Religion

India has no state religion. The Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and prohibits religious discrimination, and the word “secular” was added to the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment in 1976.

Official identity and institutional doctrine describe only part of religious life. The cross-cutting page on ritual, pilgrimage, and lived religion follows practices that move through homes, streets, shrines, and more than one census category without pretending that their differences disappear.

But Indian secularism is not the American kind, and the difference is the interesting part. There is no wall of separation. State governments administer many Hindu temples; governments support institutions and pilgrimages associated with several faiths; and family law remains divided among Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Parsi systems alongside civil marriage. The Hindu code legally includes Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs for several purposes even though their religious identities are distinct. The operating principle is closer to state engagement with religious communities than to state abstention from religion, a model with obvious uses in a country this plural and obvious failure modes. How that arrangement actually works, including the doctrine that has judges deciding what is essential to a religion, is its own subject.

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Mir Kalan Khan’s A Gathering of Holy Men of Different Faiths, Lucknow, ca. 1770-75. Proximity and exchange are part of India’s religious history, but they do not erase distinct institutions or beliefs.

By the 2011 census, Hindus are about 79.8% of the population, Muslims about 14.2%, Christians 2.3%, Sikhs 1.7%, Buddhists 0.7%, and Jains 0.4%, with Parsis, Jews, and a large number of Adivasi and folk traditions making up part of a remainder that the census has never handled well.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism all took shape in the subcontinent. India is also home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, to Christian communities established long before European colonialism, to one of the last significant Zoroastrian communities anywhere, and to Jewish communities with four unrelated histories between them.

Texts: Vedas · Upanishads · Buddhist & Jain Canons · Ramayana · Mahabharata · Bhagavad Gita · Sangam & the Tirukkural · Bhakti, Sufi & Sikh Poetry

See also: Caste, which has never ceased to be religious as well as social; and Adivasi India, whose traditions do not fit cleanly into the census categories above.

• Secularism

  No wall of separation, state-administered temples, four family law systems, and a doctrine that has judges deciding what is essential to a religion.

• Lived Religion

  Home altars and roadside shrines, vows and offerings, pilgrimage and healing—and the relationships that doctrine or census identity alone cannot explain.

• Hinduism

  Not a religion in the sense Christianity or Islam is one, and most of the confusion starts with assuming it must be.

• Buddhism

  It arose in the Gangetic world, declined across India over centuries, and returned in 1956 as a political argument.

• Jainism

  Non-violence as a metaphysical consequence rather than an ethical preference, and the doctrine of many-sidedness.

• Sikhism

  An independent revelation or a synthesis: the two answers have very different histories, and the difference matters.

• Islam

  Trade, conquest, migration, conversion, and Sufi institutions produced several histories, not one story of arrival.

• Christianity

  A community older than European colonialism, a forced Latinization it revolted against, and a conversion question that is now mostly about caste.

• Zoroastrianism

  One of the last significant Zoroastrian communities anywhere, an influence on Indian public life wildly out of proportion to its size, and a demographic problem with no agreed solution.

• Judaism

  Four communities with four unrelated histories, and a country where Jews faced almost no organized persecution, with one colonial exception.