Notions of Hinduism as a unified religion, Hindu culture as a distinct cultural zone, and “Hindu” as a well-bounded cultural category are largely products of scholarly and administrative interventions by orientalist scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrations in the Indian subcontinent since the seventeenth century. Originally used as a territorial term for those living beyond the river Indus, or as a residual term (Gentoo) used by early European merchants and colonizers to denote those in the Indian subcontinent who were not Muslims or Christians, the term “Hindoo” slowly emerged as a common denominator for the native culture(s) of the Indian subcontinent. [The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India-Thomas Blom Hansen-1999]
Modern Hinduism had thus in epistemological terms been born as a truly “empty place,” that is, as a signifier of the true and full “culture” that made India truly Indian, thus stabilizing otherwise diverse and alternating ritual and social hierarchies around an “ideal” core. Yet it was a signifier that no actual group could claim to control fully. The attempt to grasp this “true” culture of India became one of the most contested agendas within Indian nationalism. Most strands in the nationalist movement agreed that this culture or civilization—mainly Hindu—provided India with a distinct character in the world. At the same time, this culture was seen as decaying and defunct and had, therefore, to be reformed and revived in a new, “synthetic” version. To most brands of nationalists, regardless of their secular-rational or religious-national idiom, Hindu culture constituted, paradoxically, both the impediment (in its old, dispersed forms), and the solution (in its reformed, nationalized, or synthetic forms) to the final realization of nationhood. [The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India-Thomas Blom Hansen-1999]
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