No, Hindu is certainly not one religion. There have been most if not all religions and philosophical schools, including rationalism, materialism and atheism, present in the geographic area of India for at least 2,000 years.mbbhat wrote:can Hindus explain how Hindu is a religion? Some Hindus do not believe it is a religion. some believe. why?
Baldev Singh, PhD wrote ...
Due to many centuries of subjugation and humiliation by foreigners, Hindus have lost self-respect, dignity and the will to face the truth and reality. Instead, they have become masters of deception, manipulation and hypocrisy. They cry hoarse, that foreign writers have
maligned their religion and culture and distorted their history. However, they don’t have any compunction against quoting foreign
historians if it suites their purpose
He goes on to say that although the usual explanation is that the word Hindu (or Hindoo) arose from foreign invaders 3,000 years ago, namely the Persians, who were mispronouncing the name of the river Sindhu this is a mistake. The Persians were perfectly capable of using 's' or 'sh' terms and, in fact, they already had a word Hindu.
Hindu is a foreign innovation. It is not used by any of the Sanskrit writers or revered Acharyas in their works for India (and you have the Ancient Greeks or Macedonians to thank for the word India too). The word Hindu is found in Persian and, according to Maharishi Shri Dayanand Sarswati meant slave or darkness. According to Islam, he wrote, all those who did not embrace Islam were considered slaves.
Initially, the term was also entirely secular, or geographic in its use. It did not refer to religious activities, merely to where the people's lived. It was only the British that started to use it in such a manner in the 19th C so as to separate off non-Christians or non-Islamic Indians. The English word India coming from the Greek Ἰνδία (Indía) via Latin India meaning the region beyond the Indus (Sindhu river) and Hindustan, for the North of India/Pakistan coming again from the Persians/Islam.
A Persian dictionary titled Lughet-e-Kishwari, published in Lucknow in 1964, gives the meaning of Hindu as ‘chore (thief), dakoo (dacoit), raahzan (waylayer), and ghulam (slave)’. Another, the Urdu-Feroze-ul-Laghat, gives the meaning of the word as looter, ghulam (slave), barda (obedient servant) or sia faam (black color) and kaalaa (black).
Singh argues the terms Hindu was originally a derogatory term given to the original Aryan race of the region by Muslim invaders to humiliate them.
Why?
“Blackness” is used with bad connotation in Indian languages. For example, kaala munh, kaali Jeebh, kaala chore, kaala dhandha, kaali bhaid (black sheep) and kaala chum (black skinned person). The inferiority complex of “blackness” is deeply imbedded in the psyche of Indians. It even arises as such within the Brahma Kumaris and their god's Murlis.
Most Indians, except the Dalits, consider themselves as the descendants of Caucasian tribes, who ruled over India before the onslaught of Muslims. So for Hindus to accept that “Hindu” means black would make them the descendants of native Indians, the dark skinned Dravidians.
It is a fact that most Indians of today are the products of thousands of years of miscegenation between Caucasian groups and native Indians and yet there is a tendency for Indians to despise dark or black skin color. The superiority of white or lighter skin is deeply imbedded in the Indian psyche because, he says, ever since the conquest of Indus Valley by Caucasians, India has been ruled by white people like Aryans, Persians, Macedonians, Scythians, Huns, Arabs, Turks, Afghanas, Mangols, Portugese, French and English. Dark skin has always been equate with low caste, poverty and ignorance etc.
This, he argues, is why Hindus insist that “Hindu” is the corrupted form of Sindhu.
What surprised me most about my research of this term was how much more of Indian civilization has roots in Persian/Zoroastrian, and even Greek civilization.
