Are these separate religions, or one argument carried on in several languages?
Nothing here is a single religion. The traditions of the subcontinent share vocabulary, share pilgrimage sites, share the same arguments, and disagree about almost everything else. The useful move is to read them as institutions with budgets, land and staff — not as sets of beliefs floating free of the society that pays for them. That is where the interesting history is, and it is also where the political arguments of the present actually live.
Inside this pillar
Hinduism is a family, not a church
The word is a nineteenth-century umbrella over traditions with no shared founder, creed or authority.
in preparationThe Vedic corpus and how it survived
Recited for three thousand years before being written down, with a system of checks that made memorisation self-correcting.
in preparationThe Upanishads turn inward
The point where ritual competence stops being the answer and the question becomes consciousness itself.
in preparationBuddhism born on the Gangetic plain
A reform movement inside a specific landscape of towns, trade routes and competing teachers.
in preparationJainism and the discipline of not harming
A metaphysics of minute life that produced both an extreme asceticism and a very successful merchant class.
in preparationSikhism, from Nanak to the Khalsa
Ten teachers, one scripture treated as a living authority, and a military order formed under persecution.
in preparationHow caste actually works
Not one ladder but thousands of local jatis, plus the constitutional machinery built to dismantle them.
in preparationThe temple as an institution
Landlord, banker, employer, school and archive — the religious function was never the only function.
in preparation