Hindus
Adherents of the religion of Hinduism / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Hindus (Hindustani: [ˈɦɪndu] ⓘ; /ˈhɪnduːz/) or Sanatani are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism or Sanātana Dharma[67].[68][69] Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent.[70][71]
It is assumed that the term "Hindu" traces back to Avestan scripture Vendidad which refers to land of seven rivers as Hapta Hendu which itself is a cognate to Sanskrit term Sapta Sindhuḥ (This term Sapta Sindhuḥ is mentioned in RigVeda that refers to a North western Indian region of seven rivers and as a India whole). The Greek cognates of the same terms are "Indus" (for the river) and "India" (for the land of the river).[72][73][74] Likewise Hebrew cognate hōd-dū refers to India mentioned in Hebrew Bible (Esther 1:1). The term "Hindu" also implied a geographic, ethnic or cultural identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent around or beyond the Sindhu (Indus) River.[75] By the 16th century CE, the term began to refer to residents of the subcontinent who were not Turkic or Muslims.[75][lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2] Since the ancient time, Hindu has been used to refer to people inhibiting region beyond Sindhu river, therefore some assumptions that medieval persian authors considered Hindu as derogatory is not accepted by practicing Hindus themselves as those references are much later to references used in pre-Islamic Persian sources,early Arab and Indian sources , all of them had positive connotation only as they either referred to region or followers of Hinduism.
The historical development of Hindu self-identity within the local Indian population, in a religious or cultural sense, is unclear.[70][76] Competing theories state that Hindu identity developed in the British colonial era, or that it may have developed post-8th century CE after the Muslim invasions and medieval Hindu–Muslim wars.[76][77][78] A sense of Hindu identity and the term Hindu appears in some texts dated between the 13th and 18th century in Sanskrit and Bengali.[77][79] The 14th- and 18th-century Indian poets such as Vidyapati, Kabir, Tulsidas and Eknath used the phrase Hindu dharma (Hinduism) and contrasted it with Turaka dharma (Islam).[76][80] The Christian friar Sebastiao Manrique used the term 'Hindu' in a religious context in 1649.[81] In the 18th century, European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus, in contrast to Mohamedans for groups such as Turks, Mughals and Arabs, who were adherents of Islam.[70][75] By the mid-19th century, colonial orientalist texts further distinguished Hindus from Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains,[70] but the colonial laws continued to consider all of them to be within the scope of the term Hindu until about mid-20th century.[82] Scholars state that the custom of distinguishing between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs is a modern phenomenon.[83][84][lower-alpha 3]
At approximately 1.2 billion,[87] Hindus are the world's third-largest religious group after Christians and Muslims. The vast majority of Hindus, approximately 966 million (94.3% of the global Hindu population), live in India, according to the 2011 Indian census.[88] After India, the next nine countries with the largest Hindu populations are, in decreasing order: Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the United States, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.[89] These together accounted for 99% of the world's Hindu population, and the remaining nations of the world combined had about 6 million Hindus as of 2010[update].[89]