Here's a sentence that sounds like a provocation but is mainstream scholarship: there is no such thing as "Hinduism" — until recently.1 The word, the category, the single religion it names — none of it existed before the colonial period. When Europeans began sustained contact with India in the 16th century, they hit a "bewilderingly complex culture of dozens of languages and religious traditions," got overwhelmed, and simply lumped all non-Muslim Indians together as "Hindoos" (from the Persian for "people east of the Indus River"), then grouped their practices as "Hinduism."2 It was a colonial filing convenience, not a religion anyone in India practiced. Before 1500, what actually existed were mutually distinct traditions that saw themselves as separate: Brāhmanism (Vedism), Shaivism, Śāktism, Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, Jainism — plus non-religious spiritual systems like Sānkhya and Pātañjala Yoga.3
This is the historical correction that frames Tantra's place in Indian religion. The key claims:4
This isn't a pedantic history footnote — it's load-bearing for everything that follows. If "Hinduism" is a recent stew that erased the distinct flavors of its ingredients, then Śaiva Tantra is one of those forgotten flavors — a once-distinct tradition with its own doctrines, now dissolved into a generic mix where its specific genius is invisible. Recovering Tantra means un-stewing it: separating out what was originally Śaiva, what was originally Tantric, from the homogenized Hindu blend that absorbed it.
Selvalingam (Nish the Fish) adds: he has a family anecdote that exposes the one-book reflex from the inside.12 As a teenager he proudly brought the Bhagavad Gītā to his grandfather as the Hindu scripture — the way a Westerner brings a Bible — and the grandfather's reply was a gentle deflation: that's cute, it's a Vaiṣṇava book. The lens that expects one religion to have one holy book is itself the imperial projection; from inside a living Śaiva household, the Gītā is one stream's text, not the tradition's constitution. The story makes the abstract colonial-construct claim tangible — the "one Hinduism, one scripture" frame is so naturalized that even an Indian teenager had absorbed it, and it took an elder to point back to the actual plurality of distinct streams (Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, Śākta) the stew had blurred. It sits directly against the Drāviḍian Śaiva Stream vs. the Vaidika — the grandfather is simply marking which stream the boy was actually standing in.
It also dissolves a worry that stops many Westerners: am I converting to Hinduism by practicing yoga or Tantra? Wallis's answer follows directly from the history.9 Since modern Hinduism is a cultural identity you're born into, and since Śaiva Tantra predates and stands outside that construct, practicing Tantra doesn't require adopting Hindu cultural identity. More precisely, Tantric practice involves creating an esoteric divine identity within your existing culturally-specific one — so you can remain "a cultural Christian, Jew, or Buddhist and still be a Tāntrika" (the esoteric-within-cultural identity). The colonial-construct point is what makes that possible: you can't "convert" to a tradition that was never the religion the convert-anxiety imagines.
This page reframes where Tantra sits: not a sect of Hinduism but one of the distinct pre-colonial traditions later absorbed into it. It underwrites the esoteric-identity-within-cultural-identity teaching (no conversion required) and the Śaiva-priority history (Shaivism as its own tradition with historical priority over Buddhist Tantra). It connects to Tantra as a trans-sectarian mode — Tantra crossed between these distinct religions rather than belonging to one.
The sharpest evidence that "Hinduism" is an artificial category is what happens when you try to define it — the boundaries land in the wrong places. When educated Indians settled on "Veda-as-ultimate-authority" as the criterion, the definition immediately misfired in two directions.10
It excluded Buddhism — even though Buddhism "derived from the same religious culture and played a crucial role in the development of Indian spirituality in all periods." Buddhism is, by origin and influence, deeply continuous with the rest of Indian religion; it gets cut out solely because it repudiated the Veda. Meanwhile, the definition included Shaivism — even though Shaivism "was not based on the Vedas and granted them no special religious authority." So the criterion exiles a tradition that belongs and adopts traditions that don't fit its own test. That's the signature of a category imposed from outside rather than discovered from within: when you finally try to state the rule, the rule contradicts the membership. A natural category's definition tracks its real members; an artificial one's definition has to be gerrymandered, and even then it leaks. The case study shows why the colonial-construct claim is more than provocation — the very attempt to define "Hinduism" coherently exposes that it was never a single thing, just a European convenience that later hardened into a real identity through five centuries of mixing.
For a practitioner or researcher, the colonial-construct point is a working discipline. Stop asking "what does Hinduism say about X." The question imports the stew; it flattens the distinct traditions whose specific answers actually differ. Ask instead "what does Śaiva Tantra say, as distinct from Vedānta, from Vaiṣṇavism, from Buddhism." Recover the lost flavor. Treat the reification-by-stew as a loss to be reversed — when you find a generic "Hindu" teaching, ask which original tradition it came from and what got blurred when it merged. Drop the conversion anxiety. Practicing Tantra isn't joining the cultural-identity religion you're born into; it's building an esoteric identity within your existing one. Watch the Veda-authority line. It's the criterion that defines modern Hinduism, and it's exactly the line Śaiva Tantra stands outside of — which is part of why Tantra is recoverable as a distinct tradition rather than just a flavor of the stew. The whole discipline is resisting the homogenization the word "Hinduism" performs.
Anachronistic lumping. You read pre-colonial Indian traditions through the unified "Hinduism" lens, attributing to ancient Śaivas or Buddhists a shared "Hindu" identity that didn't exist, and flattening their real doctrinal differences. The tell: sentences like "Hindus have always believed X" applied to a period when "Hindu" wasn't a category anyone used.
Conversion anxiety (or its mirror, appropriation panic). You either fear that practicing Tantra means converting to a foreign religion, or insist it does — both assuming "Hinduism" is a bounded creed Tantra belongs to. The tell: the whole debate framed as "are you becoming Hindu?" when the historical reality (Tantra as a distinct, pre-Hindu, trans-sectarian tradition) dissolves the question's premise.
Mainstream postcolonial scholarship of Indian religion, presented in Wallis's accessible register.11 The genuine tension is that the claim cuts both ways and Wallis holds both: "there is no Hinduism" (historically, pre-1500) and "Hinduism exists now" (reified over five centuries into a real cultural-religious identity). Critics of the "Hinduism-is-a-colonial-construct" thesis argue it can be overstated — that some sense of shared dharmic tradition predated the British. The open question is where exactly the line falls between "the unified category is a colonial imposition" and "the colonial period merely named and hardened a coherence that was already loosely there" — and whether emphasizing the construct-thesis, useful as it is for recovering distinct traditions like Tantra, risks understating real pre-colonial continuities among them.
Wallis converges firmly with the critical-historical scholarship the vault already holds (Samuel, the broader academic consensus) on this point — and the convergence is itself worth noting because Wallis elsewhere splits sharply from that camp (on mala, on White's "sinister yogi" reading). Here, on the colonial construction of "Hinduism," the insider-devotee and the critical historian agree completely. Why? Because the construct-thesis serves Wallis's project rather than threatening it: if "Hinduism" is a recent stew that erased distinct flavors, then recovering the distinct, sophisticated, forgotten flavor of Śaiva Tantra — exactly what Wallis is doing — is legitimate historical recovery, not sectarian special-pleading. The critical history that elsewhere brackets his devotional claims here licenses his recovery project. What that reveals is something about how warrants combine: the same critical-historical scholarship can be an adversary to a devotee's claims in one place and an ally in another, depending on whether it constrains or enables the recovery — and the honest scholar-practitioner takes it as both, deferring to it on the colonial history while contesting it on the doctrine.
The plain link: this is a case study in how an external classification creates a category that then becomes real — which connects to the psychology of identity-formation and the behavioral mechanics of how naming constructs groups.
The Sharpest Implication If one of the world's "great religions" is, on inspection, a colonial filing-category that became real only by being imposed and then internalized over five centuries — then the bounded, eternal, self-identical "religions" we casually compare ("Hinduism teaches X, Christianity teaches Y") may be far more constructed, recent, and leaky than the comparison assumes. The destabilizing part: the very units we use to think about religion can be artifacts of who was doing the classifying. "Hinduism" wasn't discovered; it was assembled, by outsiders, for convenience, and then lived into reality. That should make you suspicious of every tidy religious category, and it reframes the recovery of a tradition like Śaiva Tantra not as studying "a branch of Hinduism" but as excavating something the category "Hinduism" buried — a distinct, sophisticated tradition whose specific genius the homogenizing label made invisible. The name didn't organize the territory; it overwrote it.
Generative Questions