A well-known but evidently inaccurate proposal of definition

was made by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Father of the Indian

Freedom Struggle , who chose belief in the Vedas, variety
in the means and infiniteness of the objects of worship as
the criteria for being a Hindu.3 The variety in the means is
a valuable contribution, because it explicitates what is often
only a tacit assumption presupposed in most Hindu
teachings. The acceptance of many approaches to the
ultimate truth is indeed a distinctive characteristic of
Hinduism, distinguishing it from the exclusivism intrinsic to
Christianity and Islam.
Yet, this reading may be too optimistic: perhaps
disagreement about the means would be a better
description than variety in the means . Thus, many of the
Sants of the Bhakti movement (Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya)
extol repeating the God-name as the means to Liberation and
explicitly denounce both rituals and ascetic practices as false
ways. Hindus have only agreed to disagree and not to
interfere with other people s practices eventhough these may
be considered as deceptive paths leading nowhere. It is
perhaps in this sense that Hindus could accept the presence of
Christians and Muslims as much as that of rival Hindu sects,
because all of them, i.e. both non-Hindus and Hindus of
certain rival schools, are considered as being equally in the
wrong. At any rate, Hindu tradition has an acute sense of
true and false (hence a lively culture of debate), and it does
not attribute equal truth to Hindu and non-Hindu, nor even to
different Hindu schools of thought.
The assumption that all roads lead to the same goal is typical
for modern (urban and Western-oriented) Hinduism as
propagated by Swami Vivekananda and numerous more
recent Gurus. Thus, in his highly critical account of the
specificities of Renaissance, English-speaking, eclectic,
basically anti-Sanskritic, pamphletistic neo-Vedanta ,
including its tendency to uncritical synthesis , the late
Agehananda Bharati remarks: Patanjali s yoga is for people
who have accepted brahmin theology. This is a fact which is
systematically overlooked ( ) by many teachers of the
Hindu Renaissance. One of their perennial mottoes was that
all religions are the same, that everyone can be a yogi on the
basis of his own theology, or of no theology. 4
Hinduism, by contrast, has kept up a tradition of debate and
scholastic argument since hoary antiquity, and has typically
scorned soft options and insisted on radicalism, not in the
sense of smashing the heads of people who disagree, but in
the sense of settling for nothing less than the truth which
liberates. Recent Hindu Revivalists merely return to the
genuine Hindu tradition when they state that the
comparatively newfangled notion that all religions are one,
equal or equally valid ( ) to us is a pleasant falsehood and
thereby the biggest stumbling block in the understanding of
religion and the religions .5 They refer to the Mahabharata
editor Vyasa who exercised his power of discrimination
when he observed that moral principles may be shared by all
religions ( )but their philosophical positions are often
different .6 And who is to say that philosophical viewpoints
don t matter?
Even at the level of moral precepts, religions are far from
equal. Leave alone the details such as dietary taboos, even
the general principles may differ considerably. Thus, ecstatic

states provoked by alcohol and other psychotropic substances

are sought after in many animistic and Shamanistic traditions,
but abhorred in more sober traditions like Buddhism and
Islam. Violence is strongly condemned in Jainism but
glorified, at least in specific conditions, in Islam and other
religions. Again, these differences exist not only between
Hindu and non-Hindu, but also within the Hindu
commonwealth of schools and sects. Tilak is aware of this
pluriformity; what he intended to add, is that this variety of
means is not merely a factual situation, but that it is also
valued positively by Hinduism, and that in this, Hinduism
differs from its major rivals, which impose a single
worldview and a single system of ethics on their adherents.
But the major problem with Tilak s definition is the criterion
of belief in the Veda . This reduction of Hinduism to the
believers in the Veda does injustice to any accepted usage
of the term Hindu (apart from contradicting Tilak s own justquoted
position of a plurality of ways, arguably including
non-Vedic ways as well). For centuries, Brahmins prohibited
lower-caste Hindus from hearing, reciting and studying the
Vedas, a prohibition still supported in principle by Tilak
himself.7 Are those Hindus who are unfamiliar with the
Vedas being excluded from the range of the definition? This
would be greatly welcomed by anti-Hindu polemicists, who
like to claim that only upper-caste Hindus are real Hindus.
Moreover, the expression belief in the Vedas shows a
rather crude understanding of the exact place of the Veda in
the doctrine of its adepts, a place which is radically different
from that of the Quran for Muslims. In the Quran it is God
who speaks to man, while in the Veda it is man who sings
praise to the Gods. It is not even clear what believing
would mean in the case of the Vedas, collections of hymns
written for a number of Gods by several dozens of male and
female poets over several centuries. If someone compiles an
Anthology of English Religious Verse, would it make sense to
say: I believe in this anthology ?
The matter becomes a bit clearer when we consider Tilak s
Sanskrit original:
prmnyabuddhirvedeshu sdhannmanekat
upsynmaniyama etaddharmasya lakshanam.
8
Savarkar translates it as: Belief in the Vedas, many means,
no strict rule for worship: these are the features of the Hindu
religion. 9 More literally, it would read: Acknowledging the
authority of the Vedas, pluralism ( not-one-ness ) of spiritual
paths, no fixity about the objects of worship: that is the
characteristic of the Dharma.
The point is that the Vedas are to be considered as a
pramna, a means of valid knowledge , on a par with direct
perception and inference. Veda may be understood in a very
broad sense (common enough in actual usage, e.g. Vedic
medicine , Vedic cooking ): knowledge , as encompassing
the entire Vedic corpus including the Upanishads, the
Upavedas and the Vedangas, thus meaning the accumulated
ancestral knowledge , or more or less the tradition . This
then becomes a reasonable proposition: the accumulated
knowledge passed on by the ancestors is an important though
not exclusive means of knowledge, due to the human reality
that we cannot start discovering everything anew through
personal experience within a lifetime. It is also distinctive

for Hinduism along with all Pagan cultures, contrasting

them with Christianity and Islam, and to an extent even with
Buddhism. The latter category, most radically Islam, rejects
ancestral culture, and takes a revolution against the tradition
as its starting-point, a total rejection of the preceding age as
age of ignorance (jhilya).
However, in Tilak s case, there is every reason to assume that
he used Veda in the restricted sense: Brahmanic scriptures
to the exclusion of all others, notably the four Samhitas
( collections : Rik, Sama, Yajus, Atharva), chanted by
Brahmins since time immemorial and supposed to have an
auspicious effect. In that case, the problem with Tilak s
definition is that for a majority of practising Hindus, the
Vedas are only a very distant presence, much less important
than the stories from the Itihasa-Purana literature, the rules of
conduct laid down in the Dharma-Shastras, and (often
counterbalancing the latter) the teachings of the Bhakti poets.
This is not because of some revolution rejecting the Vedic
heritage, but simply because of the time-lapse, and also
because of the jealousy with which the Brahmin caste
increasingly distanced the Vedic knowledge from the masses.
In the post-Vedic millennia, there was ample room for new
writings, and gradually the Veda proper was eclipsed by new
Great Narratives, or new formulations of old narratives,
springing from the same inspiration as the Vedas but better
placed to catch the popular imagination. But at least these
younger texts pay homage to the Vedas and fix them as a
distant and little-known object of veneration in the collective
consciousness. The most influential post-Vedic text, the
Mahabharata, is explicitly rooted in the Vedic tradition, but it
is younger and not guarded for the exclusive hearing of the
Brahmins. Through this indirect lip-service to the Vedas,
even illiterate little traditions in Hindu civilization can be
covered by Tilak s definition. However, even in its most
inclusive reading, Tilak s definition excludes important
groups which many Hindu Revivalists insist on including in
the Hindu fold: Buddhists, Jains, Brahmo Samajists, etc.
Savarkar, before developing his own alternative, rejects
Tilak s definition precisely because it is not sufficiently
inclusive.
Finally, there is a decisive scriptural argument against Tilak s
inclusion of belief in the Vedas as a criterion for
Hinduism. The Puranas describe (and the Epics occasionally
refer to) several dozens of generations of ancestors of the
Puru-Bharata lineage which patronized the composition of
the Vedas.10 Regardless of whether we accept the historicity
of those genealogies and family histories, they prove that
Hindus have at least conceived of a pre-Vedic period in Arya/
Hindu civilization. Thus, though the Manu-Smriti in its
present version does not pre-date the Christian era, tradition
ascribes it (or at least its original version) to Manu
Vaivasvata, putative ancestor of all the Puranic dynasties and
pre-Vedic founder of Hindu civilization, thought to have
lived several generations before the first Vedic poets and a
great many before the compilation of the Vedic Samhitas.11
If the central concept of dharma is ascribed to pre-Vedic
sages, if the Vedas themselves (like all ancient religious
traditions) have an awareness of venerable ancestry, it
follows that Hinduism conceives of itself as ultimately predating
the Vedas. What else could you expect of a religion

which calls itself Sanatana,

eternal , Dharma?