A timeline of Hinduism, 7000 BCE to the present

Era by era

1. c. 7000 – 3300 BCE · Chapter 1 Majority view

   Before the Vedas

   The Neolithic and the substrate that Hinduism was built on

   Balochistan, Sindh, Kashmir, the Deccan, central India

   • Farming, zebu herding and burial with grave goods in South Asia long predate any Indo-Aryan speakers.
   • A 2025 study redates Mehrgarh's first farming to c. 5200–4700 BCE, some two thousand years later than older accounts.
   • Deccan ashmounds record centuries of cattle-dung burning; whether it was ritual at all is contested.
   • Village goddesses, serpent worship and sacred trees plausibly descend from this substrate, not from the Rigveda.

2. c. 3300 – 1300 BCE · Chapter 2 Contested

   The Indus Civilization

   A great religion we cannot read

   Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra basins: Sindh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Balochistan

   • The Indus script, found on about 4,000 objects, is undeciphered, so all claims about Harappan religion are inference.
   • The Pashupati seal shows a horned figure among animals; calling it 'proto-Shiva' is contested.
   • The cities emptied gradually after c. 1900 BCE amid aridification; there is no evidence of an invasion.
   • No horse, chariot, spoked wheel, iron, monumental temple or royal tomb has been found in mature Harappan levels.

3. c. 1500 – 1200 BCE · Chapter 3 Majority view

   The Oral Rigveda

   Early Vedic society, reconstructed from its own hymns

   Sapta Sindhavaḥ: Punjab, Haryana, eastern Afghanistan

   • The Rigveda's 1,028 hymns were memorized and recited without writing for about a thousand years, with remarkable accuracy.
   • Its world was the Punjab rivers: cattle, barley, bronze and horse chariots, with no cities, rice or iron.
   • Indra and Agni dominate; Vishnu has about five hymns and Rudra, later Shiva, about three.
   • Karma, rebirth, temples, image worship and caste by birth are all absent from the text.
   • The only four-varna hymn, the Purusha Sukta, sits in the latest layer, Mandala 10.

4. c. 1200 – 900 BCE · Chapter 4 Majority view

   Late Vedic

   Iron, rice, the Kuru state, and the age of ritual

   Kuru-Pañcāla: the Ganga–Yamuna doāb, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh

   • Between about 1200 and 900 BCE the Vedic centre moved east from the Punjab into the Ganga-Yamuna doab.
   • Iron and rice entered the language, and surplus farming supported the Kuru polity, the first state-like Vedic power.
   • The Brahmanas taught that correctly performed ritual compels the cosmos, making priests indispensable.
   • Rudra gained a whole liturgy, the Shatarudriya, where 'namah shivaya' first appears.
   • Texts begin describing hereditary subordination by varna; temples, karma and rebirth are still absent.

5. c. 900 – 500 BCE · Chapter 5 Majority view

   The Upanishadic Turn

   Karma, rebirth, and the discovery of the self

   Kosala, Videha, Kāśī, Pañcāla: the eastern Ganga plain

   • Karma, rebirth, liberation and the self-absolute identity first appear c. 700–500 BCE, not in the Vedas.
   • The earliest karma passage, Brihadaranyaka 3.2.13, is taught in private, suggesting the idea was new.
   • The texts credit kings such as Pravahana Jaivali, not brahmins, with the doctrine of rebirth.
   • Cities, coins and a merchant class in the eastern Ganga plain are the likely setting.
   • The Upanishads hold several philosophies; later Vedanta schools read them in opposite ways.

6. c. 600 – 200 BCE · Chapter 6 Majority view

   The Shramana Challenge

   Buddha, Mahāvīra, and what Brahmanism had to become to survive them

   Magadha and the eastern Ganga plain; then the Mauryan empire

   • c. 250 BCE Writing. The Vedas had already been transmitted orally for roughly a thousand years. Ashokan edicts, Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī
   • Buddhists, Jains and Ajivikas accepted karma and rebirth but rejected the Veda, sacrifice and brahmin authority.
   • Ashoka's edicts, c. 250 BCE, are India's first securely dated writing and ban sacrificial slaughter.
   • Ahimsa and vegetarianism entered Brahmanism under Shramana pressure; Vedic religion had sacrificed and eaten cattle.
   • The four ashramas began as alternative vocations and only later became life stages ending in renunciation.

7. c. 200 BCE – 300 CE · Chapter 7 Majority view

   Epic and Classical Synthesis

   The Gītā, the first images, and the birth of devotion

   Śuṅga, Indo-Greek, Śaka, Kuṣāṇa and Sātavāhana north; Tamil south

   • Image worship, temples, bhakti and the avatar doctrine all first appear between about 200 BCE and 300 CE.
   • The Heliodorus pillar, c. 110 BCE, shows a Greek ambassador worshipping Vasudeva as 'God of Gods.'
   • The Bhagavad Gita reconciles action, knowledge and devotion, and opens liberation beyond the priestly elite.
   • Rama is divine only in the Ramayana's later books; the core epic presents a heroic prince.
   • The Manusmriti hardened caste and women's subordination, though it was not applied like a modern statute.

8. c. 300 – 650 CE · Chapter 8 Majority view

   Puranic Hinduism

   The Goddess, the stone temple, and the religion's classical shape

   Gupta empire and successors; the Deccan; Southeast Asia

   • Between 300 and 650 CE the stone temple, image worship, pilgrimage and festival calendar took their lasting shape.
   • The Devi Mahatmya, c. 550–600 CE, is the first text to make a goddess the supreme reality.
   • Sanchi Temple 17 and the Tigawa temple, both c. 400–425 CE, are among the earliest surviving structural temples of the form Hindu architecture built on.
   • Vaishnava, Shaiva and Shakta communities crystallized, and the root texts of the later six philosophical darshanas were in place.
   • The puja in most Hindu temples today is largely Tantric, not Vedic, in structure.

9. c. 650 – 1200 CE · Chapter 9 Majority view

   Bhakti and the Regional Turn

   Devotion in the mother tongue, and philosophy's classical age

   Tamil country, Kashmir, Karnataka, Bengal: regional kingdoms across the subcontinent

   • Tamil poet-saints, the Alvars and Nayanars, made vernacular devotion a path to God open to women and outcastes.
   • Shankara taught that only Brahman is real; Ramanuja answered that God is personal and souls stay real.
   • Kashmir's Abhinavagupta and Karnataka's Basava produced the era's boldest philosophy and sharpest caste critique.
   • Chola temples such as Thanjavur's Brihadisvara (1010 CE) were landlords, employers and financial institutions.
   • Bhakti relativized caste for salvation but did not dismantle it in social life.

10. c. 1200 – 1750 CE · Chapter 10 Majority view

    Encounter with Islam

    Vernacular scripture, the Sants, and a religion that learns to name itself

    Delhi Sultanate, Vijayanagara, the Mughal empire: pan-India

    • c. 1200–1500 CE Hindu as a religious self-description. Identity forms in contrast to Islam — but there is still no "-ism". Sant poetry contrasting hindū and turk
    • From 1200 to 1750 bhakti went vernacular: Kabir, Tulsidas, Mirabai, Tukaram and Chaitanya sang in regional languages.
    • Tulsidas's Awadhi Ramcharitmanas, begun in 1574, became the Ramayana most Hindi speakers know.
    • Eaton documents about 80 temple desecrations over five centuries, mostly royal temples of defeated kings.
    • Guru Nanak's Sikhism emerged from the Sant milieu as a distinct tradition, not a Hindu-Muslim blend.
    • Dara Shukoh's Persian Upanishads reached Schopenhauer and shaped Western views of Hindu thought.

11. c. 1750 – 1947 CE · Chapter 11 Majority view

    The Invention of "Hinduism"

    Orientalists, reformers, and the making of a world religion

    Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Punjab (and London, Chicago, Oxford)

    • 1923 CE Hindutva. Defined territorially and ethnically, not theologically. Savarkar was an atheist. Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva
    • In 1750 there were many sects and no single religion called Hinduism; by 1947 there was one.
    • Orientalists, missionaries, census officials and Indian reformers jointly gave it a canon, an essence and a census category.
    • Vivekananda's 1893 Neo-Vedanta, that all paths lead to one truth, is a modern teaching, not a Vedic one.
    • Colonial censuses hardened fluid caste identities into fixed all-India categories; they did not invent caste.
    • Ambedkar rejected reform, arguing caste is authorized by the scriptures themselves.

12. c. 1947 – 2026 CE · Chapter 12 Majority view

    Modern and Contemporary

    Constitution, diaspora, global yoga, and a religion in public argument with itself

    India and a worldwide diaspora

    • After 1947 the Indian state became Hinduism's legislator: Article 17 abolished untouchability and 1955–56 Acts rewrote family law.
    • Ambedkar's 1956 conversion with hundreds of thousands of followers was modern Hinduism's largest secession.
    • Modern postural yoga is largely a twentieth-century lineage from Krishnamacharya, loosely linked to ancient yoga.
    • The 1987–90 TV epics turned India's many Ramayanas into one version for up to 100 million viewers.
    • Hindutva moved to the centre of politics, and Ayodhya shows this history is far from academic.