and used various Sanskrittexts in his research,including the Bhagavad-gita,

Patanjali's Yoga-sutra, a text on Samkhya, the Visnu-purana, several other

Puranas,and many texts on astronomy,astrology,geography,and chronology.
Although the English translatorliberally uses the word "Hindu,"the original
Arabic text appearsto only use phrasesliterallyequivalentto "[of] the people
of India [hind]."40Nonetheless, al-Biruniclearly understoodthe differencebe-
tween the people of India as a geographicalor ethnic entity and as a religious
group.
CONCLUSIONS
The main purposeof this essay has been to show thatthe claim of many schol-
ars-that Hinduismwas inventedby the British in the early nineteenthcentu-
ry-is false. A largerissue, however,is also implicitlyinvolved.This is the ten-
dency of many historiansof modern India-especially those associated with
the subalternschool-to adopta postcolonialistperspectivethatprivileges the
Britishcolonial period as the period in which almost all the majorinstitutions
of Indiansociety and politics were inventedor constructed.As RichardEaton
(1998) notes in a recent critiqueof these historians:"Thenotion of 'postcolo-
niality' situatedall Indiantime in referenceto the Britishimperialperiod:time
was either precolonial,colonial, or postcolonial."
One postcolonialist historian, Nicholas Dirks (1989:43), has claimed that
even caste, thatuniquelyIndianinstitution,was in some sense inventedby the
British:"Colonialismseems to have createdmuch of what is now accepted as
Indian 'tradition,'including an autonomouscaste structurewith the Brahman
clearly and unambiguouslyat the head."AlthoughDirks is using hyperboleto
makehis point, andhe does include some importantbuteasily overlookedqual-
ifications, the argumentseems to me to be grossly overstated.41As the Hindi
criticPurushottomAgrawalrecentlyquipped:"We Indiansmay well have been
denied the capacityto solve our own problems,but are we so incapablethatwe
could not even create them on our own?" Caste, like Hinduism,undoubtedly
respondedto the Britishconquestwith significantchanges, but neitherinstitu-
tion was so radicallytransformedduringthe colonial period that it makes any
sense, even in termsof a transformationof preexistinginstitutionsor concepts,
to claim thatthe Britishinventedthem. Whateverculturalgarmentsthe British
stitchedtogether,caste andHinduismweren'tamongthem.At least in these re-
spects, the Empirehas no clothes.
If Hinduismis a constructor invention, then, it is not a colonial one, nor a
Europeanone, nor even an exclusively Indianone. It is a constructor invention
40 This at least is the
preliminaryconclusion of RichardEaton, who kindly looked throughthe
Arabictext for the originalequivalentsat my request.
41 To this statement,from Dirks' essay "The Inventionof Caste: Civil Society in Colonial In-

dia" (1989) can be addedanotherambitiousclaim he makes in a more recenttext (1992:3): "Even

as much of what we now recognize as culturewas producedby the colonial encounter,the concept
itself was in partinventedbecause of it." Both these passages are cited in Eaton 1998.
only in the vague and commonsensical way that any large institution is, be it
Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, communism, or parliamentary democracy.
In other words, it is an institution created out of a long historical interaction
between a set of basic ideas and the infinitely complex and variegated socio-
religious beliefs and practices that structure the everyday life of individuals and
small, local groups.
In this interaction, both the basic ideas and the everyday beliefs and practices
are constantly changing-sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Major histor-
ical changes in the economic and political institutions of India during the Tur-
co-Afghan conquest, the Mughal invasion, the consolidation of the Mughal
polity, and the establishment of the British colonial regime undoubtedly ef-
fected important changes in the religious traditions of India, but the rapid
changes of early colonial times never had such an overwhelming impact that
they could have led to the invention of Hinduism. Hinduism wasn't invented
sometime after 1800, or even around the time of the establishment of the
Delhi Sultanate. What did happen during the centuries of rule by dynasties of
Muslim sultans and emperors was that Hindus developed a consciousness of a
shared religious identity based on the loose family resemblance among the var-
iegated beliefs and practices of Hindus, whatever their sect, caste, chosen de-
ity, or theological school.
From the point of view of a modern observer, one can see the family resem-
blance taking a recognizably Hindu shape in the early Puranas, roughly around
the period 300-600 C.E. Although the religion of these Puranas displays many
continuities with the earlier Vedic religion, its principal features and em-
phases-particularly its greatly expanded mythology of the gods Vishnu, Siva
and Devi-do, I think, justify marking this religion off as something new, as
the beginning of medieval and modern Hinduism. This Hinduism wasn't in-
vented by anyone, European or Indian. Like Topsy, it just grow'd.
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