philosophy
Does Hinduism have a concept of collective or inherited guilt?
Ancestors, debt, and consequence
Hindu thought holds that a person is born into three debts. One of them is pitru-rina, the debt owed to ancestors. This is not only gratitude for life. It also carries the idea that descendants are connected to what came before them, including wrongs that were never set right. The tradition sees families as bound together across generations, not just as separate individuals. So the consequences of an ancestor's actions can ripple forward. This is not quite the same as saying a child is guilty for what a grandparent did. It is more that the family line carries something unresolved, and living members may feel its weight.
Stories that show it
The Mahabharata contains several stories where whole families bear the effects of what earlier members did. A curse, a broken promise, or a great wrong done by one person can shape the fate of children and grandchildren. These stories do not always frame this as fair. Some characters in the tradition question it openly. So the idea is present, but it is not presented without tension or debate.
Shraddha and tarpana
The tradition also offers a way to address ancestral wrongs. Shraddha rituals and tarpana, the offering of water to the departed, are performed partly to bring peace to ancestors whose lives ended with things unresolved. The belief is that these acts can ease what the ancestors carry and, by doing so, ease what the living carry too. This is not about erasing guilt in a legal sense. It is more about tending to the connection between the living and the dead, and trying to bring some resolution across time.
How this sits with individual karma
Individual karma is the most widely known idea in Hindu thought on this subject. Each soul accumulates its own karma through its own choices across many lifetimes. That teaching puts responsibility firmly on the individual. Collective or inherited consequence sits alongside this, not always comfortably. The tradition holds both ideas at once without fully resolving the tension between them. Different schools and teachers have weighed them differently.
Today
In contemporary discussion, especially around caste, some people draw on these ideas when asking whether communities or groups carry responsibility for historical wrongs. Others push back, saying individual karma means each person stands on their own. There is no single Hindu answer to this. It is an active debate, and people across the tradition land in very different places.