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.

But Indian secularism is not the American kind, and the difference is the interesting part. There is no wall of separation. The state administers major Hindu temples, funds religious education, subsidizes pilgrimages, and maintains separate personal-law codes for Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The operating principle is closer to equal state engagement with all religions than to state abstention from religion: a model with obvious advantages in a country this plural, and obvious failure modes, most of which have been on display at some point in the last seventy-five years.

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 tribal and folk traditions making up the remainder that the census has never handled well.

Four religions were born here: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. India is also home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, to Christian communities plausibly older than most European ones, and to the last significant Zoroastrian community anywhere.

Texts: Vedas & Upanishads · Ramayana · Mahabharata · Bhagavad Gita · Sangam & the Tirukkural

See also: Caste, which begins in the Vedic material and has never ceased to be a religious as well as a social question.

• 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 began here, vanished from here, and came back 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

  It arrived three separate ways, and collapsing them into one story is the source of most of the bad arguments about it.

• Christianity, Zoroastrianism & Judaism

  A church older than most European ones, the last significant Zoroastrian community anywhere, and three ancient Jewish communities.