But the early colonialists could just not conceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.80 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.
