First identity of a Hindu?

[Pulakeshin]

I was watching a scene in Bajirao Mastani when Bajirao announces that his son will be named Shamsher Bahadur. When he says that, there is a sudden silence as the scenes goes on Chimmaji Appa's horrified face. Clearly, being Muslim or naming your son with a Muslim name was not considered good at that time which made me wonder when was being Muslim looked at as bad for the first time.


So, Hinduism is pretty hard to define and you will get different answers from Hindus with regards to Hinduism. Some will say it's a faith with multiple Gods, some say it's just 1 God with different forms, some say that in its essence Hinduism is atheistic. So there are various viewpoints to it. Sure, we have the Hindu scriptures in the form of the Upanishads, Puranas, Vedas, Bhagavad-Gita, etc.

When the Islamic invasions started, Muslims had a definite identity of their own and also called themselves Muslims based on their identity. I wonder what did the Indians of that time call themselves just when the invasions started. I don't think there was a strong religious identity as such, maybe they had a caste/clan identity but not religious identity. Maybe as the invaders came, the Hindus/Buddhists might have considered Islam as just another philosophy and on the insistence of the invading Muslims, might have converted. Since Hindus didn't have a strong identity of their own and since the faith/dharmic culture encouraged different schools of thought, the initial conversion wouldn't have been too problematic I guess. It's only after the initial 100-200 years that Hindus might have started understanding that Islam could be dangerous for the subcontinent and they in turn might have started assuming their own identity. I want to know the period when Hindus actually started considering the Muslims/Turuskas/mlechhas as bad and unwanted.

 

[Tibarn]

An exact date would be hard to come by, as one would have to be familiar with all literature in India since the invasion of Sindh. Many of such literature has been destroyed and/or is illegible for the vast majority of us due to different scripts and languages used during that time: ie Sanskrit and Brahmi script.

However, we can infer from the word Mlecchha itself, that the distinction given to Mohammedens was likely as old as that religion's existence in India. Mlecchha is an older term than that religion itself. It was even used for the Greeks, with whom we have much more cultural/religious similarities. There is no reason to assume it wasn't used for Mohammedens. From that, we can assume Mleccha was used since first contact.


The earliest designation of them as Mlecchhas I have seen is from al-Beruni as early as the 1000s BCE, where he sees that he was considered one. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu specifically referred to them as such as well.