Sociology of Religion and Secularism in India

The sociology of religion in India must contend with a plurality that resists easy classification: Hinduism itself comprises immense internal diversity of sect, deity, and practice, alongside substantial Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, and tribal religious traditions, each internally differentiated by region, caste, and language. Classical sociological theories of religion developed in a largely Christian European context, such as Durkheim's theory of the sacred and profane, require significant adaptation to account for this plurality and for traditions that blur boundaries between religious and social practice.

T.N. Madan's influential critique of Indian secularism argued that secularism as a state ideology imported from a specifically Western, post-Christian history of church-state separation does not map cleanly onto Indian society, where religion remains deeply embedded in everyday social and even political life; Madan proposed that Indian secularism functions less as separation of religion from state and more as principled state distance from and equal respect toward all religions, a formulation with significant normative and empirical implications.

Ashis Nandy extended this critique further, distinguishing 'religion as faith,' a way of life embedded in tradition and community, from 'religion as ideology,' a politicised identity marker mobilised for power, arguing that much of what passes for religious conflict in modern India is actually the ideological instrumentalization of faith by modern political actors rather than an expression of traditional religiosity itself, a controversial but widely discussed thesis.

The sociology of communalism examines how religious identity becomes politically salient and occasionally violent: scholars such as Paul Brass have studied 'institutionalised riot systems,' arguing that many communal riots are not spontaneous eruptions of ancient hatred but are organised, sustained, and sometimes deliberately triggered by identifiable political and criminal networks with material interests in continued communal tension.

Contemporary debates address the sociological study of religious conversion, particularly among Dalit and Adivasi communities converting to Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam as an act of social protest against caste discrimination, following Ambedkar's own 1956 conversion to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers at Nagpur, an event sociologists treat as both religious and deeply political, illustrating how religion in India cannot be studied in isolation from caste and power.