intellectuals (i.e., Brahmins), or somehow emerged from a combination of these two forces among others, modern readers have inherited the term “Hinduism,” and that is the term we will use here. The debate represents a larger academic discussion about the role of indigenous people in creating their own identities on their own terms. Was Edward Said correct in his view that Westerners’ prejudicial perspective created the exotic “other” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and thus “Hinduism,”