section_path: Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  The word Hindū is an exonym, and is derived from the Sanskrit root Sindhu, believed to be the name of the Indus River in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.
  
  The Proto-Iranian sound change *s > h occurred between 850 and 600 BCE. According to Gavin Flood, "The actual term Hindu first occurs as a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus (Sanskrit: Sindhu)", more specifically in the 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I (550–486 BCE). The term Hindu in these ancient records is a geographical term and did not refer to a religion. The word Hindu is found as heptahindu in Avesta – equivalent to Rigvedic sapta sindhu, while hndstn (pronounced Hindustan) is found in a Sasanian inscription from the 3rd century CE, both of which refer to parts of northwestern South Asia. In Arabic texts, al-Hind referred to the land beyond the Indus and therefore, all the people in that land were Hindus. This Arabic term was itself taken from the pre-Islamic Persian term Hindū. By the 13th century, Hindustan emerged as a popular alternative name of India, meaning the "land of Hindus".
  
  Among the earliest known records of 'Hindu' with connotations of religion may be in the 7th-century CE Chinese text Record of the Western Regions by Xuanzang, and 14th-century Persian text Futuhu's-salatin by 'Abd al-Malik Isami. Some 16–18th century Bengali Gaudiya Vaishnava texts mention Hindu and Hindu dharma to distinguish from Muslims without positively defining these terms. In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus. The use of the English term "Hinduism" to describe a collection of practices and beliefs is a fairly recent construction. The term Hinduism was first used by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1816–17. By the 1840s, the term "Hinduism" was used by those Indians who opposed British colonialism, and who wanted to distinguish themselves from Muslims and Christians. Before the British began to categorise communities strictly by religion, Indians generally did not define themselves exclusively through their religious beliefs; instead identities were largely segmented on the basis of locality, language, varna, jāti, occupation, and sect.