Augusto had asked me to read the following book, among others, presumably to support Fr. Ferrao's argument that the beliefs and practices of the people of the Goan region of India before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century were not fully Hindu. That instead, they were seminal Hindu or pre-Hindu. That evolution of what we call Hinduism today happened after the advent of the Portuguese in Goa and/or the British in India. That the temples that were destroyed by the Portuguese in Goa were not Hindu temples.
"Maurice Phillips, The Evolution of Hinduism, 2007" Augusto must have recommended this book just from the word "evolution" in its title, without actually reading it. I say this because when I read it I realized that it completely contradicts Fr. Ferrao's and Augusto's claims. First of all, the book was not published for the first time in 2007, but 100 years earlier in 1903. It is in fact a Ph.D. thesis defended by Maurice Phillips before the faculty of the University of Berne in 1900. In it the author defines Hinduism as a fusion of the corrupted Vedic doctrines of Aryans involving worship of elements and forces of nature with the animism and fetichism of aborigines and indigenous people of India. He situates the emergence of Hinduism in time with the disintegration of the Vedic creed and the reaction of Brahmans to it, which he claims happened because of the following four causes: 1. The invariable natural tendency of any religion to corrupt itself. 2. The mixing of the races 3. The cultivation of philosophical thought 4. The rise of Buddhism All this occurred from about 600 B.C. to about 300 C.E., which coincided with the composition of Mahabharat, Ramayan and the Puranas, and the development of the six schools of orthodox Indian philosophy, namely Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimansa and Vedanta, and three schools of heterodox Indian philosophy, namely Buddhism, Jainism and Lokayata (Charvakism). According to him, the evolution of Hinduism as we know it today was complete by the 6th century C. E., continued further only by the elaboration of its philosophical underpinnings until the 13th century C. E. by Shankaracharya (8th century), Ramanujacharya (12th century) and Madhavacharya (13th century). Indeed, he writes that "it (Hinduism) has stood in a state of unstable equilibrium for the last 1300 years". Cheers, Santosh
