¶ … religion, Hinduism is somewhat unique in that it does not revolve around a specific, singular point of origin, belief system, or scripture. Indeed, it appears to have spontaneously evolved along with the cultures in India. The people of India are united by means of their food, customs, work, language, and beliefs. All these aspects are known as the "life of the people," and is fundamentally integrated with the Hindu belief system. According to Fisher (2005, p. 69), the term "Hinduism" was in fact propagated not by the Indians themselves, but by British colonialists, who used the term as a category for the purpose of census-taking. Informally, foreigners used the term to refer to people living in the Indus River region. Today, adherents to Hinduism prefer the term "Sanatana Dharma." Sanatana, according to Fisher, means eternal or ageless, and Dharma to the various elements under the term "religion." These include elements such as duty, natural law, social welfare, ethics, health, and transcendental realization.

What unifies Hinduism is therefore not so much a central deity, scripture, or history, but rather the needs and fundamental way of life of the people among which it arose. It is as much integrated with the Indian culture as their concrete way of living. Location is also an important element in unifying Hinduism. While the religion has spread throughout the world, India is its unifying region of origin. Hinduism and India are inextricably...

Indeed, according to the BBC (2004), the earliest evidence of Hinduism in India can be traced back as far as 3000 BCE.
Considering the above, it can therefore be said that there are three main unifying elements in the Hindu religion: the life of the people, location, and time. The very way of life of the Indian people unifies the religion, its origin in India and its age, all serve as factors that make Hinduism not only unique, but also relevant to the culture of its origin.

2. As seen above, one of the unifying factors of Hinduism is its country of origin, India. It did not however develop in isolation, and many cultural and social elements influenced it over its years of evolution. At the beginning of the eighth century for example, Muslims entered and took over several areas of the country, and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought Buddhism and Jainism (Fisher, 2005, p.106). Islam, Buddhism and Jainism existed together relatively peacefully in the country. Concomitantly, trading also resulted in the export of Sanatana Dharma to countries such as Java and Bali. These locations have modified the religion according to their lives and needs, and it survives in this form today.

The Mogul Empire in India collapsed during the 19th century, after which the Europeans entered, with the British ultimately taking over in 1857 (Fisher, 2005, p. 106). This in turn brought Christian missionaries,…