“Hindu” is related to the Arabic term “al-Hind”

“Hindu” is related to the Arabic term “al-Hind,” which was used to designate the region around Indus river by travelers to the subcontinent. Before the 19th century, the term Hindu simply didn’t refer to religion, but to a loose collection of peoples who happened to live on the subcontinent and who were neither Muslim nor Christian. The term Hindu began to be used in the 19th century, when European Indologists were trying to codify a religion. But Indologists work only with texts, and texts are the basis only of upper-caste culture. So the upper castes acted as native informants for these Indologists, and as a result, what was conceived as religion at that time was only the upper-caste religion. With the 1872 British census, a new dimension came up, which was that communities were going to be enumerated, and that’s when the upper castes began to consider their category. For the longest time, they always continued to think of themselves in terms of caste rather than the category of religion.

By the early 20th century, censuses began to show that the upper castes are a minuscule minority. Some upper-caste people began to catch up to the new game, which was that Indians would get greater room in governing themselves. They decided that if their numbers were revealed to be low, they would have no traction in this new form of electoral politics and therefore, they needed to hide caste and to produce a new category under which they would not only appear to be the majority, but also be the representatives of that majority. And that is when “Hindu” as a category was embraced, and they required quite a lot of persuasion to do so. This is all very, very well archived: Gandhi, Lajpat Rai, several other nationalist leaders were part of this.

So, in the early 20th century, they actively adopted a foreign term, “Hindu,” and the religion was “invented.” And this constructed majority allowed them to continue caste oppression, which continues until today.

Source

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hindutva-and-the-academy-a-conversation-with-divya-dwivedi/