Encounters & Turning Points
The moments when Sanatana Dharma met other worlds and changed: the coming of Islam, the colonial encounter, and the scholarship that reshaped it.
The turning points in Hindu history are mostly encounters: some of what Hinduism now is was formed in collision. The arrival of Islamic power from the eleventh century, the East India Company and the Orientalists, the missionary critique, and the nineteenth-century reformers who answered it: each encounter left the tradition changed in ways that are still argued about.
These are the hardest pages on this site to write honestly, because the history is contested and the politics are live. Temples were destroyed, and the scale and the motive are both disputed by serious historians. The Orientalists preserved manuscripts and also constructed a version of Hinduism that Hindus later adopted. Vivekananda in Chicago in 1893 invented a way of presenting the tradition to the West that has shaped how it presents itself since.
Every contested claim here is attributed to a named scholar, and a named scholar who disagrees is given alongside. No account is offered as the settled one.