Introduction

Defining a Hindu has been difficult for even the Constitution or the Law manuals. Does it mean the land (geography), ancestral roots (history), or a shared culture?  A Hindu’s definition today is ‘neti-neti’: not a Muslim, not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Parsi.  Who exactly is a ‘Hindu’ and what is this ‘Hinduism’ practice? A West rooted in religion and believing that religion must exist in all cultures (a cultural universal) experienced and described the religion of ‘Hinduism’ in India. ‘Hindutva’ blossomed as a response to attacks on this Hinduism at both the physical and the intellectual levels. The first response was against the colonial-missionary criticism of so-called idolatry in the late nineteenth century.

The standard liberal elite discourse is: ‘Hinduism is good and Hindutva bad’ and public intellectuals write books explaining why they remain Hindu despite the ‘problems’ with Hindutva. The power structures in academia and the media allow this narrative to stay intact in the public consciousness. Any counter-narrative quickly becomes ‘Hindutva fundamentalism’. Any response becomes an unacceptable defense of the unruly elements not conducive to social harmony. Cow protection and beef become intense areas of debate. Today, any intellectual response to defend Hinduism, not involving violence, also gets termed Hindutva pejoratively.

Scholars like Gurumurthy argue for Hindutva as an extension of Hinduism – the kinetic component of Hindu Dharma. Aravindan Neelakandan in his meticulously researched recent book Hindutva: Origin, Evolution, and Future calls Hindutva as not an ideology but a process – a historical and civilizational process. In these discussions, SN Balagangadhara (The Heathen in His Blindness) questions whether Hinduism and Hindutva even exist. He describes Hinduism as an experience of the West rather than any indigenous understanding of people calling themselves ‘Hindus’ about their own set of practices. Balagangadhara feels that the present Hindutva movement with limited understanding might damage the Hindu cause more rapidly and effectively than the colonial rule itself. So, what exactly is Hindutva and is it helping or damaging the cause of Hindus?

Defining Hindus

Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva were never self-descriptions of the people of India. The Inspector of General Registration in Bengal in 1874, says, ‘… it is absolutely impossible to draw the line between the various Hindu races and the aboriginal tribes, so insensibly do they merge into one another.’ Clearly, there was no competent authority on deciding a ‘pure Hindu.’  Orientalist scholars and the British Raj followed policies and procedures that presupposed the existence of Hindus (common ancestry) and Hinduism (religion) without being able to identify the individual properties.

There is also the tremendous circularity in defining a Hindu. Who is a Hindu? Someone who practises the Hindu religion. And what is the Hindu religion? A religion practised by the Hindus. This came back in the writings of V.D. Savarkar.  He says, ‘Hinduism is a word that properly speaking should be applied to all the religious beliefs that the different communities of the Hindu people hold.’ This was based on practical considerations of not shrinking the size of India; it is not with the objective of understanding ‘Hinduism’, or of correctly identifying ‘the Hindus’.

Post-independence, amazingly the Indian Constitution is yet to clearly define the word ‘Hindu’. However various acts such as The Hindu Marriage Act (1955), Hindu Succession Act (1956), and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act (1956) define the scope of the word ‘Hindu’ as:

• any person who is a Hindu by religion in any of its forms or developments, including a Virashaiva, a Lingayat, or a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana, or Arya Samaj 
• any person who is a Buddhist, Jaina, or Sikh by religion
• any other person who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jew by religion, unless proved that the group of the person does not fall in the ambit of Hindu law or custom.

Leaving the Scheduled Tribes (clause 25 of article 366) out of the ambit of Hindus has been one of the most contentious moves as they have become an intense focus of proselytization. Noticeably, the Constitution does away with geographical, historical, and cultural connotations of being a Hindu and sticks to religion.

Koenraad Elst (Who Is a Hindu) explores in detail the ambiguities in trying to define the ‘majority Hindus’ and the ‘minority non-Hindus’. It is one of the peculiar outcomes of the imprecise thoughts of our foundational fathers that at regular intervals there erupts a controversy on whether the Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, or tribals are Hindus or not. This is a question that should have had a clear answer very early on.

Such are the minority appeasement and protection policies that even the Ramakrishnaites and the Lingayats claimed to be minorities and non-Hindus. The benefits of being a non-Hindu seem to attract these kinds of stances. The Courts rejected the Ramakrishna Mission’s claim of being non-Hindus. The imprecision and ambiguity in the clear definition of Hindus and non-Hindus also become tools for the critics and the anti-Hindu forces to manipulate numbers to put the Hindus on the defensive. As Elst says, when convenient all these groups (Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, tribals) become Hindus to laugh off at the concerns of a shrinking demography. However, for purposes of proselytization, they are non-Hindus (especially the tribals). Hence, sociologically they seem to be one but on the basis of ‘religion’, they can be same or different from each other as circumstances demand. We are yet to resolve this issue.

Strangely, the Supreme Court [Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo vs Shri Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte 1996 SCC (1) 130] was also unable to clarify what ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindutva’, and ‘Hinduism’ meant but it pronounced judgment on a case which questioned the usage of Hinduism in election campaigns. It says:’… no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms ‘Hindu,’ ‘Hindutva,’ and ‘Hinduism’; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage….’ The judgment explicitly states that ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hinduism’ cannot equate with narrow bigotry.

The arguments about everyone being a Hindu in the civilizational context become rather circular. A criterion of exclusion cannot be inclusive at the same time. If Hindus and non-Hindus are separate, then they cannot be bound together by the word ‘Hindu.’  Only the religious roots are foreign in the case of a non-Hindu. The ancestral roots are Indian clearly. So, where does the person stand in the scheme of a Hindu-driven nationalism? The disturbing accusations of extra-territorial attachments have been too often on the non-Hindus.  Clearly, our semantics have gone wrong somewhere.

As some hold, finally a Hindu is one who feels and says that he or she is a Hindu! At a meta-level, perhaps Savarkar’s definition still holds true that anyone is a Hindu who considers this land as Fatherland and Holyland. There can be qualifications to these of course. A tribal culture may consider a limited geography as the Fatherland and Holyland and not the whole country but that should not deter from the definition of a Hindu. Today, despite all the criticism of Savarkar, his definition of a Hindu perhaps come closest to the neti-neti (not a Muslim; not a Christian; not a Jew; not a Parsi) definition of a Hindu in our constitution based strictly on ‘religion’.

Defining or Describing Hinduism?

One can broadly describe Hinduism as a huge set of traditions and philosophies which are methods of knowledge transmission in the external and internal worlds. The goal in most traditions is Enlightenment (moksha) and the paths are action (karma), devotion (bhakti), physical self-control (yoga), or intellectual inquiry (Gyana). In a loop, the external world also becomes a route to the internal world. It is a uniquely Indian aspect that all cultural expressions like art, poetry, music, dance, literature, architecture, and even grammar are routes to moksha. In a traditional world, an individual can have multiple beliefs without any contradiction or confusion. An independence of beliefs might include disbelief in the notion of God, enlightenment, or the Vedas too.

As Balagangadhara explains in detail (The Heathen in His Blindness), rituals define traditions. Indic traditions allow for living authorities and allow liberation while living in the present life. The lack of history-centrism is a key point in understanding traditional systems. Rama and Krishna may have never existed; however, Ramayana and Mahabharata are always true and timeless. Ishta Devatas (favourite personal forms of the Absolute) can differ; one can believe in only one or all of them. The point is, one must struggle to find common points of a monolithic ‘Hinduism’.

In different sampradayas or traditions, there may be overlapping or even completely contrasting ideas. A new tradition can evolve from mixing of previous traditions. The strongest point of traditions stays an indifference to the differences. This transcends the concepts of tolerances and acceptances. This characterized the Roman pagan traditions of the past and this characterizes the Indian pagan traditions of today. In such a traditional universe of Indic culture, Abrahamic religions found acceptance as another tradition.

Does Hinduism Even Exist?

European accounts of idolatry set up a scene of a ‘different’ Indian society. Bankimchandra Chatterjee shared this sense of difference by saying that concept of religion was not applicable to Indian society, because if everything from birth to death ties to religion in India, then it is highly possible that religion does not exist, and the word becomes meaningless. He writes in Letters on Hinduism:

“With other peoples, religion is only a part of life; there are things religious, and there are things lay and secular. To the Hindu, his whole life was religion, To the European, his relations to God and to the spiritual world are things sharply distinguished from his relations to man and to the temporal world. To the Hindu, his relations to God and his relations to man, his spiritual life, and his temporal life are incapable of being so distinguished. They form one compact and harmonious whole, which if separated into its component parts would break the entire fabric. All life to him was religion, and religion never received a name from him, because it never had for him an existence apart from all that had received a name… There is no Hindu conception answering to the term “Hinduism,” and the question with which I began this letter, what is Hinduism, can only be answered by defining what it is that the foreigners who use the word mean by the term.

For, as you know, it is a word entirely of foreign origin. Originally Hindu was only the name of a river. The western neighbours of the early Aryan settlers on the banks of the Sindhu dropped the sibilant and substituted the aspirate (see note). From the river, the name came in the course of time to be extended to the dwellers on its banks; and from them again to all peoples of the same race and language with whom the same foreigners came into contact. It may be that all the peoples with whom they came into contact did not, even in those early ages, speak the same language. But all the languages were at any rate of common stock, and a foreigner would little understand provincial differences. The Hindus were then, in the eye of the foreigner, one people—of one race and one language, and it was assumed, and probably in those early ages at least, correctly assumed, that they had a common religion too. Any differences that may have arisen then would be imperceptible to the eye of the foreigner. The writings of the ancient Greeks who visited India so far as they are still in existence show that even those acute observers failed to perceive any difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.”

(Note: dropping the sibilant and substituting the aspirate means dropping the ‘s’ and replacing it with ‘h’)

Bankim also severely criticised Max Müller for introducing words like ‘Henotheism or Kakenotheism’ to describe Indic traditions. He mocked Müller for being unable to comprehend the Hindu principle of the immanence of divinity in the material world; and rued, ‘that such knowledge is perused, studied, esteemed, and translated in this country is a matter of no small regret.’ Interestingly, Bankimchandra did not believe in the primacy of the Vedas and believed that the whole of Hindu philosophy was probably post-Vedic.

Balagangadhara’s Thesis About Religions and Traditions

Has decades of Indological scholarship improved the understanding of Hinduism? As Balagangadhara Rao points out (Cultures Differ Differently), scholars understand Hinduism in a number of ways: ‘a vast sponge’; ‘a proliferating jungle’; ‘a potpourri of religions, doctrines and attitudes’; an ‘arc culture’; ‘a rope of cultural movements’; ‘a multi-flavoured pan of lasagna’; ‘a whole complex of religious currents and social phenomena’; an ‘Ancient Banyan tree or a collection of roots and branches’; ‘a Zen diagram or a Venn diagram with an empty centre’; ‘a greenhouse plant which does not exist’, and so on. Hinduism in their descriptions is thus a religion, a culture, an inverted tree, a mathematical empty set, an unnatural creation, lasagna, or whatever else the scholar feels like. The pertinent question is if this is the state of knowledge about Hinduism, what does ‘Hinduness’ or ‘Hindutva’ or Hindu fundamentalism even mean?

Balagangadhara’s strong, simple, radical, and yet unrefuted thesis stays that ‘Hinduism’ was an Orientalist experiential construction that arose because the foreigners could not understand the different traditions existing in India. They experienced many things in an alien culture: the pujas; the temples; the priests; the varna social systems; the rituals; the scriptures of many kinds; discriminations; and a variety of practices involving humans, animals, and nature. They gave a meta-narrative explanation to bind all these phenomena into a single unity and called it the religion of Hinduism. Any newly discovered practice became a part of this Hinduism. Finally, Hinduism came to describe many practices, both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ in the Western frameworks, without really explaining why it is a religion.

Balagangadhara Rao demonstrates, by definition ‘religion’ is a term purely for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam consisting of A God, A Temple, A Doctrine. Scholars did not pause to examine that non-orthodox darshanas (like Jain and Buddhist) and a few orthodox darshanas (like Samkhya, and Vaisesika) have no specific conception of God akin to the Abrahamic notions.  The concept of a ‘Hindu religion’ has troubled intellectuals but the narrative has been strong and there is a universal acceptance of the ‘religion’ of Hinduism without understanding the differences between traditions and religions.

HINDUTVA- A TIMELINE

Raja Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj – Nineteenth Century Stirrings of Hindutva

Going by the intuitive ideas of ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’ despite many problems in truly understanding or defining them, here is a brief tracing of the Hindutva movement as it started in the 19^th century. Incidentally, it was Chandranath Basu (1844-1910) who coined the term ‘Hindutva’ in 1892 and not Savarkar as widely believed. Various authors describe Hindutva as ‘heir to a long tradition’.

The Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj of the 19th century, essentially reformist-revivalist organisations, are at the roots of the Hindutva movement. Ironically, British education, European history, nationalist movements in the West, and Enlightenment were important influences on these organisations. Members of the Brahmo Samaj, strongly influenced by Protestantism, were primarily the urban intelligentsia and elite in West Bengal. The Brahmo Samaj vigorously rejected ‘idol worship’, ‘polytheism’, and the superstitions (child marriages, Sati) that its members believed had crept into Indian society.

Swagato Ganguly (Idolatry, and the Colonial Idea of India) says that the colonial reading of Indian society was that idolatry caused its social evils. Their anxiety was in getting rid of the impure practices to bring it back to the shining past. Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) continued the theme of a ‘pure’ Vedic religion with a Upanishidic ‘peak’ which had now degenerated. Unfortunately, Roy’s understanding of Advaita was discordant with the traditional interpretations. He believed that his effort elevated Advaita to the monotheistic Christian philosophy; in fact, he shifted Advaita to a different sphere altogether. However, the immense traditionally steeped land of India generally rejected the Brahmo Samaj. Roy linked debauchery, sensuality, falsehood, ingratitude, and treachery in Indian society as an outcome of idolatry highly conforming with the prevailing Western view.

Rammohan’s heart might have been in the right place but the need to conform to Western values made him take a rather ambiguous project to purify Hinduism. The ambivalences come across when he turns back on a Christian apologist questioning him about idolatry in Hinduism. Rammohan replied by pointing to idolatry related to many Christian symbols and the history of an oppressive Christianity. On the other hand, he opposed the Chaitanya Bhakti movements based on the commentaries of Shankara ignoring Shankara’s own compositions steeped in great Bhakti.

Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj

In 1875, Dayanand Saraswati set up the Arya Samaj. Like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj also focused on social reform in India. Unlike Rammohan Roy, Dayanand Saraswati did not see British rule in India as a providential event, nor did he believe that the West was culturally superior to Indian culture. However, he admired ‘the West’s capacity for discipline and organisation’ and desired the Hindu society to build these capacities. As scholars feel, it was perhaps in the Arya Samaj, through its activities and institutions, that important aspects of Hindutva ideology crystallized: an anti-Muslim stance, Sanskrit, and a Hindu society.

Both the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj actively opposed proselytization. The Arya Samaj engaged in public debates with Christian missionaries and Muslim clerics regarding religion and religious conversion. The British censuses and the legal policies helped crystallize the religious and caste identities of the country. However, authors like Saumya Dey (Becoming Hindus and Muslims: Reading the Cultural Encounter in Bengal) show that religious identities in Bengal came much before the British censuses. The Bengal crystallization of people as Hindus and Muslims was the result of the Islamic onslaught on the non-Islamic people forcing people to create identities for themselves.

Bankimchandra Chatterjee

Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) was one of the first graduates of the English education system; ironically, a system wanting to rewrite Indian cultural narratives. He wrote extensively in vernacular Bengali to deanglicise the masses and in English too when the occasion demanded. One such was a reply to William Hastie, the principal of General Assembly’s institution, who wrote a series of polemical articles attacking ‘Hindu idolatry.’ Among other things, Hastie wrote, “Hindu thought and idolatry relied on a complete dissociation between reason and the senses and never really solved a single problem of human life.”

In a strong reply, Bankim questions Orientalism’s intellectual prerogatives and places an outsider’s view in a less privileged position that relies mainly on European commentaries of Indian texts. Bankim denies the validity of existing European knowledges of India. Bankimchandra relates idolatry to art. The ideal acquires a material embodiment through both art and idolatry, and to deny the legitimacy of idolatry is to deny the legitimacy of the representation of artistic images, as Swagato Ganguly says in his brilliant book- Idolatry and The Colonial Idea of India.

Bankim writes (Letters on Hinduism):

“…Fancy what a conception of Christianity you would arrive at, if you included in it…also the political and social constitution of Europe, its codes of morality, its jurisprudence, its international law, and its legislative enactments. Nay, go on further. Give to Dante and to Milton in Christianity the place now occupied in the ordinary conception of Hinduism by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to Tribonian and Puffendorf to Montesquieu and Bentham that of Manu and Yagnakaya, Gautama and Parasara; to the legends of King Arthur and to the Romance of the Cid, to Ariosto and to Tasso the place of the Puranas, to Spinoza that of Badarayana; and give to the writings of the early Fathers, what they once possessed, the sanctity and authority of the Upanishads; and you will then arrive at a notion of Christianity very similar to the notion of Hinduism which the ignorance, the intolerance and the contempt of foreigners and the degeneracy of natives have reduced it.”

Gaze reversal towards a European country would make Christianity idolatrous, polytheistic, and fetishist too, said Bankim. The association of Hinduism with moral corruption and cruelty was reversible when he gave examples of the Inquisition and the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics and Jews. His biggest contribution is undoubtedly the characterisation of India as a mother Goddess in his novel Anandamath in which Bande Mataram became a clarion call for nationalism. Bankimchandra however had his own contradictions that did not consistently sustain the position of debunking European intellectual superiority. As Swagato Ganguly shows, Bankim with his teleological version of history believed the colonial government a necessary outcome of the march of Reason itself.

Idolatry- The Core Criticism and the Early Hindutva Response

The colonials and missionaries looked negatively at idolatry as an Indian belief in ‘things’ and ‘images’, sometimes extending to ‘rituals, ceremonies, and practices’ done in a repetitive manner. This was exactly how early Christianity looked at the Roman pagan rituals in its attempts to subsume or destroy. The colonials, in the name of ‘reason’, genuinely saw a purpose in their rule of India steeped in such idolatry. Idolatry was of course a fabrication of the wily Brahmins representing the false objective values of a culture; and thus, naming someone as an idolater is to name an ‘Other’- a worshipper of false gods. Fetishism in Africa was, similarly, a justification for the slave trades.

From a post-Reformation point of view, idolatrous societies did not conform to a proper historical progress towards reason and purity. They were instead subject to the decay and destruction like the material idol itself. Rammohan Roy believed in these negative ideas of idolatry. Bankimchandra set up the nation-state as an idol but contradictorily, believed in the notion of a European historical progress towards ‘Reason’ for any civilization. History had a purpose to proceed from a primitive past to a great golden future. India represented the past; and Europe, the golden future in colonial historical readings.

The Creation of The Hindu Mahasabha

The Minto-Morley reforms in 1909 led to the creation of separate electorates for Muslims. As a reaction, the Hindu communities in Punjab formed Hindu Sabhas. There were sanctions placed on the Caliph in Turkey after the First World War when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Khilafat movement (1919-1924) was a pan-Islamist campaign launched by Muslims of British India led by Shaukat Ali, Abul Kalam Azad (later to become the first education minister of independent India for ten years), and others to restore the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey, considered the leader of Sunni Muslims. This led to serious communal riots in Moplah (1921) in the present-day Kerala where thousands of Hindus died. In a remarkable twist and obfuscation, the rioters arrested and prosecuted by the British became ‘nationalists’ and ‘freedom fighters.’ The narrative of an agrarian conflict and ‘persecution by the British’ replaced the story of extra-territorial sympathies of the Khilafat movement in support of the Caliphate.

The various local Hindu bodies gradually coalesced in 1921 into the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, a national umbrella organisation encompassing all regional Hindu Sabhas. At this time, the initial socio-religious reforms underwent a broader philosophy of nationalism.  The separate electorates issue, the Khilafat movement, and the colonial narratives solidified the ‘Other’ in a solid Hindu political and nationalistic identity.

Veer Savarkar, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the Sangh Parivar

In 1923, while still imprisoned at Port-Blair, Savarkar published Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? He was deeply patriotic and a biography by Vikram Sampath makes for some fascinating reading. The appeasement strategies of the Congress (and Gandhi specifically) deeply disturbed Savarkar and he was anxious to mount a protection. Academics consider Savarkar’s book central to Hindutva ideology, where he describes a wide-ranging meaning of Hindutva and the Hindu nation based on a common territory, culture, and civilization. Vikram Sampath shows clearly, contrary to the built-up narrative, that Savarkar neither compromised with British authorities nor was he a Muslim and Christian hater. He was quite critical of the Hindus too for the cow-protection activities. Savarkar was answering anxieties and confusions of his time, some arguments being simply stepping stones for future amendments. However, the critics will not budge from the anti-Muslim stance of Savarkar’s ideology.

For Savarkar, the three elements of Hindutva were a common nation (Rashtra); a common race (Jati); and a common civilisation (Sanskriti). He is a Hindu to whom Sindhusthan is not only a Pitribhumi (homeland) but also a Punyabhumi (Holy Land). Controversially, the Punyabhumi idea took the Christians and Muslims out of the equation. Like Orientalist writers, Savarkar too could not discern a structure of unity in the many practices and traditions of this common religion. The data of practices never did match his theory of Hinduism and Hindutva.

In 1925, ten years after the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha, Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Nagpur. He believed that lack of unity, mutual distrust and a general lack of strength had left the Hindu community and the nation at the mercy of invaders. Academics study Madhav Golwalkar’s (the second sarsanghchalak) books, ‘We, Our Nationhood Defined’ and ‘Bunch of Thoughts’, as important sources of RSS ideology.

In 1973, Madhukar Deoras became the third sarsanghchalak under whom several affiliate organisations of the RSS came into being. Today, along with key organisations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (established 1964) and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (established 1952), this family of organisations with the RSS at its centre forms the Sangh Parivar espousing the cause of Hindutva.

In the next part, we shall see an important event- the assassination of Gandhi, which was a serious setback to the Hindu cause. There was a ban on RSS temporarily. Gandhi became a martyr and Hindutva acquired a bad name. However, there was a strengthening of political Hindutva after independence in a gradual manner. Today, the problems arising in contemporary India are due to a confused understanding of the basic terms and in confusing the diverse traditions of India as ‘proper’ religions in the Abrahamic mould.    

Continued in Part 2

SELECTED REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

1. Hindutva: The Kinetic Effect Of Hindu Dharma by S. Gurumurthy (https://cpsindia.org/index.php/art/132-articles-by-s-gurumurthy/179-hindutva-the-kinetic-effect-of-hindu-dharma)
2. Decolonizing the Hindu Mind by Koenraad Elst
3. Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva, as understood by Supreme Court by Dhananjay Mahapatra (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/hindu-hinduism-and-hindutva-as-understood-by-supreme-court/articleshow/89081806.cms)
4. Essentials of Hindutva by V.D. Savarkar
5. (https://www.indianculture.gov.in/ebooks/letter-hinduism) Letters on Hinduism by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
6. (https://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/17/does-hinduism-exist/) Does Hinduism Exist? By Dr S.N. Balagangadhara
7. The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion by S. N. Balagangadhara
8. Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem?: The Making of Indian Religions by S. N. Balagangadhara and Divya Jhingran (A simplified version of the above book)
9. Who is a Hindu? Hindu Revivalist Views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Other Offshoots of Hinduism by Koenraad Elst
10. What does it mean to be ‘Indian’? by S.N. Balagangadhara and Sarika Rao
11. Why did the Ramakrishna Mission say they are not Hindus By Sanjeev Nayyar (https://www.esamskriti.com/e/National-Affairs/For-The-Followers-Of-Dharma/Why-did-the-Ramakrishna-Mission-say-they-are-not-Hindus-2.aspx)
12. Are Tribals Hindus? (https://pragyata.com/are-tribals-hindus/)
13. Buddhism versus Hinduism: Encounters of The Imagined Kind (https://pragyata.com/buddhism-versus-hinduism-encounters-of-the-imagined-kindpart-i/)
14. India: The Land of Traditions, Not Religions (https://pragyata.com/india-the-land-of-traditions-not-religions/)
15. Lingayats As Minorities: Why It Is Near-Impossible To Remain A Hindu And Run A School Or College In India in Swarajyamag (https://swarajyamag.com/politics/lingayats-as-minorities-why-it-is-near-impossible-to-remain-a-hindu-and-run-a-school-or-college-in-india)
16. Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism by Jakob De Roover
17. Conversion of the World: Proselytization in India and the Universalization of Christianity by Sarah Claerhout And Jakob De Roover
18. (https://www.academia.edu/1246720/Conversion_of_the_World_Proselytization_in_India_and_the_Universalization_of_Christianity) Religious Conversion: Indian Disputes And Their European Origins By Sarah Claerhout And Jakob De Roover
19. Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right by Swapan Dasgupta
20. Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 by Vikram Sampath
21. Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India: Visions of Horror, Allegories of Enlightenment by Swagato Ganguly
22. Why I Killed the Mahatma: Uncovering Godse’s Defence by Koenraad Elst
23. The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire by Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai
24. Hindutva: Origin, Evolution, and Future by Aravindan Neelakandan