{"id":2567,"date":"2002-12-04T23:33:42","date_gmt":"2002-12-04T18:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alpha.ravikiran.com\/blog\/2002\/12\/04\/neti-neti\/"},"modified":"2002-12-04T23:33:42","modified_gmt":"2002-12-04T18:03:42","slug":"neti-neti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/vintage\/200212\/neti-neti\/","title":{"rendered":"Neti Neti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Pankaj Mishra <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/dailyglobe2\/335\/focus\/The_God_of_new_things+.shtml\">writes<\/a> in the Boston Globe, repeating the canard that there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British came. <\/p>\n<p><cite><font size = -1>&#8220;Indeed, there was no such thing as &#8221;Hinduism&#8221; before the British invented the catch-all category in the early 19th century and made India seem the home of a &#8221;world religion&#8221; that was as organized and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam. The word &#8221;Hindu&#8221; itself was first used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the river Indus (&#8221;Sindhu&#8221; in Sanskrit). It later became a convenient shorthand for those who weren&#8217;t Muslims or Christians.&#8221;<\/font><\/cite><\/p>\n<p>His failure to describe Hinduism is reminiscent of Shankaracharya&#8217;s failure to describe the soul &#8211; the Neti Neti philosophy.<br \/>Is Hinduism a universalist religion like Islam or Christianity? No.<br \/>Was the Vedic religion the same as Hinduism? No.<br \/>Are any of the various sects of Hinduism Hinduism? No.<br \/>There are various philosophical streams in India. Is any one of them Hinduism? No.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the question, the answer would be no. Because it cannot be described, there is no such thing as Hinduism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pankaj Mishra writes in the Boston Globe, repeating the canard that there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British came. &#8220;Indeed, there was no such thing as &#8221;Hinduism&#8221; before the British invented the catch-all category in the early 19th century and made India seem the home of a &#8221;world religion&#8221; that was as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}