, B.R. Ambedkar publicly burned a copy to protest caste injustice. Other reformers said the Manusmriti is smriti, not shruti, and can be set aside. Some Hindus still value parts of it. Scholars study it as a window into its time.

The Gupta dynasty ruled much of northern India from about 320 to 550 CE. Many historians have called it a classical age. Sanskrit poetry, science and art flourished. The poet Kalidasa probably wrote in this era.

Gupta kings supported Vishnu worship, and many also supported Buddhists and Jains. Some of the earliest surviving stone Hindu temples date from this time, like the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, with carvings of Vishnu.

Much of the Puranas took shape in and after this period. Worship of murtis in temples grew in importance. Some historians today warn that ’golden age’ can overlook the lives of ordinary and lower-caste people.

After 600 CE, kingdoms in the south, such as the Pallavas and Cholas, built great temples. The Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur, finished around 1010 CE, is dedicated to Shiva. Temples became centers of worship, music, dance and learning.

Over the next centuries, Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva taught. Bhakti poets sang. Muslim rulers came to govern much of India from about 1200 CE. Hindu and Muslim cultures met, sometimes in conflict and often in exchange, as with Kabir and Dara Shikoh.

From the 1700s, the British gained control. Printing presses and English translations spread Hindu texts widely. Reform movements in the 1800s, like the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, looked back to the Upanishads and Vedas to shape Hindu life.

You have now seen two kinds of dates. Scholarly dates come from archaeology, language study and manuscripts. They are estimates, so they carry ’c.’ and change as new evidence appears.

Traditional dates come from Hindu reckoning of the yugas, genealogies in the Puranas and teachings of the tradition. They place the Vedas beyond time and the epics in very ancient ages. They matter deeply to many Hindus.

A careful writer can name both: ’Scholars date the Ramayana to c. 400 BCE–200 CE; Hindu tradition places Rama in the Treta age.’ This respects both scholarship and belief, and lets readers see how each view reasons.

In the jungle of northwest Cambodia stands Angkor Wat, one of the largest religious buildings in the world. King Suryavarman II built it in the early 1100s CE and dedicated it to Vishnu.

Its long galleries are covered with stone carvings. One wall shows the battle of Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata. Another shows the battle of Lanka from the Ramayana. Another shows the churning of the ocean of milk from the Puranas.

Later, Angkor Wat became a Buddhist site, and Buddhist monks still care for it. It appears on Cambodia’s flag. Its carvings show how far Hindu texts traveled, carried by traders, priests and kings across Southeast Asia.

Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country. But on the island of Bali, most people practice a form of Hinduism, often called Agama Hindu Dharma. They make daily offerings of flowers in small palm-leaf trays.

Balinese and Javanese artists perform the Ramayana and Mahabharata in dance and in wayang kulit, shadow puppet theater. A puppet master, the dalang, voices every character behind a lit screen, sometimes all night.

In Thailand, the Ramayana is retold as the Ramakien, and its scenes are painted in the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Across Southeast Asia, the epics became local stories, shaped by each culture.

Texts do not move on their own. People carry them. In early centuries, traders and priests brought Hindu ideas by sea to Southeast Asia. Local kings used Sanskrit names and built temples to Vishnu and Shiva.

Later, translators carried texts into new languages: Persian under Dara Shikoh, then Latin, German and English. In the 1800s and 1900s, Indian workers moved to places like Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Mauritius and South Africa, carrying the Ramcharitmanas with them.

Each time, the texts changed a little. New languages, new art forms and new questions shaped them. Scholars call this adaptation. Many Hindus see it as the same teachings finding new homes.

In the 1840s, the first English Gita, Charles Wilkins’s translation of 1785, reached Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson read it and shared it with his friend Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau took Hindu texts with him to Walden Pond. In Walden (1854), he wrote that each morning he bathed his mind in the vast philosophy of the Gita. Emerson wrote a short poem, ’Brahma’ (1857), inspired by Upanishad and Gita ideas.

These writers read the Gita in their own way, through their own ideas about nature and the self. Scholars say they did not always understand it as Hindus did. Still, their interest helped bring Hindu texts into American thought.

On September 11, 1893, Swami Vivekananda spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. His opening words, ’Sisters and Brothers of America,’ drew long applause from a crowd of thousands.

He quoted a hymn saying that as rivers from different sources mingle in the sea, so different paths lead to God. He also quoted Gita 4.11, where Krishna says whoever comes to him, by whatever way, he reaches them. He spoke against fanaticism.

Vivekananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna, a Bengali saint. After Chicago, he founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894. Many Hindu Americans honor him as a pioneer. Some scholars note that his Vedanta was one Hindu voice among many.

As a law student in London in 1889, Mohandas Gandhi first read the Gita in Edwin Arnold’s English translation, The Song Celestial. Later he read it daily and called it his mother and his dictionary of daily reference.

Gandhi taught nonviolence, yet the Gita is set on a battlefield. How did he read it? He saw the war as an allegory, a picture of the inner struggle between good and evil in each person. He stressed selfless action, anasakti.

Gandhi wrote a Gujarati translation with commentary, published about 1930, called Anasakti Yoga. Other readers, including some freedom fighters, read the Gita’s call to act as a call to fight. Both readings have long histories.

After a 1965 change in U.S. immigration law, many families from India came to the United States. Others came from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Caribbean and Fiji. Today, about 1 percent of Americans are Hindu, according to surveys. Estimates vary.

Families built temples, often starting in basements and rented halls. The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lemont is one of the older large temples in the Midwest. Its Rama temple and other shrines serve families across the area.

Temples hold classes in Sanskrit, the Gita and the Ramayana, and in music and dance. Children may compete in Gita recitation contests. Many Hindu Americans also learn from grandparents, books, apps and online talks.

On Sunday mornings in 1987 and 1988, streets in India went quiet. Families gathered around TV sets to watch Ramayan, a series by Ramanand Sagar on the national channel, Doordarshan. Some viewers garlanded the TV or bowed to it.

The series drew on Valmiki, Tulsidas and other versions. A Mahabharat series by B.R. Chopra followed in 1988–90. For many people, these shows became the version of the epics they knew best. Ramayan was rebroadcast in 2020 and again drew huge audiences.

Scholars have discussed the shows’ effects. Some say they united viewers around shared stories. Others note that one TV version can crowd out the many regional Ramayanas. Today, the epics also appear in films, cartoons, comics and games.

Walk into a bookstore and you may find the Gita in a dozen translations. Business leaders quote it. Yoga teachers read from it. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the building of the atomic bomb, famously recalled a Gita verse after the first test in 1945.

Hindu families read the texts in worship and study. Scholars read them as history and literature. Some Hindu voices worry that yoga and the Gita are taken out of context. Others welcome all sincere readers.

Students in Illinois read these texts, too, in classes like this one. Studying them with respect, and knowing the difference between describing a belief and holding it, lets people of every background learn from them together.