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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Hinduism timeline in the History of Worldviews.
Streams: All of Hinduism Shaivism Shaktism Vaishnavism Smarta Tradition Hindu Reform Movements Arya Samaj ISKCON
The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro anchor one of the world's earliest urban civilizations in the Indus valley; its undeciphered script leaves its religion a matter of seals, figurines, and inference, and later Hindu tradition claims continuities that scholarship cannot confirm or rule out.
In the Punjab, poets compose the hymns of the Rig Veda to Indra, Agni, and the gods of the sacrifice; the collection becomes the oldest and most authoritative layer of Hindu scripture, preserved orally with exacting precision for millennia.
Forest teachers and their students compose the early Upanishads, turning from the sacrifice to the knowledge of atman and brahman; the texts become the philosophical foundation on which every later school of Vedanta builds its reading.
Across centuries of composition, the Mahabharata grows into the largest epic of the ancient world, the war of the Bharata cousins carrying law, kingship, devotion, and doubt inside one vast story; Krishna's counsel and Shiva's appearances stand within it side by side.
Valmiki's Ramayana tells of Rama, the exiled prince whose conduct embodies dharma, and of Sita and Hanuman; Rama's standing as an avatar of Vishnu, present in the epic's framing books, makes the poem a charter of Vaishnava devotion.
On the field of Kurukshetra, Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna the paths of action, knowledge, and devotion; set inside the Mahabharata, the Gita becomes the most commented and most carried scripture of Hindu life, read by every Vedanta school as one of the three foundations.
Patanjali gathers the discipline of yoga into aphorisms on stilling the mind's turnings; the Yoga Sutras become the charter text of one of the six classical schools and, much later, the reference point of the global yoga movement.
Patanjali's Mahabhashya already knows Shiva-worshipping ascetics, and the Pashupatas grow into the earliest organized Shaiva order, marked by ash, the staff, and devotion to Shiva as Pashupati, lord of bound souls.
The Gupta emperors rule most of northern India in an age that fixes the classical forms of Hindu temple, image, and Purana; royal patronage flows to Vishnu and Shiva alike, and the imperial style becomes the reference for centuries of temple building.
The Bhagavata Purana retells Vishnu's descents and gives Krishna's childhood and loves their fullest telling; its tenth book becomes the seedbed of Krishna devotion, quoted and sung wherever Krishna is worshipped.
The Devi Mahatmya, set inside the Markandeya Purana, proclaims the Goddess as the supreme power who takes form as Durga and Kali to destroy the demons no male god can kill; it remains the central scripture of Shakta worship and of Navratri.
The Tamil saints Appar, Sambandar, and Sundarar sing Shiva through the temple towns of the south; their Tevaram hymns, later gathered as canon, carry Tamil Shaivism into the temple liturgy where they are still sung.
Shankara teaches Advaita, the non-duality of atman and brahman, writes the standard commentaries on the Upanishads, the Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, and is remembered as the organizer of monastic and temple orders across India.
Tradition holds that Shankara founded monasteries at the four quarters of India, Sringeri in the south, Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, and Joshimath in the north; their lineages anchor the Smarta monastic order and teach Advaita to this day.
Abhinavagupta, the Kashmiri master of Shaiva philosophy and aesthetics, dies after completing works that systematize the Tantric Shaiva traditions; his Pratyabhijna philosophy reads the world as Shiva's self-recognition.
Ramanuja teaches Vishishtadvaita, the qualified non-dualism in which souls and world are God's body, and opens the Sri Vaishnava community's teaching beyond a narrow circle; his Sri Bhashya stands against Shankara's reading of the same texts.
Sekkizhar composes the Periya Puranam at the Chola court, telling the lives of the sixty-three Nayanar saints; the work closes the Tamil Shaiva canon and fixes its saints' stories in the form the temples still celebrate.
Basava, minister at Kalyana, gathers the Virashaiva community around devotion to Shiva in the personal linga, rejecting caste and temple mediation; the vachana poems of Basava and his companions carry the movement's teaching in Kannada speech.
Madhva teaches Dvaita, the strict dualism of God and soul, founds the Krishna temple at Udupi, and sets the Haridasa devotion in motion; his reading of the Vedanta stands as the third great system beside Shankara's and Ramanuja's.
The weaver Kabir of Banaras sings of the one Ram who is no temple god, mocking the orthodoxies of Hindu and Muslim alike; his verses pass into the Sikh scripture, the Dadu Panth's collections, and the Kabir Panth, claimed and contested by all of them.
The Rajput princess Mirabai refuses widowhood's rules for devotion to Krishna, sings her padas across Rajasthan and Gujarat, and becomes the beloved figure of the woman saint whose only lord is Giridhar; her historicity rests on the songs and the tradition that keeps them.
Tulsidas retells Rama's story in Awadhi as the Ramcharitmanas, the lake of Rama's deeds; the poem carries Rama devotion into north Indian homes and becomes the most beloved Hindu book of the Hindi belt, recited whole in village readings.
The Koch king Naranarayan rebuilds the Kamakhya temple at Guwahati on its ancient site, one of the chief seats of the Goddess and of Tantric worship; the temple crowns Nilachal Hill above the Brahmaputra and draws the Ambubachi festival to this day.
Appayya Dikshita, the great Smarta polymath of the Tamil country, dies after writing across Vedanta, poetics, and Shaiva devotion; his works model the Smarta ideal of learning held inside devotion to Shiva.
Ram Mohan Roy argues from the Upanishads for one God without image, founds the Brahmo Samaj, and campaigns against sati until its abolition in 1829; he opens the age of Hindu reform, in which India's traditions answer print, missions, and empire with their own scriptures.
Dayananda Saraswati calls India back to the Vedas alone, rejecting image worship and later scripture in the Satyarth Prakash, and founds the Arya Samaj; his slogan and his schools shape an assertive, reforming Hinduism across the north.
Ram Mohan Roy and his companions found the Brahmo Sabha, soon the Brahmo Samaj, in Calcutta, worshipping one formless God from Upanishadic texts; the Samaj becomes the first of the modern Hindu reform movements and a seedbed of Bengal's public life.
The temple priest Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar worships Kali with total devotion, then practices Islam and Christianity and declares every path reaches the same goal; his disciple circle and his recorded conversations make him the saint of India's religious pluralism.
Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda carries Vedanta to the West, founds the Ramakrishna Mission for service and teaching, and calls India to strength through its own spiritual inheritance; his short life sets the pattern of the modern Hindu teacher.
Dayananda Saraswati founds the Arya Samaj in Bombay on the authority of the Vedas alone; its schools, its shuddhi campaigns, and its refusal of image worship and caste by birth spread a reforming Hinduism across northern and western India.
At the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda addresses the assembly as sisters and brothers of America and presents Hinduism as a universal religion of acceptance; the Parliament opens the modern era of Hindu teaching in the West.
Vivekananda founds the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta, joining the monastery at Belur with schools, hospitals, and relief work; the Mission gives the reform age its enduring institution, devotion expressed as service to the poor as God.
Hindu leaders found the Hindu Mahasabha at Haridwar to organize Hindu society and represent its interests in the politics of late colonial India; under Savarkar it later gives Hindu nationalism its name, Hindutva.
Paramahansa Yogananda founds the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles to teach Kriya Yoga in the West; his Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) becomes one of the most read Hindu books of the century, carrying yoga's spiritual frame to a global audience.
K. B. Hedgewar founds the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Nagpur on Vijayadashami, organizing Hindu men and boys in daily shakhas of drill, discipline, and teaching; the Sangh grows into the center of a family of organizations that reshapes Indian politics.
British India is divided into India and Pakistan at independence; the Punjab and Bengal are split, millions are displaced, and between several hundred thousand and a million people are killed in the violence, leaving the two nations' memories of each other marked to this day.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founds the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York, carrying Gaudiya Vaishnava devotion to Krishna across the West; its temples, festivals, and translations of the Bhagavata Purana make it the most visible Hindu movement abroad.
Anandamayi Ma, the Bengali saint whom devotees received as the Goddess herself in human form, dies at Dehradun; her ashrams and her sayings keep a Shakta sainthood of joy and spontaneity at the center of modern Hindu devotion.
A crowd mobilized by the Ayodhya movement demolishes the Babri Masjid, a mosque built in 1528, claiming the site as Rama's birthplace; riots across India kill about two thousand people, and the dispute runs through the courts until the Supreme Court awards the site for a temple in 2019.
Narendra Modi, formed in the RSS and chief minister of Gujarat, leads the Bharatiya Janata Party to the first single-party majority in thirty years and becomes prime minister; his governments put Hindu nationalist themes at the center of Indian public life.
UNESCO inscribes Durga Puja in Kolkata on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, honoring the festival in which the Goddess returns home and a whole city becomes her temple for five days.
American Hindu organizations win recognition of October as Hindu Heritage Month from legislatures and governors in states across the United States, marking the community's arrival as a settled part of American religious life.
