The standard story of the development of Indic religions was developed in the mid to late nineteenth century, in a collaboration between Western scholars on the one side, and Hindu and Buddhist scholars and intellectuals on the other. This story was essentially that of the development of a number of separate religions, principally Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, with Hinduism being seen as the earliest and Buddhism and Jainism as reactions against it. The narrative began with the hymns of the Ṛgveda, thought to be the oldest existing texts in an Indian language. The Ṛgveda was seen as representing the earliest stage of Hinduism and subsequent stages as a series of developments from it. The Ṛgveda was treated as, in effect, a foundational text with a somewhat similar role to that of the Five Books of the Jewish Torah in relation to traditional accounts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The story continued through the remaining texts of the Vedic corpus, down to such ‘late Vedic’ texts as the Upaniṣads, Śrauta Sūtras, Gṛhya Sūtras and Dharma Sūtras. All these texts were placed in a historical sequence, and seen as defining an early Hinduism, composed of sacrificial rituals, legal prescriptions and philosophical speculations, against which the śramaṇa movements (Jainism and Buddhism) reacted.

The great epics (Mahābharata and Rāmāyaṇa) formed the defining texts of the next period on the Hindu side, and the Purāṇas, along with the writings of the Vedānta philosophers and the bhakti poets, of the next, with the Tantras as a rather uncomfortable parallel development.