Hinduism is an umbrella-term for a broad range of Indian religious and spiritual traditions (sampradayas) that are unified by the concept of dharma, a universal order maintained by its followers through rituals and righteous living. The word Hindu is an exonym, and while Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world, it has also been described as Sanātana Dharma, a modern usage, based on the belief that its origins lie beyond human history, as revealed in the Hindu texts. Another endonym for Hinduism is Vaidika Dharma.
Yoni, sometimes called pindika, is an abstract or aniconic representation of the Hindu goddess Shakti. It is usually shown with linga – its masculine counterpart. Together, they symbolize the merging of microcosmos and macrocosmos, the divine eternal process of creation and regeneration, and the union of the feminine and the masculine that recreates all of existence. The yoni is conceptualized as nature's gateway of all births, particularly in the esoteric Kaula and Tantra practices, as well as the Shaktism and Shaivism traditions of Hinduism.
The Hindu calendar, also called Panchanga, is one of various lunisolar calendars that are traditionally used in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, with further regional variations for social and Hindu religious purposes. They adopt a similar underlying concept for timekeeping based on sidereal year for solar cycle and adjustment of lunar cycles in every three years, but differ in their relative emphasis to moon cycle or the sun cycle and the names of months and when they consider the New Year to start. Of the various regional calendars, the most studied and known Hindu calendars are the Shalivahana Shaka found in the Deccan region of Southern India and the Vikram Samvat (Bikrami) found in Nepal and the North and Central regions of India – both of which emphasize the lunar cycle. Their new year starts in spring. In regions such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the solar cycle is emphasized and this is called the Tamil calendar and Malayalam calendar and these have origins in the second half of the 1st millennium CE. A Hindu calendar is sometimes referred to as Panchangam (पञ्चाङ्गम्), which is also known as Panjika in Eastern India.
Indian culture is the heritage of social norms and technologies that originated in or are associated with the ethno-linguistically diverse India, pertaining to the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and the Republic of India post-1947. The term also applies beyond India to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to India by immigration, colonisation, or influence, particularly in South Asia and Southeast Asia. India's languages, religions, dance, music, architecture, food, and customs differ from place to place within the country.
Hinduism in Southeast Asia had a profound impact on the region's cultural development and its history. As the Indic scripts were introduced from the Indian subcontinent, people of Southeast Asia entered the historical period by producing their earliest inscriptions around the 1st to 5th century CE. Today, Hindus in Southeast Asia are mainly Overseas Indians and Balinese. There are also Javanese and Balamon Cham minority in Cambodia and south central Vietnam who also practice Hinduism.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
Hinduism is a minority religion in Cambodia which is followed by about 1,000 to 15,000 individuals. Even being a small minority in the Buddhist majority nation it highly influences the vast culture and history of Cambodia with being prominent religion under the Khmer Empire. Today most of the Cambodian Hindus are Indians in Cambodia. Cambodia had always been a Buddhist nation since its conception, but before its independence from French Indochina, it had a significant Hindu minority, and several hundred years before that, it had been the most dominant religion in Cambodia as well as Southeast Asia.
Greater India, also known as the Indian cultural sphere, or the Indic world, is an area composed of several countries and regions in South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically influenced by Indian culture, which itself formed from the various distinct indigenous cultures of South Asia. It is an umbrella term encompassing the Indian subcontinent and surrounding countries, which are culturally linked through a diverse cultural cline. These countries have been transformed to varying degrees by the acceptance and introduction of cultural and institutional elements from each other. The term Greater India as a reference to the Indian cultural sphere was popularised by a network of Bengali scholars in the 1920s, but became obsolete in the 1970s.
The history of Hinduism covers a wide variety of related religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent. It overlaps or coincides with the development of religion in the Indian subcontinent since the Iron Age, with some of its traditions tracing back to prehistoric religions such as those of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation. Hinduism has been called the "oldest religion" in the world, but scholars regard Hinduism as a relatively recent synthesis of various Indian cultures and traditions, with diverse roots and no single founder, which emerged around the beginning of the Common Era.
Sanskrit has been studied by Western scholars since the late 18th century. In the 19th century, Sanskrit studies played a crucial role in the development of the field of comparative linguistics of the Indo-European languages. During the British Raj (1857–1947), Western scholars edited many Sanskrit texts which had survived in manuscript form. The study of Sanskrit grammar and philology remains important both in the field of Indology and of Indo-European studies.
Moriz Winternitz was a scholar from Austria who began his Indology contributions working with Max Müller at the Oxford University. An eminent Sanskrit scholar, he worked as a professor in Prague in the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University after 1902, for nearly thirty years. His Geschichte der indischen Literatur, published 1908–1922, offered a comprehensive literary history of Sanskrit texts. The contributions on a wide range of Sanskrit texts by Winternitz have been an influential resource for modern era studies on Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Paul Thieme was a German Indologist and scholar of Vedic Sanskrit. In 1988 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for "he added immensely to our knowledge of Vedic and other classical Indian literature and provided a solid foundation to the study of the history of Indian thought".
Sheldon I. Pollock is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was the general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
Rajiv Malhotra is an Indian-born American right-wing Hindu nationalist ideologue, author and the founder of Infinity Foundation, which focuses on Indic studies, and also funds projects such as Columbia University's project to translate the Tibetan Buddhist Tengyur.
India and Indonesia established diplomatic relations on 16 April 1949. Both countries are neighbours, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Indonesia along the Andaman Sea.
Indianisation also known as Indianization, may refer to the spread of Indian languages, culture, diaspora, cuisines, economic reach and impact.
The reception of Hinduism in the Western world began in the 19th century, at first at an academic level of religious studies and antiquarian interest in Sanskrit.
The Indian influences in early Philippine polities, particularly the influence of the Srivijaya and Majapahit thalassocracies on cultural development, is a significant area of research for scholars of Philippine, Indonesian, and Southeast Asian history, and is believed to be the source of Hindu and Buddhist elements in early Philippine culture, religion, and language. Because the Indonesian thalassocracies of Srivijaya and Majapahit acquired many of these Hindu and Buddhist elements through Indianization, the introduction of such elements to early Philippine cultures has sometimes been referred to as indianization. In more recent scholarship, it is termed localization, as in, e.g., localization of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Some scholars also place the Philippine archipelago within the outermost reaches of the Indosphere, along with Northern Vietnam, where the Hindu and Buddhist elements were not directly introduced by Indian travellers.
The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.
