To the casual observer, "Hinduism" often appears as a single, monolithic religion—a unified edifice of shared beliefs and ancient scripture. However, to the cultural historian, this image is a modern mirage. The tradition is better understood through the metaphor of a vast, ancient "river system." It is a main channel formed by the confluence of disparate streams: the urban sophistication of the Bronze Age Indus Valley, the pastoral Indo-Aryan migrations, and thousands of local village cults. This river has never been a static body of water. Over four millennia, it has branched, rejoined, and occasionally dammed itself off—as it did with the rise of Buddhism and Jainism—only to absorb those tributaries back into its current centuries later. The very word "Hinduism" is a colonial-era label, an attempt to impose a "tidy" logic onto a "civilization of arguments" that has historically thrived on internal contradiction and the absence of a...