As a religious tradition, Hinduism may be thought of as a conglomerate of diverse communities sharing a set of properties that lend it a collective identity. Hindu “religion” is often conflated with a vague notion of Hindu “community”—a word that may designate sect, local temple culture, caste affiliation, regional identification, village cluster, or even a specific ethnic identity.
Many Hindu communities form around the worship of a specific divine form, a particular philosophical ethos, or a charismatic personality or saint. These communities—built around sectarian theologies—are sometimes called sampradaya and serve as a basis for many Hindus’ expression of religiosity and social identity. A given sampradaya (or sect) may focus on a particular saintly figure, concentrate on a specific form of divinity, ground itself in a popular doctrine, or situate its ethos in a specific scriptural text. Sometimes all of these interpenetrating factors contribute to the creation of a given Hindu religious community. One example is the Gaudiya Vaishnava Sam-pradaya, which traces its inspiration to the fifteenth-century mystic Chaitanya and focuses on the divine expression embodied by Lord Krishna who espoused the achintya-bhedab-heda form of Hindu Vedanta philosophy— seeing the relationship between man and God as a mysterious synthesis of difference and non-difference—and drew heavily from a scripture known as the Bhagavata Purana.
Much of Hindu notions of community have marginal connections with deities or philosophical orthodoxies. Regional formations of community constructed around lineages, castes, or social classes seem to define the Hindu cultural landscape. Within Hinduism exist organized communities sharing not only values of doctrine and diet, but also of marital ties and physical space. Certain traditional communities of Brahmins often cluster in housing projects on tracts of land known as agrahara. Similarly, in many parts of rural India, shared Hindu communal life exists among circles of villages, each with its own notions of inclusiveness and exclusivity. A parallel phenomenon is witnessed in the housing communities of urban India.
Another kind of communal paradigm that situates itself in traditional Hindu ideas and structures of thought are certain organizations that resemble both political organizations and social movements. These formations are often called samaj (society) or sangh (congregation). Some famous examples from the past century include the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj.
Contemporary communities such as the Vedanta Society also couch their larger social concerns within traditional Hindu paradigms. There are also Hindu communities that often situate their religious practice within their regional identities—this is especially common in the Hindu diaspora. The burgeoning growth of small contemporary Hindu communities, known as ashrams (literally, a place of rest), has expanded the landscape of Hindu communities. Athough initially organized around a small group of devotees attached to a holy personage, ashrams sometimes grow into formidable national or multinational organizations that attract devotees from all over the world. The activities of the ashram usually revolve around traditional Hindu practices of meditation, yoga, philosophical study, and devotional worship.
An especially complex nexus of social, political, ideological, doctrinal, and practical diversity makes it very difficult to define Hinduism and its constituent communities. Indeed, often a sense of community may extend from a broad feeling of Hindu nationality to an exclusive familial bond with its specific practices, doctrines, and philosophical outlooks.
