Tricycle | Awake in the World

Everybody knows there is really no such thing as Hinduism. The name isderived from an ancient word for sea,“sindhu,”used also for the Indus River. Persians living to the west of the Indus modified it to“hind,”and used it to refer to the land of the Indus valley. Eventually, Muslims used hindu to refer to the native peoples of South Asia. It was not a term that "Hindus," however, used to refer to themselves. In the nineteenth century, officers of the British Raj began to use the word“Hinduism,”especially for purposes of their census, to refer to a purported system of religious beliefs and practices of non-Muslim, non-Jain, non-Sikh, non-Christian, non-Parsi, non-Jewish Indians (Buddhism had disappeared from India centuries before).