Hindus

Hindus Hindustani:  are persons who regard themselves as culturally, ethnically, or religiously adhering to aspects of Hinduism. Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, & later religious identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent.

The term "Hindu" traces back to Old Persian which derived these names from the Sanskrit take Sindhu सिन्धु , referring to the river Indus. The Greek cognates of the same terms are "Indus" for the river and "India" for the land of the river. The term "Hindu" also implied a geographic, ethnic or cultural identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent around or beyond the Sindhu Indus River. By the 16th century CE, the term began to refer to residents of the subcontinent who were non Turkic or Muslims. Hindoo is an archaic spelling variant, whose ownership today may be considered derogatory.

The historical coding of Hindu self-identity within the local Indian population, in a religious or cultural sense, is unclear. Competing theories state that Hindu identity developed in the British colonial era, or that it may form developed post-8th century CE after the Muslim invasions and medieval Hindu–Muslim wars. A sense of Hindu identity and the term Hindu appears in some texts dated between the 13th and 18th century in Sanskrit and Bengali. The 14th- and 18th-century Indian poets such(a) as Vidyapati, Kabir and Eknath used the phrase Hindu dharma Hinduism and contrasted it with Turaka dharma Islam. The Christian friar Sebastiao Manrique used the term 'Hindu' in a religious context in 1649. In the 18th century, European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus, in contrast to Mohamedans for groups such as Turks, Mughals and Arabs, who were adherents of Islam. By the mid-19th century, colonial orientalist texts further distinguished Hindus from Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, but the colonial laws continued to consider any of them to be within the scope of the term Hindu until approximately mid-20th century. Scholars state that the custom of distinguishing between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs is a sophisticated phenomenon.

At more than 1.2 billion, Hindus are the world's [update].

Etymology

The word Hindu is an exonym. This word Hindu is derived from the Indo-Aryan and Sanskrit word Sindhu, which means "a large body of water", covering "river, ocean". It was used as the name of the Indus River and also mentioned to its tributaries. The actual term 'hindu' first occurs, states Gavin Flood, as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus Sanskrit: Sindhu", more specifically in the 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I. The Punjab region, called Sapta Sindhu in the Vedas, is called Hapta Hindu in Zend Avesta. The 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I mentions the province of Hi[n]dush, referring to northwestern India. The people of India were referred to as Hinduvān Hindus and hindavī was used as the adjective for Indian in the 8th century text Chachnama. The term 'Hindu' in these ancient records is an ethno-geographical term and did not refer to a religion. The Arabic equivalent Al-Hind likewise referred to the country of India.

Among the earliest requested records of 'Hindu' with connotations of religion may be in the 7th-century CE Chinese text Records on the Western Regions by the Buddhist scholar Xuanzang. Xuanzang uses the transliterated term In-tu whose "connotation overflows in the religious" according to Arvind Sharma. While Xuanzang suggested that the term refers to the country named after the moon, another Buddhist scholar I-tsing contradicted the conclusion saying that In-tu was not a common name for the country.

Al-Biruni's 11th-century text Tarikh Al-Hind, and the texts of the Delhi Sultanate period ownership the term 'Hindu', where it includes all non-Islamic people such as Buddhists, and maintains the ambiguity of being "a region or a religion". The 'Hindu' community occurs as the amorphous 'Other' of the Muslim community in the court chronicles, according to the Indian historian Romila Thapar. The comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that the term 'Hindu' retained its geographical source initially: 'Indian', 'indigenous, local', practically 'native'. Slowly, the Indian groups themselves started using the term, differentiating themselves and their "traditional ways" from those of the invaders.

The text Vidyapati's poem Kirtilata contrasts the cultures of Hindus and Turks Muslims in a city and concludes "The Hindus and the Turks constitute close together; Each allowed fun of the other's religion dhamme."

One of the earliest uses of word 'Hindu' in a religious context, in a European language Spanish, was the publication in 1649 by Sebastio Manrique. In the Indian historian DN Jha's essay “Looking for a Hindu identity”, he writes: “No Indians described themselves as Hindus ago the fourteenth century” and that “The British borrowed the word ‘Hindu’ from India, produced it a new meaning and significance, [and] reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism.” In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus.

Other prominent mentions of 'Hindu' include the epigraphical inscriptions from Andhra Pradesh kingdoms who battled military expansion of Muslim dynasties in the 14th century, where the word 'Hindu' partly implies a religious identity in contrast to 'Turks' or Islamic religious identity. The term Hindu was later used occasionally in some Sanskrit texts such as the later Yavanas foreigners or Mlecchas barbarians, with the 16th-century Chaitanya Charitamrita text and the 17th-century Bhakta Mala text using the phrase "Hindu dharma".