Earlier this month, Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a Hindu denomination that holds that an 18th-century yogi is the supreme manifestation of God-as-Krishna, stirred controversy in France recently.

It emerged that female staff at the Eiffel Tower were replaced by male colleagues during a visit by BAPS monks, who take a strict vow to not have any contact with women. During the uproar that ensued, many Hindu commentators argued that BAPS was not even Hindu, although the denomination says it is, and its massive temples are presented as Hindu.

The question of whether a denomination or sect is Hindu or not can arise because Hinduism itself can be a porous concept. The question of how to define Hinduism and who counts as Hindu has been the subject of vigorous debate for over two centuries. It is a question with political, spiritual, and legal — Indian personal law operates on the basis of an individual’s religion — ramifications.

The definition of Hinduism has emerged as an issue because, unlike Christianity or Islam, Hinduism does not have a single creed or canonical scripture. Modern Hinduism contains a large number of strands and traditions, some of which are quite at odds with each other.

Despite the extraordinary antiquity of many of these traditions, some scholars believe that a conception of Hinduism as a single, world religion emerged in the 19th century when the British colonial government constructed Hinduism to make sense of indigenous beliefs and categorize the population of British India that did not belong to other bounded, creedal religions such as Christianity and Islam. This process began with the first British census in India in 1872, which sought to enumerate and describe India’s religious groups and castes in great detail, thus entrenching communal classifications.

There is also a contemporary political angle to the debate on the origins of the idea of Hinduism. In his book, “Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History,” scholar Andrew Nicholson noted that the motivation of some thinkers “to assert that Hindu identity is purely a nineteenth-century colonial construction is to weaken Hindu communalism. For if ‘Hinduism’ is merely an artificial construction that outsiders imposed on Indians in the nineteenth century, simplistic historical narratives of medieval Hindu unity in the face of Muslim oppression would be proved false.”

However, an ideological approach to a field of study could distort objective assessments of the truth. In modern India, it has become all too commonplace to attribute every undesirable phenomenon, from lack of development, to caste, to communalism, to the British in order to strengthen one’s political argument.

The argument that Hinduism is a modern construction is based on observing its theological and ritual diversity. While the constituent parts of modern Hinduism include a number of ancient traditions, some going all the way back to the Vedic era over three millennia ago, those traditions often saw themselves as competitors. For example, the rivalry between medieval Vaishnavism and Shaivism — denominations who believe that either Vishnu or Shiva is the supreme god — is well-documented. Perhaps, in other circumstances, Vaishnavism and Shaivism would have been classified as separate — though related — religions, like Christianity and Islam.

Moreover, ancient India was home to a number of philosophical schools, which both interfaced with popular religion and asserted a number of metaphysical, ethical, psychological, and soteriological positions that were often at odds with one another. These schools, which included Buddhism, Jainism, Carvaka (materialism), and six systems now considered to be astika or orthodox Hindu philosophies, were often bitter rivals who engaged in polemical arguments. These schools held metaphysical positions that were starkly at odds with one another, and would, to a bystander, sometimes seem to be different religions. For example, Advaita Vedanta holds the position of radical monism — everything is literally of one principle, Brahman, which is also pure consciousness — while another school, Samkhya, proposes the opposite, that there is a complete duality between matter and consciousness, which is present in an infinite number of individuated souls. Samkhya, and another school, Mimamsa, are atheistic and posit that there is no creator god or ground of reality. The Yoga and Nyaya schools, however, posit a creator deity distinct from creation. Meanwhile, Vedanta’s god manifests as the world.

Thus, some scholars, such as the Indologist Paul Hacker, argue that Hinduism is a collective, descriptive label, just like Chinese folk religion.

There is, however, evidence for an alternative viewpoint, which holds that Hinduism was not simply fabricated by the British out of a random set of indigenous beliefs. Rather, Hindus developed a self-conception of their own tradition, one that took shape over time and sharpened vis-à-vis Hindu contact with Muslims and Europeans. Many elements of Hindu identity and self-conception are too deeply rooted for them to be explained simply as the outcome of a foreign census project lasting a mere century.

Hindus began to understand themselves first in ethnic and cultural terms before also coming to see themselves in religious terms. Hinduism never became a creedal, bounded religion with a single doctrine or set of scriptures, but Hindus did recognize, over time, a unity to their religion and a set of customs and rituals that characterized their tradition and separated it from other traditions.

The cultural element is reflected in the terminology used even in antiquity, which refers to groups that we would today call Hindus as arya or followers of the Vedas — ancient Hindu scriptures — and counterposes them with foreign groups with different practices: mlecchas (barbarians), Sakas (Scythians), Yavanas (Greeks), Turushkas (Turks), and others. According to Andrew Nicholson, by the medieval era, Hindus recognized a clear difference between themselves and other groups, a distinction that Muslim rule sharpened, because Hindus could clearly see the difference between their customs and those of Islam.

This is expressed in vernacular literature, such as the works of Kabir and the Marathi poet Eknath, whose writings refer to the differences between Hindus and Turks, or Muslims, including the differences in their modes of worship and theology.

Around this time, the term Hindu began to appear in inscriptions by Hindu dynasties, which used the term to characterize their rule as opposed to rule by the mlecchas or Turushkas. Some rulers of the Vijayanagara Empire (1335-1646 CE) called themselves “Sultan among Hindu kings.” The Maratha ruler Sivaji (1630-1680 CE) also self-consciously set up a “Hindawi” state, though with the caveat that this meant rule by natives of India as opposed to “Turks.” Nonetheless, it contained many clear Hindu ritual elements and the increased use of Sanskrit in place of Persian. Thus, Hindu ethnic identity began to crystallize even before the British period.

More importantly, starting in the late Middle Ages, Hindu scholars and philosophers began to conceptualize it as a single theological system. This was facilitated by the triumph of Vedanta and its partial absorption of the other Hindu philosophical systems. Despite their differences, the six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy are rooted in a common Vedic tradition and agree on some principles, such as the existence of a soul as well as the cycle of rebirth and the aim of moksha (liberation) from this cycle. This is, in fact, essentially the definition of Hinduism given by the Supreme Court of India in its famous 1966 ruling Sastri Yagnapurushadji And Others vs Muldas Brudardas Vaishya And Another. The court asserted:

…underneath [the] divergence [of Hindu views] lie certain broad concepts which can be treated as basic, and there is a kind of subtle indescribable unity which keeps them within the sweep of broad and progressive Hindu religion. The first among these basic concepts is the acceptance of the Vedas as the highest authority in religious and philosophic matters. This concept necessarily implies that all the systems claim to have drawn their principles from a common reservoir of thought enshrined in the Vedas.

These commonalities, along with the loss of much political power amongst Hindus after the 12th century CE, blunted much of the rivalry between Hindu schools. Individuals like the 16th-century philosopher Vijnanabhiksu synthesized the Hindu philosophical traditions. For example, he advocated Yoga as a means to achieve the goal of liberation as set forth in Vedanta. He also understood the Samkhya division of matter and consciousness as two elements of a great whole, as understood by Vedanta. Other scholars approached synthesis from other angles, but the end results were generally similar, building upon earlier Hindu thought that held the various deities to be facets of one divinity.

This unity of Hindu schools and traditions deepened throughout Muslim rule and into the British colonial era. Thus, the British did not have to invent Hinduism out of whole cloth as a native understanding of what it was had already emerged. It was not simply a catch-all for indigenous traditions because it explicitly did not include Buddhist and Jain traditions, which rejected the Vedas and explicitly disagreed with the Hindu systems on the nature of the soul and goals of life. Hinduism may not be as well-defined and creedal as Christianity or Islam, but it is not a meaningless label either. It refers to a real idea.

Nonetheless, a great many traditions, including many with divergent viewpoints and practices, are indeed considered Hindu today, including the Swaminarayan sect that gave rise to BAPS. This is because followers of that group advocate a theology rooted in Vedanta of the philosopher Ramanuja and seek moksha through the worship of Krishna as manifested in their guru, Swaminarayan.