Composed between the fifteenth and the fifth century BCE, the Vedas - literally "Knowledge" - are a Sanskrit corpus considered by most Hindus as a non-human revelation, and whose transmission has for centuries been reserved to a socio-religious elite, the Brahmins. Throughout Brahmanical literature the authority of the Vedas is recognized as supreme. In the nineteenth century, as part of the construction of an Indian national identity during the colonial period, some reform movements transformed them into the reference texts for a Hinduism conceived of as a unitary religion. They also read and interpreted the Vedas as a religion that, unlike Christianity, contained truths compatible with the achievements of modern science.

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