…Words Mean Things: Hindu When the Persian Moguls invaded the northern Asian sub-continent, the armies came to the Nadī (River) Sindhu. Like the Greeks, the Moguls had difficulty with the Sanskrit ‘s’, and they too came up with a novel solution. They exchanged the Sanskrit ‘s’ for the Farsi ‘h’, thereby creating ‘Hindu’. … Initially, Hindu referred to the river. Then it came to refer to the lands around the River Hindu and thus emerged, Hindustan, Land of the Hindu. … Naturally, the people resident in Hindustan came to be known as Hindus and Hindustanis. Their language was called Hindustani till recently. Now its called Hindi. … Visitors from Persia were unable to distinguish the differences in the various religious practices of the Hindustanis and came refer to them all as Hindu(-ism). In fact, many of the religions are confederated, but the correct name for this grouping is ‘sanatana dharma’. Pandit Rajmani Tigunait suggested (paraphrase), “To get an idea of the misunderstanding in the term ‘Hindu’ as religion, imagine a visitor to New England, in the northeast US, explaining that all the religions of the region, Roman Catholic, Methodists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Jews, etc, are members of a religion called ‘Yankee-ism.’” … Hindu without a defining adjective is prone to misunderstanding as it can refer to a geographic region, an ethnic group, a philosophical tradition, or a religious confederation. … However, ‘Hindu’ itself is a term based on an intentional Persian mispronunciation.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 05:39:10 +0000
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