To be honest with you, being of a Hindu background I’ve never ever understood the concept of conversion. It seems so alien to me and seems to be prevalent only among the monotheistic religions, to me it seems to be a sort of rejection of the other.
Two qualifications. First, by “Hindu,” I mean Hindu-as-Indian, not Hindu as the set of native Indian beliefs which matured and crystallized under Turco-Muslim and British Christian hegemony. Second, inventing a missionary religion is like inventing the hypertext link or “one-click purchasing.” Someone was going to invent this. People of “Hindu background” seem to routinely forget that the first non-tribal religious system with universalist aspirations arose on the soil of India, Buddhism. This makes some sense because most people don’t know any history.
Below is a map which illustrates the nations which the Indian king Ashoka reputedly sent missionaries. One does not need to take this literally in all the details. Rather, it does establish the likelihood that Buddhism, which was a native Indian tradition, sent out missionaries across much of the civilized world centuries before Christianity in any form existed. In fact, it is almost certainly the case that Buddhism was a presence within China proper when Christianity was still self-consciously a Jewish sect, in the 1st century.
Of course, it must not be denied that Hinduism as a recognizable religious tradition has engaged in proselytization. The Cham Hindus of Vietnam and the Balinese are both relics of a vast domain of Southeast Asian Hinduism, which stretched from Cambodia south to Java.
