The Hindu: An alternative History

This is an excellent book by "Windy Doniger", where she has tried to explore the history of Hinduism. A must read book for all who are interested in the subject or History".

Here is a few paragraph from the book which try to mention that how Hinduism is evolved.

"          AN ALTERNATIVE ANSWER: FUSION AND BRICOLAGE

It is therefore unlikely that both the Vedas and Harappa were “a product of the

civilization of these two peoples,” but it is more than likely that later Hinduism was a product

of both of them, a linguistic and cultural combination of Vedic words and Indus images, as well

as other contributions from other cultures. In some areas this combination was a fusion, a

melting pot, a hybrid, while in others the elements kept their original shape and behaved more

like a tossed salad, a multiplicity. This is of course quite different from saying that the Veda was

composed in the Indus Valley cities. But even if the languages and cultures were distinct, as

surely they were, people from the two cultures must have met. Ideas already current in India

before the entry of the Vedic people or arising outside the Vedic world after that entry may have

eventually filtered into Vedic and then post-Vedic Sanskrit literature.55 (These ideas may have

come not only from the IVC but also from the so-called Adivisis or “Original Inhabitants” of

India, or from the Munda speakers and Dravidian speakers whose words are already incorporated

in the Rig Veda, though that is another story.) Survivors of the Indus cities may have taught

something of their culture to the descendants of the poets who composed the Vedas. The people

of Harappa may have migrated south, so that their culture could have found its way into the

strand of Hinduism that arose there. Some elements of pre-Vedic Indo-European civilization

may have been taken up by the last inhabitants of the Indus Valley. Some elements of the Indus

civilization may have been adopted by the authors of later Vedic literature. Some combination of

all of the above seems extremely likely.

A good example of this possible fusion is the case of bricks. The authors of the Rig Veda

did not know about bricks; their rituals required only small mud altars, not large brick altars. But

later, around 600 BCE, when the Vedic people had moved down into the Ganges Valley and

their rituals had become more elaborate, they began to build large brick altars. The size of the

mud bricks was a multiple or fraction of the height of the patron of the sacrifice, and a fairly

sophisticated geometry was developed to work out the proportions. We know that the Indus

people had mastered the art of calculating the precise size of bricks, within a system of uniform

and proportionate measurement. The use of bricks and the calculations in the Vedic ritual may

therefore have come from a Harappan tradition, bypassed the Rig Vedic period, and resurfaced

later. This hypothesis must be qualified by the realization that kiln-fired (in contrast with

sun-fired) brickwork does not reappear until the last centuries BCE, a long time for that secret

to lie dormant. But other aspects of brickmaking, and other ideas, may have been transmitted

earlier.

Though the Vedic people told the story of their early life in India, and their descendants

controlled the narrative for a very long time, most of what Hindus have written about and talked

about and done, from the Mahabharata on, has not come from the Veda. In part because of the

intertextuality and interpracticality of Hinduism, one text or ritual building on another through

the centuries, right back to the Veda, scholars looking at the history of transmission have

assumed that the Veda was the base onto which other things were added in the course of Indian

history, just as Central Asia was the base that absorbed the impact of that interloping piece of

Africa so long ago. And in the textual tradition, at least, this is true enough of the form in which

the ideas were preserved, the chain of memorized texts. But from the standpoint of the ideas

themselves, it was quite the opposite: The Veda was the newcomer that, like the African island

fusing onto a preexisting continental base, combined with a preexisting cultural world consisting

perhaps of the Indus Valley, perhaps of any of several other, more widely dispersed non-Vedic

cultures.

The non-Veda is the fons et origo of Hinduism; new ideas, new narratives, new practices

arose in the non-Sanskrit world, found their way into the Sanskrit world, and, often, left it again,

to have a second or third or fourth life among the great vernacular traditions of India. These new

narratives and practices fitted into the interstices between the plot lines of the great Sanskrit

texts, as stories told in response to the protagonists’ questions about places encountered on their

travels or to illustrate a relevant moral point, or any other reason why. The non-Veda is not one

thing but so many things. We have noted, briefly, and can rank in the order that their records

appear in history, the existence of at least five cultures: (1) Stone Age cultures in India long

before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures built. (2) At some point,

impossible to fit into a chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the “Original

Inhabitants” of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to

various strands of Hinduism. Many of them were there long before the IVC and may have been a

part of it; many of them have never been assimilated to Hinduism. Next come (3) the Indus

civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after

that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6)

the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers,60 who may or may not have been a part of the IVC,

added pieces to the puzzle.

Hinduism, like all cultures, is a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out

of the scraps of other things. We’ve seen how the British used the stones of Mohenjo-Daro as

ballast for their railway before (and after) they realized what those stones were and that a

Buddhist stupa stands over some of the ruins there. So too Hindus built their temples on (and out

of) Buddhist stupas as well as on other Hindu temples, and Muslims their mosques on Hindu

temples (and Buddhist stupas), often reusing the original stones, new wine in old bottles,

palimpsest architecture. In the realm of ideas as well as things, one religion would take up a

word or image from another religion as a kind of objet trouvé. There are no copyrights there; all

is in the public domain. This is not the hodgepodge that the Hindus and the early Orientalists

regarded as dirt, matter out of place, evidence of an inferior status but, rather, the interaction of

various different strains that is an inevitable factor in all cultures and traditions, and a Good

Thing."

Source:  The Hindu: an alternatgive history by Windy Doniger