He looked at me with slightly glazed eyes through the pulse of bodies on the banks of the Ganges.

‘Hinduism is as big as your mind or as small as your mind,’ said the smiling sadhu, stroking a belly that was as swollen and smooth as a spacehopper. Well, that seemed to wrap it all up really, one of those great throw-a-way lines that the wandering holy men of India, the sadhus, know the foreigners want to hear and will mull over for hours in the shimmering heat of the subcontinent. But beneath the glaze-eyed guru gimmick was the nut of Hinduism. It is a huge religion, the oldest in the world with a confusion of thousands in the Hindu pantheon of gods. And even if you were to crack the cast of thousands, each one of them has a vehicle, an animal of some description that flies or trundles them around the heavens on their otherworldly missions. It is this hugeness that is daunting but it is an onion religion that is heavy with the ritual paraphernalia attached to it by the Indian nature and culture. As you peel away the layers the simple moral codes of human behaviour are at the root of Hinduism. If you dig down through the extraordinary scriptures to one of the main works, The Upanishads (400-200BC) there is the nub that is the same basis of the majority of the world’s main religions: ‘The Great God is One, and the learned call him by different names.’

Hinduism’s thousands of gods lead to the big three: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, three in one, and the physical representations of the unseen omnipotent God, Parabrahma.

When the glaze-eyed sadhu with the spacehopper belly said that it was ‘as big as your mind’ he was referring to the ability of Hinduism to embrace so many forms of worship; every family has a favourite god or goddess to whom they turn for guidance, support and comfort. But from out of all the layers of belief comes one core creed: the acceptance of Samsara, Karma and Dharma:Samsara, the cycle of rebirth through many lives on the way to attaining perfection, Moksha, spiritual salvation and release from the cycle of reincarnation; Karma, the law of cause and effect, whatever you do, good or bad, there will be a consequence and crimes and good deeds that are not recognised in the current life may be punished or rewarded in the next; Dharma, the natural balance of the universe, the law of the caste system and the moral code that each person should follow.

For the visitor to India and Asia, whether travelling through Hindu societies or living in them, a basic understanding of the caste system is important. The control of the caste system has been profoundly challenged for centuries, and most dramatically in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru became the first prime minister of independent India and called for secular government. Nehru’s hope to form a government free of religious undertone was an idealistic cry for a newly independent nation that has always ebbed and flowed on the tides of religious passion. The caste system is deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche and, even though it no longer officially exists as a class structure, the four main castes still effect daily life at every level. It has become largely diluted in the cities but it remains the rule of thumb in most rural areas. To ignore it is to bypass a great chunk of India at its pulse.

There are two things about Hinduism that are set in stone: you are either born a Hindu or you are not, you cannot truly convert to Hinduism; if you are a Hindu you are born into a cast and there you remain for your lifetime. This may well be one of the reasons that foreigners find Hinduism so fascinating, because ultimately we can find out as much about it as we like, we can read theMahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Vedas, the Upanishads an