Hinduism The term Hinduism refers to the civilization of the Hindus (originally, the inhabitants of the land of the Indus River).Introduced in about 1830 by British writers, it properly denotes the Indian civilization of approximately the last 2,000 years, which evolved from Vedism the religion of the Indo- European peoples who settled in India in the last centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. The spectrum that ranges from the level of popular Hindu belief to that of elaborate ritual technique and philosophical speculation is very broad and is attended by many stages of transition and varieties of coexistence. Magic rites