Hinduism has no single founder, creed, scripture or head. It is a family of related traditions, Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Smarta and many regional and local ones, that grew over some four thousand years out of the Vedic hymns and rituals of northern India, the Upanishads, the epics and Puranas, the law books, the philosophical schools and the devotional poetry of saints in a dozen languages. Its roots are sometimes traced to the cities of the Indus Valley of about 2600 BCE, but how far their religion continued into later Hindu practice is not known, and the origin of the Vedic tradition itself, whether from migrating Indo-Aryan speakers or from within the subcontinent, is still debated.

The faith was shaped as much by the kings who patronised it as by the sages who taught it. The Kuru kingdom collected the Vedas, the Mauryas and Guptas presided over classical India, the Pallavas, Cholas, Hoysalas and Vijayanagara raised great temples, and Hindu rulers in Cambodia, Champa, Java and Bali built Angkor Wat and Prambanan. Buddhism and Jainism rose in the same soil and competed with Brahmanical tradition; from the 8th century Muslim dynasties ruled much of the north, bringing destruction of some temples and patronage of others, and the Mughals, Marathas and the East India Company followed.

Under British rule the word Hindu came to describe a single religion and census category, reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda and Vivekananda reinterpreted the tradition, Gandhi and Ambedkar argued over caste, and Hindu nationalism emerged as a political movement. India became independent and was partitioned in 1947 and adopted a secular Constitution in 1950; the dispute over Ayodhya, the Kumbh Mela and a worldwide diaspora mark the recent era. Pew Research Center estimated nearly 1.2 billion Hindus in 2020, about 15 per cent of humanity, roughly 94 per cent of them in India.

Explore the twelve ages below through selected events from the timeline.