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A. Sandmo
India, Religions of
Indian civilization contains a great number of religious
traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism,
Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism. All these traditions
have influenced each other and have become part and
parcel of Indian civilization in one way or another. A
large number of Indian traditions refer, positively or
negatively, to a set of religious books, called the
Vedas. These scriptures were, originally, the intel-
lectual property of a priestly caste of Brahmans and the
basis of their rituals and philosophies. Brahmans as a
caste form the apex of a hierarchy of status categories
which can be seen as an early form of the later much
more elaborate Indian caste system. Buddhism and
Jainism emerged around 500 BC in protest against the
Brahmanical monopoly of Vedic ritual. They are
essentially ascetic religions which have much in com-
mon with other speculative philosophies which con-
tinued to accept the authority of the Vedas. Buddhism
spread from India to the rest of Asia, but became
marginal in India, while Jainism did not expand
outside of India, but continued in India as the religion
of, primarily, businessmen. Christianity came to
Kerala in the first centuries of the Common Era and in
other varieties with the Portuguese to Goa in the
sixteenth century and with other Europeans in the
centuries thereafter. Islam came to India at the end of
the first millennium, along the coast with traders and
in the northern plains as an element of the military and
religious expansion of a variety of groups from West
and Central Asia.
1. Hinduism
The majority of the Indian population today calls
itself Hindu. Hinduism is a term that only in the
eighteenth century came to be used for a variety of
religious traditions which dominate the Indian re-
ligious landscape. When they are Brahmanical, these
traditions refer to the Vedas, but when they are not
they can refer to a number of religious texts, oral or
scriptural. Gods like Vishnu and his reincarnations
Rama and Krishna are very popular. Likewise, a god
like Shiva, often represented in an aniconic, phallic
form, is worshipped all over India. In many localities
one finds local manifestations of gods like Vishnu or
Shiva. A special and important category of gods are
Mother Goddesses which often protect against evil
and diseases. The typical form of worship of images of
gods is the offering of gifts like flowers or sometimes
goats or buffaloes. These temples are serviced by
Brahman or ascetic priests. Temples are everywhere,
but especially in sacred places, which are somehow
connected to the story of the god. Hindus make
pilgrimages to these places, especially at auspicious
times in the lunar calendar. There is also an elaborate
complex of rituals which are performed in the domestic
context, often related to moments in the life cycle.
Finally, there are groups of priests, specialized in
warding off evil and witchcraft and performing mor-
tuary rites.
In terms of the social organization of religion there
are five elements in Hindu traditions. First, there is
caste. Brahman groups have continued from the
earliest times to dominate a large part of religious
beliefs and practices. Ritual purity and sacred knowl-
edge are the foundations of their supremacy. Other
castes have also created cults of their own, but often
they are seen of lower status than the Brahmanical
cults. Second, there are rituals of kingship. There is the
conception of a generic relationship between royal
deity and human king which is reflected in ritual
practice. In a large number of regions in India one
finds a network of temples and palaces which are
mutually interdependent. Third, there is the level of
the village. The local community is often ritually
represented in a number of festivals. Fourth, there is
the notion of world renunciation. Ascetics have for a
long time up to the twenty-first century built monastic
orders and drawn lay support for their religious and
worldly activities. They are innovators of religious
traditions, but also as free agents in a village society
important long-distance traders, money brokers, and
military entrepreneurs until the coming of the colonial
state. Fifth, there is the concept of bhakti (devotion).
One cult after another sprang up in India during the
second millennium, channeling waves of devotional
enthusiasm. Often ascetic leaders were involved in this
and in a number of cases they revolted against the
Brahmans and the caste system. By that token they
were sometimes able to find a distinct religious
tradition, such as the religion founded by Guru
Nanak, which evolved gradually into Sikhism and
defined itself as different from Hinduism.
Hinduism is a term which has developed from
‘Hindu,’ a term used by Muslims who came to the river
Indus or Sindh (from Sanskrit Sindhu) in the second
half of the first millennium. ‘Hindu’ designates the
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India, Religions of
inhabitants of this area of Al-Hind or Hindustan and
their customs and beliefs. The term Hindu was made
into an ‘ism’ by the British in the eighteenth century.
The conceptualization of Hinduism as one particular
religion among other religions and theoretically com-
parable to them can be understood in relation to a
number of philosophical arguments about the uni-
versality of the category of ‘religion’ in the European
Enlightenment. The conceptualization of their reli-
gious traditions by Hindus themselves had evolved
along lines of philosophical argumentation about
dharma (the sacred order of things) by religious
scholars who are easiest divided in followers of the
God Shiva and followers of the God Vishnu. Their
philosophical arguments were often accompanied by
ritual injunctions, especially for temple worship. Be-
low this level of high philosophical argumentation
there were a number of devotional movements which
can broadly be divided into those which focus on the
worship of images and those which have an aniconic
image of God. The British introduced the essentialized
and unified concept of Hinduism as a religion in an
already existing arena of lively polemics about re-
ligious difference.
2. Modern Period
In the modern period the expansion of the colonial
state is crucial for defining the location of religion in
India. In the eighteenth century the British East-India
Company followed a traditional policy of religious
patronage benefiting the religious establishments in
the areas which came under their growing influence.
This policy was further supported by a strong interest
in Hindu scripture from a viewpoint of comparative
linguistics and comparative religion. This so-called
‘orientalism’ of the late-eighteenth century was ve-
hemently attacked at home and in the colony by
utilitarian administrators and evangelical missionaries
who were united in their rejection of anything Hindu.
In education and religious worship the colonial admin-
istration was forced to withdraw from giving its
patronage to religious establishments and a policy of
‘religious neutrality’ was established gradually in the
nineteenth century.
The response of Indian religious thinkers, institu-
tions and movements to colonial interference under
the aegis of religious neutrality has been central to the
formation of modern religions in India during the
nineteenth century. Especially attacks by evangelical
missionaries on religious practices and social customs
led to both reformist and conservative responses.
In Bengal, Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) studied
Christianity and felt great affinity with the rational
critique of religious orthodoxy, launched in Britain by
Unitarians. In 1827 he founded the British Indian
Unitarian Association, but his study of the Vedas and
Upanishads quickly led him to explore the limits of
7280
Unitarian universalism. In 1828 he decided that a
universal, rational religion had to be based upon the
Vedas and Upanishads and created the Brahmo
Samaj, a small, but influential elite movement, propa-
gating a deist and universalist kind of religion, based
upon Hindu sources. The movement is particularly
opposed to ‘superstitious customs’ of ‘ignorant
people,’ ‘deceived’ by their Brahman leaders.
Rammohan was in the forefront of public action. In
January 1830 he, together with 300 residents of
Calcutta, presented a petition to Governor-General
William Bentinck in support of government pro-
hibition of widow immolation, a practice found in
some parts of India when after the demise of a husband
the widow throws herself on the pyre of her husband
to be burned with him. Rammohan rejected this
practice on the basis of his reading of Hindu scripture.
He distinguished authoritative sources, such as the
Vedas, from other sources. It is significant that he did
not refer to authoritative interpretations by learned
Brahmans, but relied entirely on his own judgement.
This is an important step towards the laicization of
Hinduism, that is to say, the formation of religious
movements, carried by lay believers and relatively
independent of traditional, sacred interpreters of the
Hindu canon. The Brahmo Samaj was the cradle of an
intellectual Hinduism which was at the end of the
century personified by Swami Vivekananda (1863–
1902), the founder of the Ramakrishna movement.
Movements like the Brahmo Samaj are sometimes
called Neo-Hindu because they have been clearly
influenced by European thought and Christianity. On
the other hand, however, they are also in direct
interaction with more traditional thinkers and move-
ments. A good example is the illiterate saint
Ramakrishna (1836–88), a priest of a Kali temple near
Calcutta whose devotional practices, ecstasies, and
unconventional behavior was very attractive to the
intellectual Brahmo Samaj adherents, because he
seemed to signify a certain untainted Hindu auth-
enticity. The great reformer Vivekananda took
Ramakrishna as his spiritual guide.
Vivekananda became famous after his visit to the
World Parliament of Religions which was organized in
Chicago in 1893. He offered a packaged Hinduism, in
which spirituality and yoga (mental and physical
discipline) were keywords, first to a world audience
and later to an audience at home. Central to
Vivekananda’s religious message is the notion of
‘practical Vedanta,’ in which he combined the Vedanta
(l philosophical commentaries on the Vedas) with
participation in social activism rather than with ascetic
withdrawal from the world, as had been common in
Hindu traditions. It is this message which could be tied
up with nationalism and political activism as was done
by political leaders such as Mohandas (‘Mahatma’)
Gandhi (1869–1948).
Also outside of Bengal we see a number of move-
ments which interact both with Hindu tradition and

with modernity, as brought by colonial rule. The Arya
Samaj is the most important among them. Founded by
Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), an ascetic who had
been initiated in one of the most austere monastic
orders in Hinduism, it is an iconoclastic movement
which identifies image worship with the decline of an
earlier pure Vedic religion. It attacked also the caste
system and its system of marriage and the traditional
Brahmanical priesthood. The Arya Samaj became and
remains one of the central religious pillars of Hindu
nationalism.
3. Public Sphere
It is not only Hinduism which is developing modern
movements in the new public sphere created under
colonial rule. The general pattern is an attack on
traditional priestly leadership, on ‘backward,’ popular
religion and an emphasis on free, lay access to scripture
and to religious debate. In this way the foundation of
religious authority changes and becomes mediated by
education and new forms of communication, such as
print, and later radio and television. Muslim move-
ments such as the Deobandis, the Ahmadiyyas, and
the modernist Aligarh movement share with the Hindu
movements of the period the defense of their religion
against the onslaught of missionary criticism and the
attempt to formulate an answer to modern intellectual
challenges. Clearly, they are all deeply political since
they mobilize people against certain aspects of colonial
rule as well as against aspects of their religious
traditions and traditional leadership. They are the
basis for the formation of the Muslim political party,
the Muslim League, and for Muslim participation in
the Congress Party. Also the Sikhs have to respond to
colonial modernity. The British gave the Sikhs pre-
ferential treatment in their recruitment for the army,
which made the rather fluid Sikh identity both more
valuable and more fixed. The Singh Sabha movement
is especially important, since it challenges the control
over the centers of Sikhism, the temples or gurdwaras.
These centers were owned by hereditary priests, but
following the general pattern of laicization the Singh
Sabha movement demanded that they came under the
control of the lay community of Sikhs. Control over
the committee which governs these temples is still one
of the biggest prizes in Sikh politics. It is also the basis
of the power of the Sikh political party, the Akali Dal.
The twentieth century witnessed a further politiciza-
tion of religious identity. The greatest competition was
between Hindus and Muslims. The colonial state
reinforced this competition by creating separate job
opportunities, separate civil laws, and separate elec-
torates. The advent of mass politics brought with it the
mass mobilization of people on the basis of reified
identities. Mohandas Gandhi, the great leader of the
Congress party, was brilliant in his strategies to
dismantle British power, but these strategies were
India, Religions of
based explicitly upon Hindu practices. Both he and, to
a lesser extent, Jawaharlal Nehru were perceived by
Muslims as Hindu despite their open secular politics.
Radical movements emerged which challenge the idea
of India as a plural civilization. ‘To be an Indian is to
be a Hindu’ was a slogan of V. D. Savarkar
(1883–1966), one of the founding ideologies of Hindu
nationalism. Movements such as the Rashtriya Sway-
amsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindu Mahasabha
wanted to establish Hindu hegemony in independent
India. The assassins of Gandhi in 1947 emerged from
such organizations. On the Muslim side, the Muslim
League became gradually more and more radical until
it demanded Pakistan, a homeland for Muslims, in
1942 and ultimately forced the Partition of India. The
tragedy of the violently enforced migration of Hindus
to India and Muslims to Pakistan, the division of East
and West Pakistan which led in 1971 to the foundation
of Bangladesh, the territorial dispute about Kashmir,
and the threat of warfare between these two nuclear
powers, were all results of the political mobilization of
religious difference on the Indian subcontinent.
4. Nationalism
Hindu nationalism needs to construct a Hindu
majority among the Indian population to realize its
claims to political hegemony. It not only runs against
the resistance of non-Hindu religious communities,
such as Muslims or Sikhs, but also against that of so-
called ‘untouchables’ and ‘tribals’ who form a large
minority in that section of the population which has to
be constructed as a Hindu majority, but who are
within Hindu practices severely discriminated. There
are a number of anti-Brahman, and sometimes anti-
Hindu, movements among these underprivileged
groups which demand special protection and positive
discrimination from the state. Most of these demands
concern education and employment, but participation
in Hindu rituals and access to temples are also
important in the mobility of these groups. One of the
most important movements among ‘untouchables’
was led by Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–1956), a
Mahar untouchable from West India who has a
doctorate in law from Columbia University. It was
Ambedkar, one of the principal authors of the Indian
constitution, who late in his life concluded that the
untouchables would not be equal citizens in India as
long as they continued to be second-rate Hindus. He
led a mass conversion to Buddhism, primarily by his
own community of Mahars, but also followed by other
untouchable groups in India. The conversion to
Buddhism, however, has not solved the discrimination
of these groups in India and more recently a unifying
tactic has been to claim a more secular, militant
identity in terms of race rather than religion.
In Indian Islam, one of the major developments in
the twentieth century was the founding of the Tablighi
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India, Religions of
Jama’at in 1927 by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas
(1886–1944). In 1934 Ilyas started a great revivalist
campaign among Muslims of Mewat, an area near
Delhi. Going from person to person, he called upon
them to follow their Muslim duties, such as praying in
the mosque. Gradually he formed groups of laymen
who went for fixed periods on tours to invite their
fellow Muslims to perform their duties. This created a
snowball effect whereby more and more people
became involved in this activity. The groups went
around first in the area of Mewat, then in other places
in India and Pakistan, and, finally, in the 1950s abroad
to countries such as Nigeria, Morocco, Britain,
Canada, and France. The movement thus spread from
South Asians to other Muslims and is now one of the
most successful Islamic movements in the world. The
Tablighi Jama’at is professedly apolitical and in that
way very different from the major Islamist movement
of the subcontinent, the Jama’at-i-Islami. This move-
ment was founded in 1941 by a former journalist,
Maulana Maududi (1903–79), one of the most influ-
ential Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century. It is
a much smaller movement than the Tablighi Jama’at,
but highly political and organized as a tightly and
hierarchically run revolutionary force which aims to
capture the state in order to transform society accord-
ing to Islamic principles. In Pakistan it has a con-
siderable influence in politics and also in the rest of
the Muslim world revolutionary movements of the
Islamist persuasion have taken it as an inspiring
example.
The 1980s saw the development of some ultra-
nationalist religious movements in India. The Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, founded in Bombay in 1964 by some
religious leaders with the help of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, organized a country-wide pro-
test against the conversion to Islam of a group of
‘untouchables’ in the South Indian village of Meenak-
shipuram in 1981. The success of this protest led to
the staging of another All-India campaign in 1984 to
demand the demolition of a sixteenth century mosque
in Ayodhya, in North India, which had allegedly been
built on the site of a temple commemorating the
birthplace of the God Rama. This campaign became
one of the most important issues in Indian politics in
the decade following its start. In 1992, the mosque was
demolished with the tacit acceptance of the Indian
state.
The 1980s saw also the development of a radical
Sikh separatism in the Punjab, led by Sant Jarnail
Singh Bhindranwale (1947–84), a young religious
leader. His militant career started with intersectarian
strife among the Sikhs, but developed into straight-
forward confrontation with the Indian state. In
1984 the most important Sikh shrine, the Akal Takht
in Amritsar, was captured by the militants who
demanded Khalistan, a separate Sikh state, imitating
the earlier demand for Pakistan by the Muslims of
South Asia. In the same year the Indian army decided
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
to attack the Golden temple and chase the militants.
The action caused great disaffection with the state
among Sikhs worldwide and led to the assassination of
Mrs Indira Gandhi (1917–84), the then prime minister
of India.
During the twentieth century there was a growing
nationalization of Indian religions, which makes it
difficult to separate them from processes of state
formation. The migration of South Asians outside
India has led to these forms of religious nationalism
being spread to the rest of the world.
See also: Area and International Studies: Develop-
ment in Southeast Asia; Buddhism; Conflict: Anthro-
pological Aspects; Conflict Sociology; Hindu Law;
Internal Warfare: Civil War, Insurgency, and Re-
gional Conflict; Marx, Karl (1818–89); Revolution;
Revolutions, Sociology of; Revolutions, Theories of;
Social Movements, Sociology of; South Asia: Socio-
cultural Aspects; South Asian Studies: Culture
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P. van der Veer
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Indicator: Methodology
Concepts in the social sciences are often abstract.
Current knowledge or data allows only imperfect
empirical representations of them. But abstract ideas
such as intelligence, the values of goods, individual
attitudes, or social class are so important to the social
sciences that we attempt to empirically track them
even if our ways of doing so are limited. ‘Indicator’ is
a common term to refer to the variables that we use to
detect these concepts empirically. Other terms are
proxy
ariables, items, measures, scores, scales, indices,
or obser
ed
ariables. Occasionally some of the terms
have a ‘part-whole’ relation where, for instance, a
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