Hinduism is the majority religion of India and of Nepal and has roughly 1.2 billion adherents worldwide, which places it third in size after Christianity and Islam. Its distribution beyond South Asia was shaped first by trade and the long Indian presence in Southeast Asia, where Bali remains predominantly Hindu, then by indentured labour under British rule, which established communities in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and South Africa, and more recently by migration to Britain, North America, the Gulf and Australia.
The nineteenth century brought organised reform under colonial conditions. The Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828, pressed for a Hinduism without image worship and against practices its founders judged indefensible. The Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, argued for a return to the Vedas and against later accretion. Both were minority movements, but they set terms that later debate used. Vivekananda's appearance at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 marked the first sustained presentation of the tradition to a Western public on its own terms.
The twentieth century added a political dimension. Hindutva, a term given currency by V.D. Savarkar in 1923, defines Indian identity in terms of the traditions native to the subcontinent, and the movements built on it have been a major force in Indian politics since the late 1980s. Its relation to Hinduism as a religion is contested: supporters present it as the political expression of the tradition, critics as a modern nationalism that uses religious identity for other ends. Caste, abolished as a legal disability in independent India, remains a live question within the religion and about it.