Gonna be a controversial post

Hinduism is a 20th century religion and not the often cited 5000 years old. That was all Brahminism over all these centuries who had been appropriating local non aryan beliefs into theirs.

Dyk Gandhi had to convince Brahmin leaders to start calling themselves hindus as opposed to their caste ? Whomever we refer to as hindu, comes from a British classification from the missionaries to distinguish beliefs from islam. It's a kind of an indic term for pagan. The identity of Hindu, being religious came from British missionary classifications and not some romanticised age old egalitarian civilization like the mainstream political narrative. The identity marker for people in the subcontinent was their caste. During the freedom struggle, hindu nationalism was created by upper caste Brahmins where the beliefs and cultures of Brahmins were kept as pure beliefs of a religion they liked calling different names like Sanatana Dharma, Vaidic dharma, Hindu dharma etc.

It doesn't mean these words are completely made up , Hindu is a real world and historically very accurate. But it was a vague geographical term for the land beyond the Sindhu river as opposed to a religious identity. Same way, there is a vedic religion and the word sanatana does appear in those scriptures. However, the main point of consideration is how the Brahmin beliefs and cultures were made mainstream and rest other local ones were called as deities or sub-gods, yet again establishing a cultural dominance over the lower castes. It makes sense though. Islamic rulers and all colonisers were in close contact with upper castes first and foremost. Their beliefs then surely came out to be the ONLY beliefs of the whole community for the islamic rulers and colonisers.

To have a political dominance, a Hindu religion and a Hindu identity was created so that the fact of Brahmin or upper caste hegemony could be hidden because yk a majority always win. Now there will be people who buy the narrative of "there is only one god but different ways of worshipping it" yall should read puranas first and have better interpretations of them. There are clear hierarchies and contradictions in mythic claims. Then remember that Hinduism maybe include the vedic religion, vedic religion is exclusionary and it doesn't recognise other deities as valid, specifically the non Aryans deities.

We also have to remember that whatever interpretation of scriptures we read today are written by someone or other with different things in their mind : a priest to spread the messages (what he think the message is ) of scriptures to people, an English interpretor for the purpose of understanding ancient literature, a modern politician to glaze an ahistorical past so that the fault of current bad conditions can be put on the past and avoid responsibility directly.