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Purana (पुराण): Purana meaning "ancient" or "old" is the name of a genre (or a group of related genres) of Indian written literature (as distinct from oral literature). Its general themes are history, tradition and religion. It is usually written in the form of stories related by one person to another.
Vasant Panchami (Sanskrit: वसन्त पञ्चमी, romanized: Vasanta Pañcamī), also rendered Vasanta Panchami [4] [5] and Saraswati Puja in honour of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, is a festival that marks the preparation for the arrival of spring.
In early colonial era Anglo-Hindu laws and British India court system, the term Hindu referred to people of all Indian religions as well as two non-Indian religions: Judaism and Zoroastrianism. [113] In the 20th century, personal laws were formulated for Hindus, and the term 'Hindu' in these colonial 'Hindu laws' applied to Buddhists, Jains and ...
Religion in India is characterised by a diversity of religious beliefs and practices. Throughout India's history, religion has been an important part of the country's culture and the Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of four of the world's major religions, namely, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which are collectively known as native Indian religions or Dharmic religions and ...
In modern times, most ancient texts have been translated into other Indian languages and some in non-Indian languages. [1] Prior to the start of the common era, the Hindu texts were composed orally, then memorized and transmitted orally, from one generation to the next, for more than a millennium before they were written down into manuscripts.
The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans, which were collected and later redacted into the Samhitas (usually known as the Vedas), four canonical collections of hymns or mantras composed in archaic Sanskrit.
The historical Vedic religion is now generally accepted to be a predecessor of modern Hinduism, but they are not the same because the textual evidence suggests significant differences between the two. [a] These include the belief in an afterlife instead of the later developed reincarnation and samsāra concepts.
There is significant variation in the language and style between the family books (RV books 2–7), book 8, the "Soma Mandala" , and the more recent books 1 and 10. The older books share many aspects of common Indo-Iranian religion, and is an important source for the reconstruction of earlier common Indo-European traditions .