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Swami Vivekananda and His 1893 Speech

Photo of Swami Vivekananda in Chicago in 1893 with the handwritten words “one infinite pure and holy—beyond thought beyond qualities I bow down to thee”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) is best known in the United States for his groundbreaking speech to the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in which he introduced Hinduism to America and called for religious tolerance and an end to fanaticism. Born Narendranath Dutta, he was the chief disciple of the 19th-century mystic Ramakrishna and the founder of Ramakrishna Mission. Swami Vivekananda is also considered a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga to the West and is credited with raising the profile of Hinduism to that of a world religion.

Speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda on September 11, 1893, at the first World’s Parliament of Religions on the site of the present-day Art Institute

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world, I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shat­tered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.” Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descen­dant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with vio­lence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

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Swami Vivekananda’s Speeches at the World ‘s Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893

• Response to Welcome
• Why we Disagree ?
• Paper on Hinduism
• Religion not the crying need of India
• Buddhism : the fulfillment of Hinduism
• Address at the Final session

RESPONSE TO WELCOME

At the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 11 September 1893

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honour of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: ‘As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.’

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world, of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: ‘Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.’ Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

WHY WE DISAGREE

15 September 1893

I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished say, ‘Let us cease from abusing each other,’ and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance.

But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story’s sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well.

‘Where are you from?’ ‘I am from the sea.’

‘The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?’ and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other.

‘My friend,’ said the frog of the sea, ‘how do you compare the sea with your little well?’

Then the frog took another leap and asked, ‘Is your sea so big?’

‘What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!’

‘Well, then,’ said the frog of the well, ‘nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out.’

That has been the difficulty all the while.

I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose.

PAPER ON HINDUISM

Read at the Parliament on 19 September 1893

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric-Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks, and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the sea- shore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation.

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time, and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: ‘The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles.’ And this agrees with modern science.

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I,’ what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, ‘No.’ I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here I am in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour, and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions. Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence-one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives.

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up-try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce —  him the fire cannot burn —  him the water cannot melt — him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence, it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as matter.

Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: ‘I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter.’ But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody’s consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, ‘I do not know.’

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions-a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect, a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape? — was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: ‘Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again.’ ‘Children of immortal bliss’ — what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name —  heirs of immortal bliss —  yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth —  sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One, ‘by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth’.

And what is His nature?

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. ‘Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend. Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life.’ Thus sang the Rishis of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. ‘He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.’

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world-his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love’s sake, and the prayer goes: ‘Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward-love unselfishly for love’s sake.’  One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, ‘Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s sake. I cannot trade in love.’

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti —  freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: ‘I have seen the soul; I have seen God.’ And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing-not in believing, but in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God, and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realize the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, Soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever- changing world, One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation. ‘The rose, called by any other name, would smell as sweet.’ Names are not explanations.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, ‘If I abuse your God, what can He do?’ ‘You would be punished,’ said the preacher, ‘when you die.’ ‘So my idol will punish you when you die,’ retorted the Hindu.

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, ‘Can sin beget holiness?’

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing. By the law of association the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word ‘omnipresent’, we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress.

He must not stop anywhere. ‘External worship, material worship,’ say the scriptures, ‘is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realized.’ Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, ‘Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine.’ But he does not abuse any one’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes in it a necessary stage of life. ‘The child is father of the man.’ Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols-so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna: ‘I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.’ And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, ‘We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed.’ One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centred in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature.

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Ashoka’s council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar ‘s, though more to the purpose, was only a parlour meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every religion.

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura- Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour ‘s blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony.

RELIGION NOT THE CRYING NEED OF INDIA

20 September 1893

Christians must always be ready for good criticism, and I hardly think that you will mind if I make a little criticism. You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen-why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In India, during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did nothing. You erect churches all through India, but the crying evil in the East is not religion-they have religion enough-but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats. They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I fully realized how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a Christian land.

BUDDHISM : THE FULFILMENT OF HINDUISM

26 September 1893

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticize Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticize him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shakya Muni as God and worship him. But the real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the teachings of Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shakya Muni came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy. Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realize the import of his teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.

The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks.

In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Shakya Muni himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths from the hidden Vedas and throw them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarizing into practice-nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytizing.

The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of Buddha’s Brahmin disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told them, ‘I am for the poor, for the people: let me speak in the tongue of the people.’ And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.

Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.

On the philosophic side the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them, and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which everyone, man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day there is not one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

But at the same time, Brahminism lost something-that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realize what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmin with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master.

ADDRESS AT THE FINAL SESSION

27 September 1893

The World’s Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the merciful Father has helped those who laboured to bring it into existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labour.

My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first dreamed this wonderful dream and then realized it. My thanks to the shower of liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to this enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of religions. A few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking contrast, made the general harmony the sweeter.

Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going just now to venture my own theory. But if anyone here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, ‘Brother, yours is an impossible hope.’ Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.

The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth, or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant.

Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.

If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: ‘Help and not Fight’, ‘Assimilation and not Destruction’, ‘Harmony and Peace and not Dissension’.

Response to Welcome  | Why we disagree | Paper on Hinduism | Religion not the crying need of India | Buddhism : the fulfillment of Hinduism | Address at the Final Session  | 

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Clarification on swami vivekananda’s voice recording.

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When Vivekananda reconstructed Hinduism

The real success of swami vivekananda’s iconic speech at the world’s parliament of religions in chicago in 1893 lay in his ability to rise above theological strife and the historical constraints of the times..

Published : Oct 24, 2018 12:30 IST

A view of the World's Parliament of Religions, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago.

AS I sit down to write my column for Frontline , I am overwhelmed by a sense of urgency to catch up with news from 125 years ago. At that time, the big news in India was a speech delivered in Chicago by an obscure Indian, Swami Vivekananda. The urgency to get back to that comes from an apprehension that Vivekananda’s message to us may have been lost. How authentic is the claim of some of his followers that they alone offer the true interpretation? 

When we read Vivekananda’s words once again with care today, it seems that we are yet to appreciate the full significance of his message. Consider, for instance, Vivekananda’s comments on how Christianity was elaborated “in a patronising way”. By way of a reply to the Christian missionary effort to belittle other religions, Vivekananda spoke on the tenth day of the Chicago Conference. In his speech entitled “Religion is not the crying need of India”, he said: “You Christians who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the heathen —why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? ...they ask for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to starving people to offer them religion, it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics” ( Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda , Calcutta, 1963, hereafter cited as CWSV, Volume I, page 20).

Exactly 125 years ago, on September 19, 1893, Swami Vivekananda spoke on Hinduism at the Chicago Parliament of Religions. It was a speech that would reverberate around the world. And numerous commentaries have been made, for many decades since, on the words then uttered. And yet, we may question ourselves whether we have fully realised the significance of that moment, that effort to reconstruct Hinduism by one of the many delegates from India at the world forum on September 19.

From the long view of history, what is the significance of that day and hour? It holds an import that may not be clear from the text of the proceedings at the Chicago Parliament of Religions. The import becomes clear only when we consider the context, the historical conjuncture, and ask, why did Vivekananda’s speech create such an impact? 

The answer is not easy to find. After all, Vivekananda’s was not the first exposition of its kind in the Western world. One can recall, for example, the writings of Raja Rammohan Roy or the speeches of Keshab Chandra Sen, or at the Chicago Parliament itself, Reverend Dharmapal or P.C. Mazoomdar, who shared the podium with Vivekananda. Thus, Vivekananda’s celebrated success was not due to the chronological accident of being the first on the scene. Secondly, the message of classical Hindu texts was no longer new in the West when Vivekananda went to Chicago. 

For about a century before that, the Orientalist scholars of Europe, particularly the English and the Germans, had translated many Sanskrit texts so as to allow Western people access to those texts. Vivekananda might have construed those texts in his own fashion but many of them had already been construed before. Thus, novelty was not the reason why Vivekananda’s speech produced such an impact. 

A third possible explanation (apart from the charismatic personality of Vivekananda) may be that Vivekananda’s Chicago speech marked the beginning of an initiative that fructified into a missionary and ideological movement of vast proportions. It is perfectly true that the speech did mark such a beginning. But then, that is known to us only by virtue of our historical hindsight. It could not have been self-evident to Vivekananda’s compatriots in India in 1893 because that missionary and ideological movement was at that time part of an unknowable future. That is obviously no explanation of the reception of Vivekananda’s speech in Chicago in 1893.

Therefore, we see that these explanations are inadequate, and that they cannot fully explain the impact of that speech on the contemporary mind. Perhaps we have to seek an explanation in the historical conjuncture when the speech was delivered. Consider the events in India between 1857 and 1893, as well as the scene abroad. 

Let us examine the five years immediately preceding 1893. In 1888, France secured an imperialist hold over Indo-China including Cambodia. In 1889, Italy claimed Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, and Cecil Rhodes obtained Britain’s support towards expansion of the Cape Colony in South Africa. In 1890, Britain secured her occupation of Uganda and Nigeria and in the next year she cut up Borneo into pieces to be shared with Holland. In 1892, Britain came into conflict with the ruler of Egypt and the French fought and defeated the king of Dahomey in West Africa. In 1893, the United States annexed Hawaii, while the French crushed native resistance in Siam and the British suppressed the Metabele rebellion in South Africa and the tribal resistance in India’s north-west border. These are just some representative events in the tide of imperialist advance around the time the Chicago conference met. In fact, the conference itself was a part of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in the year following the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, bringing about Europe’s penetration and domination in the American continents. 

Historical perspective

It is interesting to note that Vivekananda emphasised Western domination of the world in his speech on September 19: “We who have come from the east have sat here day after day and have been told in a patronising way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and we see England, the most prosperous nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics. We look back into history and see that the prosperity of Christian Europe began with Spain. Spain’s prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellowmen” ( The Times , Dubuque, Iowa, September 29, 1893, cited in M.L. Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America , Calcutta, 1966, pages 81-82). These remarks indicate Vivekananda’s historical perspective. In the context of the fact that he was speaking at a conference which came in the wake of the colonisation of North and South America by European powers, and the Christopher Columbus celebrations, this statement was especially significant.

Vivekananda’s own speeches in reply to the many addresses of welcome emphasise the intrinsic merit of the Vedantic outlook, but to the common citizens the confrontation with the West had a significance other than that of spiritual discourse. This was understandable in the historical conjuncture I have tried to outline.

In this context, let us also remember two other historical facts: racial discrimination in North America at the end of the 19th century and the concerted Christian effort to assert Christian superiority in the Chicago Conference in 1893. Racism was a part of Vivekananda’s personal experience in America. He wrote to Mrs Bull about his being turned out of a hotel on account of colour-bar at Baltimore ( Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda , Volume VI, page 279, to Mrs Bull, October 271894). There is similar evidence in his biography ( Life , Volume III, page 226). On each occasion, it should be recorded, he received the support of liberal-minded Americans. A very touching example is cited by Marie Louise Burke. Vivekananda stayed during the Chicago conference as a guest of John B. Lyon at 262 Michigan Avenue. The lady of the house welcomed Vivekananda late in the evening, but “when she went to bed she was somewhat troubled (her granddaughter writes). Some of our guests were Southerners…. Southerners have a strong dislike for associating with anyone but whites…. When my grandfather woke up, she told him of the problem and said he must decide whether it would be uncomfortable for Swami and for our Southern friends to be together.” In the event, grandfather Lyon decided that Vivekananda was a “brilliant and interesting man” and must stay as guest, no matter what other guests thought of it (M.L. Burke, ibid., pages 100-101). 

In such apparently small ways racism—and its opposite, a liberal spirit—were evinced. Racism was also evident in the white American attitude to the American Indians. White settlers’ incursions into traditional American Indian territories were legalised in September 1893 (while the Chicago Conference was meeting) in the case of appropriation of Cherokee Indian lands. In the preceding two years, there were outbreaks of conflict with Cherokee and Sioux Indians, and in December 1890 the famous chief of the Sioux, Sitting Bull, was killed. It is a matter of speculation whether Vivekananda sympathised with the American victims of racism. But it is likely that his scepticism about the authenticity of the Christian spirit was influenced by his awareness of these forms of Western racism.

That brings us to the other historical factor which Vivekananda had to contend with and which added to his credit: he was a spokesman from outside the pale of Christianity. The Chicago Parliament of Religions nurtured a strong Christian defence of the faith against other religions. On September 19, the day Vivekananda spoke, the air was thick with invectives. It continued in that fashion about “the greasy bull of Madura and Tanjore”, “adherents of false religions”, and so on until the last day. “Brethren all, yet they indulged in sharp words” was a newspaper headline of reports on September 19. (M.L. Burke, ibid., page 80).

But the historical conjuncture—the resentment of the oppressed peoples in two continents under Western dominance, the emotional reaction to Western racism, the resistance of old civilisations and religions to aggressive Christian missionary zeal—assigned to Vivekananda a contestatory position. It was Vivekananda’s ability to hold his own in this position which accounts for Vivekananda’s celebrated success at the Chicago Parliament of Religions as the spokesman of the eastern world. His utterances found a resonance not only in the hearts of his compatriots in India, which is evident from the congratulatory and welcome addresses he received from his countrymen. Let us recall the impact of Vivekananda in the speeches and letters from his compatriots in India. For example, the address of welcome to Vivekananda at Ramnad: “Your Holiness has crossed boundless seas and oceans to convey the message of truth, peace, and to plant the flag of India’s spiritual triumph and glory in the rich soil of Europe and America…. Above all your lectures in the West have tended to awaken apathetic sons and daughters of India to a sense of the greatness and glory of their ancestral faith…” (CWSV, Vol. III, page 144). Likewise, the “Zamindars and citizens of Shivaganga and Manamadura” were impressed with the ability of Vivekananda to “convey the greatest message of the East to the West” (CWSV, III, page 163). The address of welcome in Colombo (CWSV., III, p. 103), Madras (CWSV, III, page 200), Paramakudi (CWSV, III, page 155), Madurai (CWSV, III, page 169), Almora (CWSV, III, page 350), and so on harp on this theme of Vivekananda’s triumphal march in the West, as Indians perceived it.

The greatness of Vivekananda was his ability to rise above the contest, if it can be called so, between religious faiths. In his major speech on Hinduism on September 19 he focussed on certain universalities above the narrow particularism of religious contestations. The core universal concept in his speech is the concept of unity, alike in religious experience and in science. The speech begins with an assertion of the syncretism of Hinduism: “From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy… to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.” Then followed an exposition of the concept of Advaita (unity) and the striking thought that “Science is nothing but the search for unity” and thus a parallel between the quest of man in the spiritual and scientific realms.

Turning to “the religion of the ignorant”, Vivekananda explains many features attacked by Christian missionaries as a means used by the Hindu to reach the same end that every religion aims at. “The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time… which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammadan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development…. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force will be centred in aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature”. (CWSV, I, page 19). 

This humanist universalism accounts for Vivekananda’s enduring influence. The historical context I have tried to analyse explains in part his success in his mission in September 1893 at Chicago. But his real success lay in his ability to rise above the theological strife, above the historical constraints of the times on members of a subjected people. It is given to few to overcome history and he was one of them.

Eyes wide shut: How the state turns away from Manipur’s realities

Editor’s Note: The deafening silence on Manipur

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An ambedkar speech no hindu should ever forget.

Tarun Vijay

The breeze from Indus, a Shiva mantra at Kailas, a trek in Chushul and a chadar walk on frozen Zanskar. All this put together describes Tarun Vijay. He is a former BJP member of Rajya Sabha. The blog revolves around everything that is Mother India and her concerns. LESS ... MORE

Ambedkar, in his historic speech in Nagpur on October 15, 1956, a day after he had embraced Buddhism, said, “The movement to leave the Hindu religion was taken in hand by us in 1955, when a resolution was made in Yeola. Even though I was born in the Hindu religion, I will not die in the Hindu religion. This oath I made earlier; yesterday, I proved it true. I am happy; I am ecstatic! I have left hell — this is how I feel. I do not want any blind followers. Those who come into the Buddhist religion should come with an understanding; they should consciously accept that religion.”

Hitting out at the Communists, he said: “Religion is a very necessary thing for the progress of mankind. I know that a sect has appeared because of the writings of Karl Marx. According to their creed, religion means nothing at all. Religion is not important to them. They get breakfast in the morning, of bread, cream, butter, chicken legs, etc.; they get undisturbed sleep, they get to see movies and that’s all there is. This is their philosophy. I am not of that opinion.”

After six decades of Ambedkar leaving the fold of Hindu dharma, what is the condition of Scheduled Castes at the ground level among Hindus? Have Hindus learnt any lessons?

There are crematoriums which are separately designated for them, no ‘normal’ Pandit who performs puja for any occasion – from birth to home warming to death, for a scheduled caste family (exceptions will always be there specially the Arya Samaj , Gayatri Pariwar pandits do come forward). Even the Scheduled caste Yamaraj, the god of death, is different. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had to issue an appeal that all Hindus must make sure that temples, wells ( water sources) and crematoriums must remain accessible by all Hindus- without any discrimination.

When I tried to take some Dalit youth to a temple in Uttarakhand, I was stunned to see when they stoned us and wanted to kill us because of sheer hate. I asked them: you are stoning us as we are Hindus, the day we are not, what will you do? You are punishing us because we simply ask you to let us worship Hindu gods. If we refuse to accept your gods, who will you stone?

The high caste friends came to see me in the hospital. Some of them were sympathetic but mostly those who belonged to the scheduled caste and tribe communities came. Some of the high caste friends, told me, point blank, looking into my eyes, while my family was worried about the injuries I had on my head because of the incident: “You did a wrong thing. You shouldn’t have gone there.” High caste news portals published articles by high caste authors how wrong I was in taking this initiative. They tried to make me feel apologetic for going to temple with some Dalits.

The second incident was more horrifying. A dalit in Bageshwar was beheaded because he touched the atta (wheat flour) of a high caste person. The three of us – me, a human rightist attorney and a dalit leader of my Pariwar – booked tickets for Haldwani to reach Bageshwar and console the victim’s family. But we could never undertake the journey. There were people though, from all castes, who readily came to help the victim’s family, but it was too late. “We all stand together with the family in this time of distress. What was done to Sohan Ram was inhuman. Customs and taboos have been there for thousands of years but killing someone in the name of such beliefs is not acceptable at any cost,” said Ramesh Singh Bhandari, the pradhan of the village.”

Read: In village where Dalit man killed for touching flour, upper caste residents pitch in with support to his family

Why we were unable to go to Bageshwar in spite of confirmed tickets? There is a sad story behind it exposing the hypocrisy of higher caste politicians.

Even when Ambedkar was leaving Hindu dharma, some people criticised him and not the ritualistic high caste Hindus.

Ambedkar hit them hard with his words, “The criticism of some people is hard. In their opinion, I was leading my poor helpless untouchable people astray. They say, ‘today those who are Untouchables will remain Untouchables, and those rights gained for the Untouchables will be destroyed’ and some people among us are bewildered. To the unlearned people among us, they say, ‘Go by the traditional path’ [pagdandi (Hindi), ‘footpath’ suggests that the Mahars should use an inferior path]. On some of the old and young among us, they may be influential. If doubt has been created in the minds of people because of this, it is our duty to remove that doubt; and to turn back that doubt is to strengthen the foundation of our movement.

“Earlier we people had had a movement against eating meat. The touchables thought a bolt of lightning had hit them. They should drink living buffalo’s milk; but, when that buffalo died, we should carry that dead cow on our shoulders. Wasn’t this a strange practice? We tell them, if your old woman died, then why not give her to us? If you ought to give us your dead cow, then you ought to give us your old woman also, shouldn’t you? At that time, some man wrote in Kesari that in certain villages every year fifty cattle die, so that five hundred rupees can be earned from their hide, horns, hooves, meat, bones, and tail. Leaving aside the matter of meat, these people will be deprived of all that profit, so the letter appeared in Kesari. Really speaking, what was the necessity of giving an answer to his propaganda? But our people used to feel that if our lord [Babasaheb] does not give an answer to this thing, then what does the lord do at all?

“Once I went to a meeting at Sangamner. An arrangement for eating in the evening after the meeting had been made. At that time a note was sent me by a Kesari reporter, and he asked me, “Say, you tell your people not to remove dead cattle [from the village]! Look at their poverty. No sari and blouse for their wives, no food for them, no fields for them. When their circumstances are so difficult, why do you say, throw away the 500-rupee profit every year from hide, hoof, and meat? Is this not a loss for your people?

“I said: We will answer you. Shall I answer here on the veranda, or in a meeting? It is good if this critical question comes before people. I asked the gentleman, “Is this all you have to say, or is there more?” The gentleman said, “Whatever I have asked you, answer that much.” I asked that man, “How many children and dependents do you have”? He said, “I have five sons and my brother has five or six children also.” I said, “Then your family is large. You and your relations should certainly remove the dead cattle from the village and get that 500-rupee profit. Besides that, every year I myself will give you 500 rupees on top of that. Whatever will become of my people, whether they will get food and clothing or not, this is my affair and I will look after it. But are you putting aside such a successful thing? Why do you not take it on? If we do the work and get the profit, won’t there be a profit if you do it? Why don’t you remove the dead cattle?

“Yesterday a Brahmin boy came to me and asked, “In Parliament and the Assemblies, your people have been given reserved places. Why are you giving those up?” I said to him, “You become a Mahar and fill that place in Parliament and the Assemblies. If there is a service vacant, then that place fills in no time. How many applications from Brahmins and others come for that place! As places in service are filled in that way, why don’t you Brahmin people, as Mahars, fill those reserved seats?

“If we have suffered a loss, why do you weep? This is my question to them. Truly it means honor is dear to mankind; profit is not dear. A woman of good qualities and good behavior knows that there is profit in prostitution. There is a locality of prostitutes in our Bombay. When those women get up at eight in the morning, they order breakfast from a nearby hotel and say (Dr Ambedkar at this time, giving an imitation in a different voice, said): ‘Suleman, you bring a pound of bread and a plate of minced meat.’ That Suleman brings it. Besides, he brings tea, bread, cake, and other things. But my depressed-class sisters do not even get ordinary chutney-bhakri. However, they live with dignity. They live piously.

“We are fighting for honor. We are getting ready to lead mankind to perfection. For this, we are ready to do any sacrifice necessary. These newspaper people (turning toward them) have pestered me for the last forty years. How much criticism have they given me, even up to this day! I say to them, however: Think! Today, leave aside immature speech; use mature speech.

“If we accept Buddhism, even then I will get political rights. I am absolutely sure of this.”   (Excerpts from Amebdkar’s speech at Nagpur on 15th October 1956).

It is the political rights, it is equality and a social acceptance that Ambedkar struggled for, not the crumbs and any kind of protectionism and guardian ship. Gone are those days when you thought you may please a scheduled caste family by eating in his house. Today he obliges these high caste arrogant hypocrites by letting them eat in his house.

The day is not far when the scheduled castes will rise as empowered Indians leading the march of India’s progress. Keep your protectionism with you. They will get their top positions on their strength and love for Hindu dharma and nation. They need equal rights in decision making and not cosmetic positions and concrete halls built in their leader’s name.

The biggest issue Hindus face today is not an electoral victory or a defeat but the assaults on their social fabric. If we don’t change, the future of a Hindu majority nation would be in danger. The growing camaraderie between the Communist, Jihadis, and proselytizing religions with Dalits, the Islamic inroads in Dalit society- since the days of Haji Mastan led Dalit Muslim Mahasangh shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Read: Ambedkar’s struggle was for honour and equality; casteist Hindus forced him to leave Hindu Dharma

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Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation

Indians say it is important to respect all religions, but major religious groups see little in common and want to live separately, table of contents.

• The dimensions of Hindu nationalism in India
• India’s Muslims express pride in being Indian while identifying communal tensions, desiring segregation
• Muslims, Hindus diverge over legacy of Partition
• Religious conversion in India
• Religion very important across India’s religious groups
• Near-universal belief in God, but wide variation in how God is perceived
• Across India’s religious groups, widespread sharing of beliefs, practices, values
• Religious identity in India: Hindus divided on whether belief in God is required to be a Hindu, but most say eating beef is disqualifying
• Sikhs are proud to be Punjabi and Indian
• Most Indians say they and others are very free to practice their religion
• Most people do not see evidence of widespread religious discrimination in India
• Most Indians report no recent discrimination based on their religion
• In Northeast India, people perceive more religious discrimination
• Most Indians see communal violence as a very big problem in the country
• Indians divided on the legacy of Partition for Hindu-Muslim relations
• More Indians say religious diversity benefits their country than say it is harmful
• Indians are highly knowledgeable about their own religion, less so about other religions
• Substantial shares of Buddhists, Sikhs say they have worshipped at religious venues other than their own
• One-in-five Muslims in India participate in celebrations of Diwali
• Members of both large and small religious groups mostly keep friendships within religious lines
• Most Indians are willing to accept members of other religious communities as neighbors, but many express reservations
• Indians generally marry within same religion
• Most Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Jains strongly support stopping interreligious marriage
• India’s religious groups vary in their caste composition
• Indians in lower castes largely do not perceive widespread discrimination against their groups
• Most Indians do not have recent experience with caste discrimination
• Most Indians OK with Scheduled Caste neighbors
• Indians generally do not have many close friends in different castes
• Large shares of Indians say men, women should be stopped from marrying outside of their caste
• Most Indians say being a member of their religious group is not only about religion
• Common ground across major religious groups on what is essential to religious identity
• India’s religious groups vary on what disqualifies someone from their religion
• Hindus say eating beef, disrespecting India, celebrating Eid incompatible with being Hindu
• Muslims place stronger emphasis than Hindus on religious practices for identity
• Many Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists do not identify with a sect
• Sufism has at least some followers in every major Indian religious group
• Large majorities say Indian culture is superior to others
• What constitutes ‘true’ Indian identity?
• Large gaps between religious groups in 2019 election voting patterns
• No consensus on whether democracy or strong leader best suited to lead India
• Majorities support politicians being involved in religious matters
• Indian Muslims favor their own religious courts; other religious groups less supportive
• Most Indians do not support allowing triple talaq for Muslims
• Southern Indians least likely to say religion is very important in their life
• Most Indians give to charitable causes
• Majorities of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jains in India pray daily
• More Indians practice puja at home than at temple
• Most Hindus do not read or listen to religious books frequently
• Most Indians have an altar or shrine in their home for worship
• Religious pilgrimages common across most religious groups in India
• Most Hindus say they have received purification from a holy body of water
• Roughly half of Indian adults meditate at least weekly
• Only about a third of Indians ever practice yoga
• Nearly three-quarters of Christians sing devotionally
• Most Muslims and few Jains say they have participated in or witnessed animal sacrifice for religious purposes
• Most Indians schedule key life events based on auspicious dates
• About half of Indians watch religious programs weekly
• For Hindus, nationalism associated with greater religious observance
• Indians value marking lifecycle events with religious rituals
• Most Indian parents say they are raising their children in a religion
• Fewer than half of Indian parents say their children receive religious instruction outside the home
• Vast majority of Sikhs say it is very important that their children keep their hair long
• Half or more of Hindus, Muslims and Christians wear religious pendants
• Most Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women cover their heads outside the home
• Slim majority of Hindu men say they wear a tilak, fewer wear a janeu
• Eight-in-ten Muslim men in India wear a skullcap
• Majority of Sikh men wear a turban
• Muslim and Sikh men generally keep beards
• Most Indians are not vegetarians, but majorities do follow at least some restrictions on meat in their diet
• One-in-five Hindus abstain from eating root vegetables
• Fewer than half of vegetarian Hindus willing to eat in non-vegetarian settings
• Indians evenly split about willingness to eat meals with hosts who have different religious rules about food
• Majority of Indians say they fast
• More Hindus say there are multiple ways to interpret Hinduism than say there is only one true way
• Most Indians across different religious groups believe in karma
• Most Hindus, Jains believe in Ganges’ power to purify
• Belief in reincarnation is not widespread in India
• More Hindus and Jains than Sikhs believe in moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth)
• Most Hindus, Muslims, Christians believe in heaven
• Nearly half of Indian Christians believe in miracles
• Most Muslims in India believe in Judgment Day
• Most Indians believe in fate, fewer believe in astrology
• Many Hindus and Muslims say magic, witchcraft or sorcery can influence people’s lives
• Roughly half of Indians trust religious ritual to treat health problems
• Lower-caste Christians much more likely than General Category Christians to hold both Christian and non-Christian beliefs
• Nearly all Indians believe in God
• Few Indians believe ‘there are many gods’
• Many Hindus feel close to Shiva
• Many Indians believe God can be manifested in other people
• Indians almost universally ask God for good health, prosperity, forgiveness
• Acknowledgments
• Questionnaire design
• Sample design and weighting
• Precision of estimates
• Response rates
• Significant events during fieldwork
• Appendix B: Index of religious segregation

This study is Pew Research Center’s most comprehensive, in-depth exploration of India to date. For this report, we surveyed 29,999 Indian adults (including 22,975 who identify as Hindu, 3,336 who identify as Muslim, 1,782 who identify as Sikh, 1,011 who identify as Christian, 719 who identify as Buddhist, 109 who identify as Jain and 67 who identify as belonging to another religion or as religiously unaffiliated). Interviews for this nationally representative survey were conducted face-to-face under the direction of RTI International from Nov. 17, 2019, to March 23, 2020.

To improve respondent comprehension of survey questions and to ensure all questions were culturally appropriate, Pew Research Center followed a multi-phase questionnaire development process that included expert review, focus groups, cognitive interviews, a pretest and a regional pilot survey before the national survey. The questionnaire was developed in English and translated into 16 languages, independently verified by professional linguists with native proficiency in regional dialects.

Respondents were selected using a probability-based sample design that would allow for robust analysis of all major religious groups in India – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains – as well as all major regional zones. Data was weighted to account for the different probabilities of selection among respondents and to align with demographic benchmarks for the Indian adult population from the 2011 census. The survey is calculated to have covered 98% of Indians ages 18 and older and had an 86% national response rate.

For more information, see the  Methodology  for this report. The questions used in this analysis can be found  here .

More than 70 years after India became free from colonial rule, Indians generally feel their country has lived up to one of its post-independence ideals: a society where followers of many religions can live and practice freely.

India’s massive population is diverse as well as devout. Not only do most of the world’s Hindus, Jains and Sikhs live in India, but it also is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations and to millions of Christians and Buddhists.

A major new Pew Research Center survey of religion across India, based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020 (before the COVID-19 pandemic ), finds that Indians of all these religious backgrounds overwhelmingly say they are very free to practice their faiths.

Related India research

This is one in a series of Pew Research Center reports on India based on a survey of 29,999 Indian adults conducted Nov. 17, 2019, to March 23, 2020, as well as demographic data from the Indian Census and other government sources. Other reports can be found here:

• How Indians View Gender Roles in Families and Society
• Religious Composition of India
• India’s Sex Ratio at Birth Begins To Normalize

Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be “truly Indian.” And tolerance is a religious as well as civic value: Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.

These shared values are accompanied by a number of beliefs that cross religious lines. Not only do a majority of Hindus in India (77%) believe in karma, but an identical percentage of Muslims do, too. A third of Christians in India (32%) – together with 81% of Hindus – say they believe in the purifying power of the Ganges River, a central belief in Hinduism. In Northern India, 12% of Hindus and 10% of Sikhs, along with 37% of Muslims, identity with Sufism, a mystical tradition most closely associated with Islam. And the vast majority of Indians of all major religious backgrounds say that respecting elders is very important to their faith.

Yet, despite sharing certain values and religious beliefs – as well as living in the same country, under the same constitution – members of India’s major religious communities often don’t feel they have much in common with one another. The majority of Hindus see themselves as very different from Muslims (66%), and most Muslims return the sentiment, saying they are very different from Hindus (64%). There are a few exceptions: Two-thirds of Jains and about half of Sikhs say they have a lot in common with Hindus. But generally, people in India’s major religious communities tend to see themselves as very different from others.

This perception of difference is reflected in traditions and habits that maintain the separation of India’s religious groups. For example, marriages across religious lines – and, relatedly, religious conversions – are exceedingly rare (see Chapter 3 ). Many Indians, across a range of religious groups, say it is very important to stop people in their community from marrying into other religious groups. Roughly two-thirds of Hindus in India want to prevent interreligious marriages of Hindu women (67%) or Hindu men (65%). Even larger shares of Muslims feel similarly: 80% say it is very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion, and 76% say it is very important to stop Muslim men from doing so.

Moreover, Indians generally stick to their own religious group when it comes to their friends. Hindus overwhelmingly say that most or all of their close friends are also Hindu. Of course, Hindus make up the majority of the population, and as a result of sheer numbers, may be more likely to interact with fellow Hindus than with people of other religions. But even among Sikhs and Jains, who each form a sliver of the national population, a large majority say their friends come mainly or entirely from their small religious community.

Fewer Indians go so far as to say that their neighborhoods should consist only of people from their own religious group. Still, many would prefer to keep people of certain religions out of their residential areas or villages. For example, many Hindus (45%) say they are fine with having neighbors of all other religions – be they Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain – but an identical share (45%) say they would not be willing to accept followers of at least one of these groups, including more than one-in-three Hindus (36%) who do not want a Muslim as a neighbor. Among Jains, a majority (61%) say they are unwilling to have neighbors from at least one of these groups, including 54% who would not accept a Muslim neighbor, although nearly all Jains (92%) say they would be willing to accept a Hindu neighbor.

Indians, then, simultaneously express enthusiasm for religious tolerance and a consistent preference for keeping their religious communities in segregated spheres – they live together separately . These two sentiments may seem paradoxical, but for many Indians they are not.

Indeed, many take both positions, saying it is important to be tolerant of others and expressing a desire to limit personal connections across religious lines. Indians who favor a religiously segregated society also overwhelmingly emphasize religious tolerance as a core value. For example, among Hindus who say it is very important to stop the interreligious marriage of Hindu women, 82% also say that respecting other religions is very important to what it means to be Hindu. This figure is nearly identical to the 85% who strongly value religious tolerance among those who are not at all concerned with stopping interreligious marriage.

In other words, Indians’ concept of religious tolerance does not necessarily involve the mixing of religious communities. While people in some countries may aspire to create a “melting pot” of different religious identities, many Indians seem to prefer a country more like a patchwork fabric, with clear lines between groups.

One of these religious fault lines – the relationship between India’s Hindu majority and the country’s smaller religious communities – has particular relevance in public life, especially in recent years under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP is often described as promoting a Hindu nationalist ideology .

The survey finds that Hindus tend to see their religious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined: Nearly two-thirds of Hindus (64%) say it is very important to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian.

Most Hindus (59%) also link Indian identity with being able to speak Hindi – one of dozens of languages that are widely spoken in India. And these two dimensions of national identity – being able to speak Hindi and being a Hindu – are closely connected. Among Hindus who say it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian, fully 80% also say it is very important to speak Hindi to be truly Indian.

The BJP’s appeal is greater among Hindus who closely associate their religious identity and the Hindi language with being “truly Indian.” In the 2019 national elections, 60% of Hindu voters who think it is very important to be Hindu and to speak Hindi to be truly Indian cast their vote for the BJP, compared with only a third among Hindu voters who feel less strongly about both these aspects of national identity.

Overall, among those who voted in the 2019 elections, three-in-ten Hindus take all three positions: saying it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian; saying the same about speaking Hindi; and casting their ballot for the BJP.

These views are considerably more common among Hindus in the largely Hindi-speaking Northern and Central regions of the country, where roughly half of all Hindu voters fall into this category, compared with just 5% in the South.

Whether Hindus who meet all three of these criteria qualify as “Hindu nationalists” may be debated, but they do express a heightened desire for maintaining clear lines between Hindus and other religious groups when it comes to whom they marry, who their friends are and whom they live among. For example, among Hindu BJP voters who link national identity with both religion and language, 83% say it is very important to stop Hindu women from marrying into another religion, compared with 61% among other Hindu voters.

This group also tends to be more religiously observant: 95% say religion is very important in their lives, and roughly three-quarters say they pray daily (73%). By comparison, among other Hindu voters, a smaller majority (80%) say religion is very important in their lives, and about half (53%) pray daily.

Even though Hindu BJP voters who link national identity with religion and language are more inclined to support a religiously segregated India, they also are  more  likely than other Hindu voters to express positive opinions about India’s religious diversity. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of this group – Hindus who say that being a Hindu and being able to speak Hindi are very important to be truly Indian  and  who voted for the BJP in 2019 – say religious diversity benefits India, compared with about half (47%) of other Hindu voters.

This finding suggests that for many Hindus, there is no contradiction between valuing religious diversity (at least in principle) and feeling that Hindus are somehow more authentically Indian than fellow citizens who follow other religions.

Among Indians overall, there is no overwhelming consensus on the benefits of religious diversity. On balance, more Indians see diversity as a benefit than view it as a liability for their country: Roughly half (53%) of Indian adults say India’s religious diversity benefits the country, while about a quarter (24%) see diversity as harmful, with similar figures among both Hindus and Muslims. But 24% of Indians do not take a clear position either way – they say diversity neither benefits nor harms the country, or they decline to answer the question. (See Chapter 2 for a discussion of attitudes toward diversity.)

India’s Muslim community, the second-largest religious group in the country, historically has had a complicated relationship with the Hindu majority. The two communities generally have lived peacefully side by side for centuries, but their shared history also is checkered by civil unrest and violence. Most recently, while the survey was being conducted, demonstrations broke out in parts of New Delhi and elsewhere over the government’s new citizenship law , which creates an expedited path to citizenship for immigrants from some neighboring countries – but not Muslims.

Today, India’s Muslims almost unanimously say they are very proud to be Indian (95%), and they express great enthusiasm for Indian culture: 85% agree with the statement that “Indian people are not perfect, but Indian culture is superior to others.”

Relatively few Muslims say their community faces “a lot” of discrimination in India (24%). In fact, the share of Muslims who see widespread discrimination against their community is similar to the share of Hindus who say Hindus face widespread religious discrimination in India (21%). (See Chapter 1 for a discussion of attitudes on religious discrimination.)

But personal experiences with discrimination among Muslims vary quite a bit regionally. Among Muslims in the North, 40% say they personally have faced religious discrimination in the last 12 months – much higher levels than reported in most other regions.

In addition, most Muslims across the country (65%), along with an identical share of Hindus (65%), see communal violence as a very big national problem. (See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Indians’ attitudes toward national problems.)

Like Hindus, Muslims prefer to live religiously segregated lives – not just when it comes to marriage and friendships, but also in some elements of public life. In particular, three-quarters of Muslims in India (74%) support having access to the existing system of Islamic courts, which handle family disputes (such as inheritance or divorce cases), in addition to the secular court system.

Muslims’ desire for religious segregation does not preclude tolerance of other groups – again similar to the pattern seen among Hindus. Indeed, a majority of Muslims who favor separate religious courts for their community say religious diversity benefits India (59%), compared with somewhat fewer of those who oppose religious courts for Muslims (50%).

Sidebar: Islamic courts in India

Since 1937, India’s Muslims have had the option of resolving family and inheritance-related cases in officially recognized Islamic courts, known as dar-ul-qaza. These courts are overseen by religious magistrates known as qazi and operate under Shariah principles . For example, while the rules of inheritance for most Indians are governed by the Indian Succession Act of 1925 and the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 (amended in 2005), Islamic inheritance practices differ in some ways, including who can be considered an heir and how much of the deceased person’s property they can inherit. India’s inheritance laws also take into account the differing traditions of other religious communities, such as Hindus and Christians, but their cases are handled in secular courts. Only the Muslim community has the option of having cases tried by a separate system of family courts. The decisions of the religious courts, however, are not legally binding , and the parties involved have the option of taking their case to secular courts if they are not satisfied with the decision of the religious court.

As of 2021, there are roughly 70 dar-ul-qaza in India. Most are in the states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Goa is the only state that does not recognize rulings by these courts, enforcing its own uniform civil code instead. Dar-ul-qaza are overseen by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board .

While these courts can grant divorces among Muslims, they are prohibited from approving divorces initiated through the practice known as triple talaq, in which a Muslim man instantly divorces his wife by saying the Arabic/Urdu word “talaq” (meaning “divorce”) three times. This practice was deemed unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court in 2017 and formally outlawed by the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, in 2019. 1

Recent debates have emerged around Islamic courts. Some Indians have expressed concern that the rise of dar-ul-qaza could undermine the Indian judiciary, because a subset of the population is not bound to the same laws as everyone else. Others have argued that the rulings of Islamic courts are particularly unfair to women, although the prohibition of triple talaq may temper some of these criticisms. In its 2019 political manifesto , the BJP proclaimed a desire to create a national Uniform Civil Code, saying it would increase gender equality.

Some Indian commentators have voiced opposition to Islamic courts along with more broadly negative sentiments against Muslims, describing the rising numbers of dar-ul-qaza as the “Talibanization” of India , for example.

On the other hand, Muslim scholars have defended the dar-ul-qaza, saying they expedite justice because family disputes that would otherwise clog India’s courts can be handled separately, allowing the secular courts to focus their attention on other concerns.

Since 2018, the Hindu nationalist party Hindu Mahasabha (which does not hold any seats in Parliament) has tried to set up Hindu religious courts , known as Hindutva courts, aiming to play a role similar to dar-ul-qaza, only for the majority Hindu community. None of these courts have been recognized by the Indian government, and their rulings are not considered legally binding.

The seminal event in the modern history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the region was the partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan at the end of the British colonial period in 1947. Partition remains one of the largest movements of people across borders in recorded history, and in both countries the carving of new borders was accompanied by violence, rioting and looting .

More than seven decades later, the predominant view among Indian Muslims is that the partition of the subcontinent was “a bad thing” for Hindu-Muslim relations. Nearly half of Muslims say Partition hurt communal relations with Hindus (48%), while fewer say it was a good thing for Hindu-Muslim relations (30%). Among Muslims who prefer more religious segregation – that is, who say they would not accept a person of a different faith as a neighbor – an even higher share (60%) say Partition was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations.

Sikhs, whose homeland of Punjab was split by Partition, are even more likely than Muslims to say Partition was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations: Two-thirds of Sikhs (66%) take this position. And Sikhs ages 60 and older, whose parents most likely lived through Partition, are more inclined than younger Sikhs to say the partition of the country was bad for communal relations (74% vs. 64%).

While Sikhs and Muslims are more likely to say Partition was a bad thing than a good thing, Hindus lean in the opposite direction: 43% of Hindus say Partition was beneficial for Hindu-Muslim relations, while 37% see it as a bad thing.

Context for the survey

Interviews were conducted after the conclusion of the 2019 national parliamentary elections and after the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under the Indian Constitution. In December 2019, protests against the country’s new citizenship law broke out in several regions.

Fieldwork could not be conducted in the Kashmir Valley and a few districts elsewhere due to security concerns. These locations include some heavily Muslim areas, which is part of the reason why Muslims make up 11% of the survey’s total sample, while India’s adult population is roughly 13% Muslim, according to the most recent census data that is publicly available, from 2011. In addition, it is possible that in some other parts of the country, interreligious tensions over the new citizenship law may have slightly depressed participation in the survey by potential Muslim respondents.

Nevertheless, the survey’s estimates of religious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes can be reported with a high degree of confidence for India’s total population, because the number of people living in the excluded areas (Manipur, Sikkim, the Kashmir Valley and a few other districts) is not large enough to affect the overall results at the national level. About 98% of India’s total population had a chance of being selected for this survey.

Greater caution is warranted when looking at India’s Muslims separately, as a distinct population. The survey cannot speak to the experiences and views of Kashmiri Muslims. Still, the survey does represent the beliefs, behaviors and attitudes of around 95% of India’s overall Muslim population.

These are among the key findings of a Pew Research Center survey conducted face-to-face nationally among 29,999 Indian adults. Local interviewers administered the survey between Nov. 17, 2019, and March 23, 2020, in 17 languages. The survey covered all states and union territories of India, with the exceptions of Manipur and Sikkim, where the rapidly developing COVID-19 situation prevented fieldwork from starting in the spring of 2020, and the remote territories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep; these areas are home to about a quarter of 1% of the Indian population. The union territory of Jammu and Kashmir was covered by the survey, though no fieldwork was conducted in the Kashmir region itself due to security concerns.

This study, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is part of a larger effort by Pew Research Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world. The Center previously has conducted religion-focused surveys across sub-Saharan Africa ; the Middle East-North Africa region and many other countries with large Muslim populations ; Latin America ; Israel ; Central and Eastern Europe ; Western Europe ; and the United States .

The rest of this Overview covers attitudes on five broad topics: caste and discrimination; religious conversion; religious observances and beliefs; how people define their religious identity, including what kind of behavior is considered acceptable to be a Hindu or a Muslim; and the connection between economic development and religious observance.

Caste is another dividing line in Indian society, and not just among Hindus

Religion is not the only fault line in Indian society. In some regions of the country, significant shares of people perceive widespread, caste-based discrimination.

The caste system is an ancient social hierarchy based on occupation and economic status. People are born into a particular caste and tend to keep many aspects of their social life within its boundaries, including whom they marry. Even though the system’s origins are in historical Hindu writings , today Indians nearly universally identify with a caste, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain.

Overall, the majority of Indian adults say they are a member of a Scheduled Caste (SC) – often referred to as Dalits (25%) – Scheduled Tribe (ST) (9%) or Other Backward Class (OBC) (35%). 2

Buddhists in India nearly universally identify themselves in these categories, including 89% who are Dalits (sometimes referred to by the pejorative term “untouchables”).

Members of SC/ST/OBC groups traditionally formed the lower social and economic rungs of Indian society, and historically they have faced discrimination and unequal economic opportunities . The practice of untouchability in India ostracizes members of many of these communities, especially Dalits, although the Indian Constitution prohibits caste-based discrimination, including untouchability, and in recent decades the government has enacted economic advancement policies like reserved seats in universities and government jobs for Dalits, Scheduled Tribes and OBC communities.

Roughly 30% of Indians do not belong to these protected groups and are classified as “General Category.” This includes higher castes such as Brahmins (4%), traditionally the priestly caste. Indeed, each broad category includes several sub-castes – sometimes hundreds – with their own social and economic hierarchies.

Three-quarters of Jains (76%) identify with General Category castes, as do 46% of both Muslims and Sikhs.

Caste-based discrimination, as well as the government’s efforts to compensate for past discrimination, are politically charged topics in India . But the survey finds that most Indians do not perceive widespread caste-based discrimination. Just one-in-five Indians say there is a lot of discrimination against members of SCs, while 19% say there is a lot of discrimination against STs and somewhat fewer (16%) see high levels of discrimination against OBCs. Members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are slightly more likely than others to perceive widespread discrimination against their two groups. Still, large majorities of people in these categories do not think they face a lot of discrimination.

These attitudes vary by region, however. Among Southern Indians, for example, 30% see widespread discrimination against Dalits, compared with 13% in the Central part of the country. And among the Dalit community in the South, even more (43%) say their community faces a lot of discrimination, compared with 27% among Southern Indians in the General Category who say the Dalit community faces widespread discrimination in India.

A higher share of Dalits in the South and Northeast than elsewhere in the country say they, personally, have faced discrimination in the last 12 months because of their caste: 30% of Dalits in the South say this, as do 38% in the Northeast.

Although caste discrimination may not be perceived as widespread nationally, caste remains a potent factor in Indian society. Most Indians from other castes say they would be willing to have someone belonging to a Scheduled Caste as a neighbor (72%). But a similarly large majority of Indians overall (70%) say that most or all of their close friends share their caste. And Indians tend to object to marriages across caste lines, much as they object to interreligious marriages. 3

Overall, 64% of Indians say it is very important to stop women in their community from marrying into other castes, and about the same share (62%) say it is very important to stop men in their community from marrying into other castes. These figures vary only modestly across members of different castes. For example, nearly identical shares of Dalits and members of General Category castes say stopping inter-caste marriages is very important.

Majorities of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Jains consider stopping inter-caste marriage of both men and women a high priority. By comparison, fewer Buddhists and Christians say it is very important to stop such marriages – although for majorities of both groups, stopping people from marrying outside their caste is at least “somewhat” important.

People surveyed in India’s South and Northeast see greater caste discrimination in their communities, and they also raise fewer objections to inter-caste marriages than do Indians overall. Meanwhile, college-educated Indians are less likely than those with less education to say stopping inter-caste marriages is a high priority. But, even within the most highly educated group, roughly half say preventing such marriages is very important. (See Chapter 4 for more analysis of Indians’ views on caste.)

In recent years, conversion of people belonging to lower castes (including Dalits) away from Hinduism – a traditionally non-proselytizing religion – to proselytizing religions, especially Christianity, has been a contentious political issue in India. As of early 2021, nine states have enacted laws against proselytism , and some previous surveys have shown that half of Indians support legal bans on religious conversions. 4

This survey, though, finds that religious switching, or conversion, has a minimal impact on the overall size of India’s religious groups. For example, according to the survey, 82% of Indians say they were raised Hindu, and a nearly identical share say they are currently Hindu, showing no net losses for the group through conversion to other religions. Other groups display similar levels of stability.

Changes in India’s religious landscape over time are largely a result of differences in fertility rates among religious groups, not conversion.

Respondents were asked two separate questions to measure religious switching: “What is your present religion, if any?” and, later in the survey, “In what religion were you raised, if any?” Overall, 98% of respondents give the same answer to both these questions.

An overall pattern of stability in the share of religious groups is accompanied by little net gain from movement into, or out of, most religious groups. Among Hindus, for instance, any conversion out of the group is matched by conversion into the group: 0.7% of respondents say they were raised Hindu but now identify as something else, and although Hindu texts and traditions do not agree on any formal process for conversion into the religion, roughly the same share (0.8%) say they were  not raised Hindu but now identify as Hindu. 5  Most of these new followers of Hinduism are married to Hindus.

Similarly, 0.3% of respondents have left Islam since childhood, matched by an identical share who say they were raised in other religions (or had no childhood religion) and have since become Muslim.

For Christians, however, there are some net gains from conversion: 0.4% of survey respondents are former Hindus who now identify as Christian, while 0.1% are former Christians.

Three-quarters of India’s Hindu converts to Christianity (74%) are concentrated in the Southern part of the country – the region with the largest Christian population. As a result, the Christian population of the South shows a slight increase within the lifetime of survey respondents: 6% of Southern Indians say they were raised Christian, while 7% say they are currently Christian.

Some Christian converts (16%) reside in the East as well (the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal); about two-thirds of all Christians in the East (64%) belong to Scheduled Tribes.

Nationally, the vast majority of former Hindus who are now Christian belong to Scheduled Castes (48%), Scheduled Tribes (14%) or Other Backward Classes (26%). And former Hindus are much more likely than the Indian population overall to say there is a lot of discrimination against lower castes in India. For example, nearly half of converts to Christianity (47%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Scheduled Castes in India, compared with 20% of the overall population who perceive this level of discrimination against Scheduled Castes. Still, relatively few converts say they, personally, have faced discrimination due to their caste in the last 12 months (12%).

Though their specific practices and beliefs may vary, all of India’s major religious communities are highly observant by standard measures. For instance, the vast majority of Indians, across all major faiths, say that religion is very important in their lives. And at least three-quarters of each major religion’s followers say they know a great deal about their own religion and its practices. For example, 81% of Indian Buddhists claim a great deal of knowledge about the Buddhist religion and its practices.

Indian Muslims are slightly more likely than Hindus to consider religion very important in their lives (91% vs. 84%). Muslims also are modestly more likely than Hindus to say they know a great deal about their own religion (84% vs. 75%).

Significant portions of each religious group also pray daily, with Christians among the most likely to do so (77%) – even though Christians are the least likely of the six groups to say religion is very important in their lives (76%). Most Hindus and Jains also pray daily (59% and 73%, respectively) and say they perform puja daily (57% and 81%), either at home or at a temple. 6

Generally, younger and older Indians, those with different educational backgrounds, and men and women are similar in their levels of religious observance. South Indians are the least likely to say religion is very important in their lives (69%), and the South is the only region where fewer than half of people report praying daily (37%). While Hindus, Muslims and Christians in the South are all less likely than their counterparts elsewhere in India to say religion is very important to them, the lower rate of prayer in the South is driven mainly by Hindus: Three-in-ten Southern Hindus report that they pray daily (30%), compared with roughly two-thirds (68%) of Hindus in the rest of the country (see “ People in the South differ from rest of the country in their views of religion, national identity ” below for further discussion of religious differences in Southern India).

The survey also asked about three rites of passage: religious ceremonies for birth (or infancy), marriage and death. Members of all of India’s major religious communities tend to see these rites as highly important. For example, the vast majority of Muslims (92%), Christians (86%) and Hindus (85%) say it is very important to have a religious burial or cremation for their loved ones.

The survey also asked about practices specific to particular religions, such as whether people have received purification by bathing in holy bodies of water, like the Ganges River, a rite closely associated with Hinduism. About two-thirds of Hindus have done this (65%). Most Hindus also have holy basil (the tulsi plant) in their homes, as do most Jains (72% and 62%, respectively). And about three-quarters of Sikhs follow the Sikh practice of keeping their hair long (76%).

For more on religious practices across India’s religious groups, see Chapter 7 .

Nearly all Indians say they believe in God (97%), and roughly 80% of people in most religious groups say they are absolutely certain that God exists. The main exception is Buddhists, one-third of whom say they do not believe in God. Still, among Buddhists who do think there is a God, most say they are absolutely certain in this belief.

While belief in God is close to universal in India, the survey finds a wide range of views about the type of deity or deities that Indians believe in. The prevailing view is that there is one God “with many manifestations” (54%). But about one-third of the public says simply: “There is only one God” (35%). Far fewer say there are many gods (6%).

Even though Hinduism is sometimes referred to as a polytheistic religion , very few Hindus (7%) take the position that there are multiple gods. Instead, the most common position among Hindus (as well as among Jains) is that there is “only one God with many manifestations” (61% among Hindus and 54% among Jains).

Among Hindus, those who say religion is very important in their lives are more likely than other Hindus to believe in one God with many manifestations (63% vs. 50%) and less likely to say there are many gods (6% vs. 12%).

By contrast, majorities of Muslims, Christians and Sikhs say there is only one God. And among Buddhists, the most common response is also a belief in one God. Among all these groups, however, about one-in-five or more say God has many manifestations, a position closer to their Hindu compatriots’ concept of God.

Most Hindus feel close to multiple gods, but Shiva, Hanuman and Ganesha are most popular

Traditionally, many Hindus have a “personal god,” or  ishta devata:  A particular god or goddess with whom they feel a personal connection. The survey asked all Indian Hindus who say they believe in God which god they feel closest to – showing them 15 images of gods on a card as possible options – and the vast majority of Hindus selected more than one god or indicated that they have many personal gods (84%). 7  This is true not only among Hindus who say they believe in many gods (90%) or in one God with many manifestations (87%), but also among those who say there is only one God (82%).

The god that Hindus most commonly feel close to is Shiva (44%). In addition, about one-third of Hindus feel close to Hanuman or Ganesha (35% and 32%, respectively).

There is great regional variation in how close India’s Hindus feel to some gods. For example, 46% of Hindus in India’s West feel close to Ganesha, but only 15% feel this way in the Northeast. And 46% of Hindus in the Northeast feel close to Krishna, while just 14% in the South say the same.

Feelings of closeness for Lord Ram are especially strong in the Central region (27%), which includes what Hindus claim is his ancient birthplace , Ayodhya. The location in Ayodhya where many Hindus believe Ram was born has been a source of controversy: Hindu mobs demolished a mosque on the site in 1992, claiming that a Hindu temple originally existed there. In 2019, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the demolished mosque had been built on top of a preexisting non-Islamic structure and that the land should be given to Hindus to build a temple, with another location in the area given to the Muslim community to build a new mosque. (For additional findings on belief in God, see Chapter 12 .)

Sidebar: Despite economic advancement, few signs that importance of religion is declining

A prominent theory in the social sciences hypothesizes that as countries advance economically, their populations tend to become less religious, often leading to wider social change. Known as “secularization theory,” it particularly reflects the experience of Western European countries from the end of World War II to the present.

Despite rapid economic growth, India’s population so far shows few, if any, signs of losing its religion. For instance, both the Indian census and the new survey find virtually no growth in the minuscule share of people who claim no religious identity. And religion is prominent in the lives of Indians regardless of their socioeconomic status. Generally, across the country, there is little difference in personal religious observance between urban and rural residents or between those who are college educated versus those who are not. Overwhelming shares among all these groups say that religion is very important in their lives, that they pray regularly and that they believe in God.

Nearly all religious groups show the same patterns. The biggest exception is Christians, among whom those with higher education and those who reside in urban areas show somewhat lower levels of observance. For example, among Christians who have a college degree, 59% say religion is very important in their life, compared with 78% among those who have less education.

The survey does show a slight decline in the perceived importance of religion during the lifetime of respondents, though the vast majority of Indians indicate that religion remains central to their lives, and this is true among both younger and older adults.

Nearly nine-in-ten Indian adults say religion was very important to their family when they were growing up (88%), while a slightly lower share say religion is very important to them now (84%). The pattern is identical when looking only at India’s majority Hindu population. Among Muslims in India, the same shares say religion was very important to their family growing up and is very important to them now (91% each).

The states of Southern India (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Telangana) show the biggest downward trend in the perceived importance of religion over respondents’ lifetimes: 76% of Indians who live in the South say religion was very important to their family growing up, compared with 69% who say religion is personally very important to them now. Slight declines in the importance of religion, by this measure, also are seen in the Western part of the country (Goa, Gujarat and Maharashtra) and in the North, although large majorities in all regions of the country say religion is very important in their lives today.

Despite a strong desire for religious segregation, India’s religious groups share patriotic feelings, cultural values and some religious beliefs. For instance, overwhelming shares across India’s religious communities say they are very proud to be Indian, and most agree that Indian culture is superior to others.

Similarly, Indians of different religious backgrounds hold elders in high respect. For instance, nine-in-ten or more Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Jains say that respecting elders is very important to what being a member of their religious group means to them (e.g., for Hindus, it’s a very important part of their Hindu identity). Christians and Sikhs also overwhelmingly share this sentiment. And among all people surveyed in all six groups, three-quarters or more say that respecting elders is very important to being truly Indian.

Within all six religious groups, eight-in-ten or more also say that helping the poor and needy is a crucial part of their religious identity.

Beyond cultural parallels, many people mix traditions from multiple religions into their practices: As a result of living side by side for generations, India’s minority groups often engage in practices that are more closely associated with Hindu traditions than their own. For instance, many Muslim, Sikh and Christian women in India say they wear a bindi (a forehead marking, often worn by married women), even though putting on a bindi has Hindu origins.

Similarly, many people embrace beliefs not traditionally associated with their faith: Muslims in India are just as likely as Hindus to say they believe in karma (77% each), and 54% of Indian Christians share this view. 8  Nearly three-in-ten Muslims and Christians say they believe in reincarnation (27% and 29%, respectively). While these may seem like theological contradictions, for many Indians, calling oneself a Muslim or a Christian does not preclude believing in karma or reincarnation – beliefs that do not have a traditional, doctrinal basis in Islam or Christianity.

Most Muslims and Christians say they don’t participate in celebrations of Diwali, the Indian festival of lights that is traditionally celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. But substantial minorities of Christians (31%) and Muslims (20%) report that they do celebrate Diwali. Celebrating Diwali is especially common among Muslims in the West, where 39% say they participate in the festival, and in the South (33%).

Not only do some followers of all these religions participate in a celebration (Diwali) that consumes most of the country once a year, but some members of the majority Hindu community celebrate Muslim and Christian festivals, too: 7% of Indian Hindus say they celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid, and 17% celebrate Christmas.

While there is some mixing of religious celebrations and traditions within India’s diverse population, many Hindus do not approve of this. In fact, while 17% of the nation’s Hindus say they participate in Christmas celebrations, about half of Hindus (52%) say that doing so disqualifies a person from being Hindu (compared with 35% who say a person can be Hindu if they celebrate Christmas). An even greater share of Hindus (63%) say a person cannot be Hindu if they celebrate the Islamic festival of Eid – a view that is more widely held in Northern, Central, Eastern and Northeastern India than the South or West.

Hindus are divided on whether beliefs and practices such as believing in God, praying and going to the temple are necessary to be a Hindu. But one behavior that a clear majority of Indian Hindus feel is incompatible with Hinduism is eating beef: 72% of Hindus in India say a person who eats beef cannot be a Hindu. That is even higher than the percentages of Hindus who say a person cannot be Hindu if they reject belief in God (49%), never go to a temple (48%) or never perform prayers (48%).

Attitudes toward beef appear to be part of a regional and cultural divide among Hindus: Southern Indian Hindus are considerably less likely than others to disqualify beef eaters from being Hindu (50% vs. 83% in the Northern and Central parts of the country). And, at least in part, Hindus’ views on beef and Hindu identity are linked with a preference for religious segregation and elements of Hindu nationalism. For example, Hindus who take a strong position against eating beef are more likely than others to say they would not accept followers of other religions as their neighbors (49% vs. 30%) and to say it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian (68% vs. 51%).

Relatedly, 44% of Hindus say they are vegetarians, and an additional 33% say they abstain from eating certain meats. Hindus traditionally view cows as sacred, and laws pertaining to cow slaughter have been a recent flashpoint in India . At the same time, Hindus are not alone in linking beef consumption with religious identity: 82% of Sikhs and 85% of Jains surveyed say that a person who eats beef cannot be a member of their religious groups, either. A majority of Sikhs (59%) and fully 92% of Jains say they are vegetarians, including 67% of Jains who do not eat root vegetables . 9  (For more data on religion and dietary habits, see Chapter 10 .)

Sidebar: People in the South differ from rest of the country in their views of religion, national identity

The survey consistently finds that people in the South (the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, and the union territory of Puducherry) differ from Indians elsewhere in the country in their views on religion, politics and identity.

For example, by a variety of measures, people in the South are somewhat less religious than those in other regions – 69% say religion is very important in their lives, versus 92% in the Central part of the country. And 37% say they pray every day, compared with more than half of Indians in other regions. People in the South also are less segregated by religion or caste – whether that involves their friendship circles, the kind of neighbors they prefer or how they feel about intermarriage. (See Chapter 3 .)

Hindu nationalist sentiments also appear to have less of a foothold in the South. Among Hindus, those in the South (42%) are far less likely than those in Central states (83%) or the North (69%) to say being Hindu is very important to be truly Indian. And in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP’s lowest vote share came in the South. In the survey, just 19% of Hindus in the region say they voted for the BJP, compared with roughly two-thirds in the Northern (68%) and Central (65%) parts of the country who say they voted for the ruling party.

Culturally and politically, people in the South have pushed back against the BJP’s restrictions on cow slaughter and efforts to nationalize the Hindi language . These factors may contribute to the BJP’s lower popularity in the South, where more people prefer regional parties or the Indian National Congress party.

These differences in attitudes and practices exist in a wider context of economic disparities between the South and other regions of the country. Over time, Southern states have seen stronger economic growth than the Northern and Central parts of the country. And women and people belonging to lower castes in the South have fared better economically than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Even though three-in-ten people in the South say there is widespread caste discrimination in India, the region also has a history of anti-caste movements . Indeed, one author has attributed the economic growth of the South largely to the flattening of caste hierarchies.

Muslim identity in India

Most Muslims in India say a person cannot be Muslim if they never pray or attend a mosque. Similarly, about six-in-ten say that celebrating Diwali or Christmas is incompatible with being a member of the Muslim community. At the same time, a substantial minority express a degree of open-mindedness on who can be a Muslim, with fully one-third (34%) saying a person can be Muslim even if they don’t believe in God. (The survey finds that 6% of self-described Muslims in India say they do not believe in God; see “ Near-universal belief in God, but wide variation in how God is perceived ” above.)

Like Hindus, Muslims have dietary restrictions that resonate as powerful markers of identity. Three-quarters of Indian Muslims (77%) say that a person cannot be Muslim if they eat pork, which is even higher than the share who say a person cannot be Muslim if they do not believe in God (60%) or never attend mosque (61%).

Indian Muslims also report high levels of religious commitment by a host of conventional measures: 91% say religion is very important in their lives, two-thirds (66%) say they pray at least once a day, and seven-in-ten say they attend mosque at least once a week – with even higher attendance among Muslim men (93%).

By all these measures, Indian Muslims are broadly comparable to Muslims in the neighboring Muslim-majority countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in those countries in late 2011 and early 2012. In Pakistan, for example, 94% of Muslims said religion is very important in their lives , while 81% of Bangladeshi Muslims said the same. Muslims in India are somewhat more likely than those elsewhere in South Asia to say they regularly worship at a mosque (70% in India vs. 59% in Pakistan and 53% in Bangladesh), with the difference mainly driven by the share of women who attend.

At the same time, Muslims in India are slightly less likely to say there is “only one true” interpretation of Islam (72% in Pakistan, 69% in Bangladesh, 63% in India), as opposed to multiple interpretations.

When it comes to their religious beliefs, Indian Muslims in some ways resemble Indian Hindus more than they resemble Muslims in neighboring countries. For example, Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh almost universally say they believe in heaven and angels, but Indian Muslims seem more skeptical: 58% say they believe in heaven and 53% express belief in angels. Among Indian Hindus, similarly, 56% believe in heaven and 49% believe in angels.

Majority of Muslim women in India oppose ‘triple talaq’ (Islamic divorce)

Many Indian Muslims historically have followed the Hanafi school of thought, which for centuries allowed men to divorce their wives by saying “talaq” (which translates as “divorce” in Arabic and Urdu) three times. Traditionally, there was supposed to be a waiting period and attempts at reconciliation in between each use of the word, and it was deeply frowned upon (though technically permissible) for a man to pronounce “talaq” three times quickly in a row. India’s Supreme Court ruled triple talaq unconstitutional in 2017, and it was banned by legislation in 2019 .

Most Indian Muslims (56%) say Muslim men should not be allowed to divorce this way. Still, 37% of Indian Muslims say they support triple talaq, with Muslim men (42%) more likely than Muslim women (32%) to take this position. A majority of Muslim women (61%) oppose triple talaq.

Highly religious Muslims – i.e., those who say religion is very important in their lives – also are more likely than other Muslims to say Muslim men should be able to divorce their wives simply by saying “talaq” three times (39% vs. 26%).

Triple talaq seems to have the most support among Muslims in the Southern and Northeastern regions of India, where half or more of Muslims say it should be legal (58% and 50%, respectively), although 12% of Muslims in the South and 16% in the Northeast do not take a position on the issue either way.

Sikhism is one of four major religions – along with Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – that originated on the Indian subcontinent. The Sikh religion emerged in Punjab in the 15th century, when Guru Nanak, who is revered as the founder of Sikhism, became the first in a succession of 10 gurus (teachers) in the religion.

Today, India’s Sikhs remain concentrated in the state of Punjab. One feature of the Sikh religion is a distinctive sense of community, also known as “Khalsa” (which translates as “ones who are pure”). Observant Sikhs differentiate themselves from others in several ways, including keeping their hair uncut. Today, about three-quarters of Sikh men and women in India say they keep their hair long (76%), and two-thirds say it is very important to them that children in their families also keep their hair long (67%). (For more analysis of Sikhs’ views on passing religious traditions on to their children, see Chapter 8 .)

Sikhs are more likely than Indian adults overall to say they attend religious services every day – 40% of Sikhs say they go to the gurdwara (Sikh house of worship) daily. By comparison, 14% of Hindus say they go to a Hindu temple every day. Moreover, the vast majority of Sikhs (94%) regard their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, as the word of God, and many (37%) say they read it, or listen to recitations of it, every day.

Sikhs in India also incorporate other religious traditions into their practice. Some Sikhs (9%) say they follow Sufi orders, which are linked with Islam, and about half (52%) say they have a lot in common with Hindus. Roughly one-in-five Indian Sikhs say they have prayed, meditated or performed a ritual at a Hindu temple.

Sikh-Hindu relations were marked by violence in the 1970s and 1980s, when demands for a separate Sikh state covering the Punjab regions in both India and Pakistan (also known as the Khalistan movement) reached their apex. In 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards as revenge for Indian paramilitary forces storming the Sikh Golden Temple in pursuit of Sikh militants. Anti-Sikh riots ensued in Northern India, especially in the state of Punjab.

According to the Indian census, the vast majority of Sikhs in India (77%) still live in Punjab, where Sikhs make up 58% of the adult population. And 93% of Punjabi Sikhs say they are very proud to live in the state.

Sikhs also are overwhelmingly proud of their Indian identity. A near-universal share of Sikhs say they are very proud to be Indian (95%), and the vast majority (70%) say a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh. And like India’s other religious groups, most Sikhs do not see evidence of widespread discrimination against their community – just 14% say Sikhs face a lot of discrimination in India, and 18% say they personally have faced religious discrimination in the last year.

At the same time, Sikhs are more likely than other religious communities to see communal violence as a very big problem in the country. Nearly eight-in-ten Sikhs (78%) rate communal violence as a major issue, compared with 65% of Hindus and Muslims.

The BJP has attempted to financially compensate Sikhs for some of the violence that occurred in 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, but relatively few Sikh voters (19%) report having voted for the BJP in the 2019 parliamentary elections. The survey finds that 33% of Sikhs preferred the Indian National Congress Party – Gandhi’s party.

• Ahmed, Hilal. 2019. “ Siyasi Muslims: A story of political Islams in India .” ↩
• All survey respondents, regardless of religion, were asked, “Are you from a General Category, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Class?” By contrast, in the 2011 census of India, only Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists could be enumerated as members of Scheduled Castes, while Scheduled Tribes could include followers of all religions. General Category and Other Backward Classes were not measured in the census. A detailed analysis of differences between 2011 census data on caste and survey data can be found here . ↩
• According to the 2004 and 2009 National Election Studies by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), roughly half of Indians or more said that marriages of boys and girls from different castes should be  banned . In 2004, a majority also said this about people from different religions. ↩
• In both the 2004 and 2009 National Election Studies (organized by CSDS), roughly half of Indians said that “There should be a legal ban on religious conversions.” ↩
• This includes 0.2% of all Indian adults who now identify as Hindu but give an ambiguous response on how they were raised – either saying “some other religion” or saying they don’t know their childhood religion. ↩
• Puja is a specific worship ritual that involves prayer along with rites like offering flowers and food, using vermillion, singing and chanting. ↩
• Fifteen named deities were available for selection, though no answer options were read aloud. Respondents could select up to three of those 15 deities by naming them or selecting the corresponding image shown on a card. The answer option “another god” was available on the card or if any other deity name was volunteered by the respondent. Other possible answer options included “I do not have a god I feel closest to” and “I have many personal gods,” though neither was on the card. See the questionnaire or topline for the full list of gods offered. ↩
• The religious origins of karma are debated by scholars, but the concept has deep roots in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. ↩
• For an analysis of Jain theology on the concept of  jiva  (soul) see Chapple, Christopher K. 2014. “Life All Around: Soul in Jainism.” In Biernacki, Loriliai and Philip Clayton, eds. “ Panentheism Across the World’s Traditions .” ↩

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sanatana dharma , in Hinduism , term used to denote the “eternal” or absolute set of duties or religiously ordained practices incumbent upon all Hindus, regardless of class, caste , or sect. Different texts give different lists of the duties, but in general sanatana dharma consists of virtues such as honesty, refraining from injuring living beings, purity, goodwill, mercy, patience, forbearance, self-restraint, generosity, and asceticism . Sanatana dharma is contrasted with svadharma , one’s “own duty” or the particular duties enjoined upon an individual according to his or her class or caste and stage of life. The potential for conflict between the two types of dharma ( e.g. , between the particular duties of a warrior and the general injunction to practice non-injury) is addressed in Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gītā , where it is said that in such cases svadharma must prevail.

The term has also more recently been used by Hindu leaders, reformers, and nationalists to refer to Hinduism as a unified world religion . Sanatana dharma has thus become a synonym for the “eternal” truth and teachings of Hinduism, the latter conceived of as not only transcendent of history and unchanging but also as indivisible and ultimately nonsectarian.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: November 16, 2023 | Original: October 6, 2017

Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion, according to many scholars, with roots and customs dating back more than 4,000 years. Today, with more than 1 billion followers , Hinduism is the third-largest religion worldwide, after Christianity and Islam . Roughly 94 percent of the world’s Hindus live in India. Because the religion has no specific founder, it’s difficult to trace its origins and history. Hinduism is unique in that it’s not a single religion but a compilation of many traditions and philosophies: Hindus worship a number of different gods and minor deities, honor a range of symbols, respect several different holy books and celebrate with a wide variety of traditions, holidays and customs. Though the development of the caste system in India was influenced by Hindu concepts , it has been shaped throughout history by political as well as religious movements, and today is much less rigidly enforced. Today there are four major sects of Hinduism: Shaivism, Vaishnava, Shaktism and Smarta, as well as a number of smaller sects with their own religious practices.

Hinduism Beliefs, Symbols

Some basic Hindu concepts include:

• Hinduism embraces many religious ideas. For this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as a “way of life” or a “family of religions,” as opposed to a single, organized religion.
• Most forms of Hinduism are henotheistic, which means they worship a single deity, known as “Brahman,” but still recognize other gods and goddesses. Followers believe there are multiple paths to reaching their god.
• Hindus believe in the doctrines of samsara (the continuous cycle of life, death, and reincarnation) and karma (the universal law of cause and effect).
• One of the key thoughts of Hinduism is “atman,” or the belief in soul. This philosophy holds that living creatures have a soul, and they’re all part of the supreme soul. The goal is to achieve “moksha,” or salvation, which ends the cycle of rebirths to become part of the absolute soul.
• One fundamental principle of the religion is the idea that people’s actions and thoughts directly determine their current life and future lives.
• Hindus strive to achieve dharma, which is a code of living that emphasizes good conduct and morality.
• Hindus revere all living creatures and consider the cow a sacred animal.
• Food is an important part of life for Hindus. Most don’t eat beef or pork, and many are vegetarians.
• Hinduism is closely related to other Indian religions, including Buddhism , Sikhism and Jainism.

There are two primary symbols associated with Hinduism, the om and the swastika. The word swastika means "good fortune" or "being happy" in Sanskrit, and the symbol represents good luck . (A hooked, diagonal variation of the swastika later became associated with Germany’s Nazi Party  when they made it their symbol in 1920.)

The om symbol is composed of three Sanskrit letters and represents three sounds (a, u and m), which when combined are considered a sacred sound. The om symbol is often found at family shrines and in Hindu temples.

Hinduism Holy Books

Hindus value many sacred writings as opposed to one holy book.

The primary sacred texts, known as the Vedas, were composed around 1500 B.C. This collection of verses and hymns was written in Sanskrit and contains revelations received by ancient saints and sages.

The Vedas are made up of:

• The Rig Veda
• The Samaveda
• Atharvaveda

Hindus believe that the Vedas transcend all time and don’t have a beginning or an end.

The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, 18 Puranas, Ramayana and Mahabharata are also considered important texts in Hinduism.

Origins of Hinduism

Most scholars believe Hinduism started somewhere between 2300 B.C. and 1500 B.C. in the Indus Valley, near modern-day Pakistan. But many Hindus argue that their faith is timeless and has always existed.

Unlike other religions, Hinduism has no one founder but is instead a fusion of various beliefs.

Around 1500 B.C., the Indo-Aryan people migrated to the Indus Valley, and their language and culture blended with that of the indigenous people living in the region. There’s some debate over who influenced whom more during this time.

The period when the Vedas were composed became known as the “Vedic Period” and lasted from about 1500 B.C. to 500 B.C. Rituals, such as sacrifices and chanting, were common in the Vedic Period.

The Epic, Puranic and Classic Periods took place between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500. Hindus began to emphasize the worship of deities, especially Vishnu, Shiva and Devi.

The concept of dharma was introduced in new texts, and other faiths, such as Buddhism and Jainism, spread rapidly.

Hinduism vs. Buddhism

Hinduism and Buddhism have many similarities. Buddhism, in fact, arose out of Hinduism, and both believe in reincarnation, karma and that a life of devotion and honor is a path to salvation and enlightenment. 

But some key differences exist between the two religions: Many strains of Buddhism reject the caste system, and do away with many of the rituals, the priesthood, and the gods that are integral to Hindu faith.

Medieval and Modern Hindu History

The Medieval Period of Hinduism lasted from about A.D. 500 to 1500. New texts emerged, and poet-saints recorded their spiritual sentiments during this time.

In the 7th century, Muslim Arabs began invading areas in India. During parts of the Muslim Period, which lasted from about 1200 to 1757, Islamic rulers prevented Hindus from worshipping their deities, and some temples were destroyed.

Mahatma Gandhi

Between 1757 and 1947, the British controlled India. At first, the new rulers allowed Hindus to practice their religion without interference, but the British soon attempted to exploit aspects of Indian culture as leverage points for political control, in some cases exacerbating Hindu caste divisions even as they promoted westernized, Christian approaches.

Many reformers emerged during the British Period. The well-known politician and peace activist, Mahatma Gandhi , led a movement that pushed for India’s independence.

The partition of India occurred in 1947, and Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. British India was split into what are now the independent nations of India and Pakistan , and Hinduism became the major religion of India.

Starting in the 1960s, many Hindus migrated to North America and Britain, spreading their faith and philosophies to the western world.

Hindus worship many gods and goddesses in addition to Brahman, who is believed to be the supreme God force present in all things.

Some of the most prominent deities include:

• Brahma: the god responsible for the creation of the world and all living things
• Vishnu: the god that preserves and protects the universe
• Shiva: the god that destroys the universe in order to recreate it
• Devi: the goddess that fights to restore dharma
• Krishna: the god of compassion, tenderness and love
• Lakshmi: the goddess of wealth and purity
• Saraswati: the goddess of learning

Places of Worship

Hindu worship, which is known as “puja,” typically takes place in the Mandir (temple). Followers of Hinduism can visit the Mandir any time they please.

Hindus can also worship at home, and many have a special shrine dedicated to certain gods and goddesses.

The giving of offerings is an important part of Hindu worship. It’s a common practice to present gifts, such as flowers or oils, to a god or goddess.

Additionally, many Hindus take pilgrimages to temples and other sacred sites in India.

Hinduism Sects

Hinduism has many sects, and the following are often considered the four major denominations.

Shaivism is one of the largest denominations of Hinduism, and its followers worship Shiva, sometimes known as “The Destroyer,” as their supreme deity.

Shaivism spread from southern India into Southeast Asia and is practiced in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia as well as India. Like the other major sects of Hinduism, Shaivism considers the Vedas and the Upanishads to be sacred texts.

Vaishnavism is considered the largest Hindu sect, with an estimated 640 million followers, and is practiced worldwide. It includes sub-sects that are familiar to many non-Hindus, including Ramaism and Krishnaism.

Vaishnavism recognizes many deities, including Vishnu, Lakshmi, Krishna and Rama, and the religious practices of Vaishnavism vary from region to region across the Indian subcontinent.

Shaktism is somewhat unique among the four major traditions of Hinduism in that its followers worship a female deity, the goddess Shakti (also known as Devi).

Shaktism is sometimes practiced as a monotheistic religion, while other followers of this tradition worship a number of goddesses. This female-centered denomination is sometimes considered complementary to Shaivism, which recognizes a male deity as supreme.

The Smarta or Smartism tradition of Hinduism is somewhat more orthodox and restrictive than the other four mainstream denominations. It tends to draw its followers from the Brahman upper caste of Indian society.

Smartism followers worship five deities: Vishnu, Shiva, Devi, Ganesh and Surya. Their temple at Sringeri is generally recognized as the center of worship for the denomination.

Some Hindus elevate the Hindu trinity, which consists of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Others believe that all the deities are a manifestation of one.

Hindu Caste System

The caste system is a social hierarchy in India that divides Hindus based on their karma and dharma. Although the word “caste” is of Portuguese origin, it is used to describe aspects of the related Hindu concepts of varna (color or race) and jati (birth). Many scholars believe the system dates back more than 3,000 years.

The four main castes (in order of prominence) include:

• Brahmin: the intellectual and spiritual leaders
• Kshatriyas: the protectors and public servants of society
• Vaisyas: the skillful producers
• Shudras: the unskilled laborers

Many subcategories also exist within each caste. The “Untouchables” are a class of citizens that are outside the caste system and considered to be in the lowest level of the social hierarchy.

For centuries, the caste system determined most aspect of a person’s social, professional and religious status in India.

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When India became an independent nation, its constitution banned discrimination based on caste.

Today, the caste system still exists in India but is loosely followed. Many of the old customs are overlooked, but some traditions, such as only marrying within a specific caste, are still embraced.

Hindus observe numerous sacred days, holidays and festivals.

Some of the most well-known include:

• Diwali : the festival of lights
• Navaratri: a celebration of fertility and harvest
• Holi: a spring festival
• Krishna Janmashtami: a tribute to Krishna’s birthday
• Raksha Bandhan: a celebration of the bond between brother and sister
• Maha Shivaratri: the great festival of Shiva

Hinduism Facts. Sects of Hinduism . Hindu American Foundation. Hinduism Basics . History of Hinduism, BBC . Hinduism Fast Facts, CNN .

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Netaji & Hindu Nationalism: A Complicated Relationship

• AUTHOR Akshay Chavan
• PUBLISHED 26 March 2022

On 15th March 1940, Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, then a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, was holding a meeting to address workers in the run-up to the Calcutta Municipal Corporation elections. But in the middle of his speech, a stone was thrown at Mookerjee which hit him on the head. Complete chaos ensued and Hindu Mahasabha workers beat up the goons. But the identity of these men were no surprise to Mookerjee. They were supporters of Subhas Chandra Bose.

In his diary, Moorkerjee reminisced [ ‘Leaves From A Diary’ , Published 1993]:

‘Subhas once warned me in a friendly spirit, adding significantly, that if we proceed to create a rival political body in Bengal, he would see to it (by force if need be).. that it was broken before it was really born. This is considered most unreasonable and unfair attitude to take up.’

Author Chandrachur Ghose, in his book Bose: The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist , writes how two days after this attack, a lead editorial was published in the pro-Bose Bengali newspaper Amrita Bazaar Patrika titled ‘The Plague of Fascism’, which asked the people to defeat the candidates of ‘the fascist party’ (Hindu Mahasabha) in the upcoming Calcutta Municipal Corporation elections. Years later, Dr Mookerjee would go on to the Jana Sangh in 1951, which later evolved into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

In January 2022, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a hologram statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at India Gate in Delhi, there was are a lot of discussion on Netaji’s views and relationship with the Hindu nationalist movement, especially with leaders like Jana Sangh founder Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Hindutva ideologue V D Savarkar.

A number of arguments were put forward about how Bose was pro- or anti-Hindu nationalism, depending on which side of the ideological spectrum you stood. But like most things in history, the relationship between Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Hindu nationalists can be termed as ‘complicated’.

A good example of this is the 1940 Calcutta Municipal Corporation elections, which caused a fallout between Bose and Dr Mookerjee. It was Bose who had first approved the pre-poll alliance between the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha in February 1940.

Bose Was Against ‘Communal Politics’

Bose was staunchly opposed to what he called “communal politics”. A staunch socialist, he had been highly influenced by the Socialist movement in Europe, where class struggles gained primacy over religious issues. In his unfinished autobiography An Indian Pilgrim (1937), Bose wrote:

“History will bear me out when I say that it is a misnomer to talk of Muslim rule when describing the political order in India prior to the advent of the British. Whether we talk of the Moghul Emperors at Delhi, or of the Muslim Kings of Bengal, we shall find that in either case the administration was run by Hindus and Muslims together, many of the prominent Cabinet Ministers and Generals being Hindus. Further, the consolidation of the Moghul Empire in India was affected with the help of Hindu commanders-in-chief. The Commander-in-chief of Nawab Sirajudowla, whom the British fought at Plassey in 1757 and defeated, was a Hindu.’’

Bose had an interesting relationship with Hindutva ideologue, V D Savarkar . Author and researcher Chandrachur Ghose, in an interview to Live History India, revealed how both Savarkar and Bose mutually admired each other despite their differences.

For example, when Savarkar was released from internment in March 1937, Bose issued a statement welcoming him to public life. Bose had hoped that Savarkar would join the Congress, but much to his disappointment, Savarkar joined the Hindu Mahasabha, to work for Hindu interests. This put them on opposing paths.

In November 1938, when Bose served as President of the Indian National Congress, he made a statement to the national press that in the event of a future round table conference, the Congress alone should represent all Indians. To this, Savarkar issued a strong rebuttal, arguing that it was the Hindu Mahasabha which alone represented the interests of India’s Hindus.

The clashes continued when Savarkar attempted to strengthen the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal in December, 1939. Opposing Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha, Bose in his political weekly Forward Block argued how:

‘The Hindu Mahasabha has been doing incalculable harm to the idea of Indian nationhood by underlining the communal differences—by lumping all the Muslims together…. We cannot oblige Mr Savarkar by ignoring the contributions of nationalist Muslims to the cause of India.’

And, yet, just two months later, in March 1940, Bose approved the pre-poll alliance between the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC) and the Bengal Hindu Mahasabha led by Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. But this alliance ended just seven days later, when the parties failed to come up with a mutually agreed-upon list of candidates.

When the deal fell through, a vicious campaign of intimidation by Bose supporters against the Hindu Mahasabha followed. Senior Sangh Parivar leader Balraj Madhok, in his book Portrait of a Martyr: Biography of Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (1954), writes how Bose supporters would break up Hindu Mahasabha meetings and even attack Dr Mookerjee.

But attacks on the Hindu Mahasabha did not pay political dividends in the March 1940 elections. Of the total 42 reserved ‘Hindu’ seats in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, Bose supporters won 21 seats and the Hindu Mahasabha won 16 seats. This led to even more bitter disputes between the BPCC and the Hindu Mahasabha. Bose kept attacking the Mahasabha in his speeches and editorials.

Alliance With The Muslim League

Much to the shock of Mookerjee and the Hindu Mahasabha, Bose and the BPCC formed an alliance with the Muslim League on 17th April 1940, for elections to the five seats of the governing body of the corporation. This ‘Bose-League Pact of 1940’ is one of the lesser known aspects of Netaji’s political career and has been studied by historian P K Chatterjee in his research paper ‘ Bose-League Pact in Calcutta Corporation in 1940 ’ (1980).

Through this pact, Muslim League nominees were elected to two seats and Bose supporters got three. Bose also issued a statement expressing his satisfaction with the pact and claimed that the agreement was the beginning of a ‘new era’ in Bengal politics. There was a virulent reaction from the Hindu Mahasabha to this pact, who in their statement on 18th April 1940 accused Bose of ‘ selling the interests of Hindus ’. Most newspapers such as the Tribune of Lahore and the Bombay Chronicle criticised for the pact with the Muslim League.

Interestingly, the following month, Bose wrote an editorial in the Forward Block (4th May 1940), in which he condemned both the Hindu Mahasabha and surprisingly, the Muslim League as well. The editorial, titled Congress and Communal Organizations , said:

‘That was a long time ago, when prominent leaders of the Congress could be members of the communal organisations like Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League. But in recent times, the circumstances have changed. These communal organisations have become more communal than before. As a reaction to this, the Indian National Congress has put into its constitution a clause to the effect that no member of a communal organisation like Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League can be a member of an elective committee of Congress.’

Just a week later, in his speech at Jhargram in Bengal on 12th May 1940, Bose thundered:

“The Hindu Mahasabha has entered the political arena by taking advantage of religion and has desecrated it. It is the duty of every Hindu to condemn it. Banish these traitors from national life.”

And, yet, despite deep political differences, Subhas Chandra Bose as well as Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and V D Savarkar had mutual respect for each other. Before his escape to Afghanistan and Germany, Bose had met Savarkar in 1940 and in his book Indian Pilgrim lamented that ‘ Savarkar seemed to be oblivious of the international situation and was only thinking how the Hindus could secure military training by entering Britain’s army in India.’

Chandrachur Ghose, author of Bose: The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist reveals how Savarkar sent a message to the organisers of ‘All India Subhas Day’ on 23rd February 1941, stating: ‘May the gratitude, sympathy and good wishes of the nation be the source of never-failing solace and inspiration to him wherever he happens to be.’

Ghose also reveals that, in one of the last interviews given by Savarkar to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh publication The Organiser , Savarkar listed the role of Netaji and his Indian National Army as one of the reasons India won its freedom. Balraj Madhok, Dr Shyama Mookerjee’s biographer, too noted how Bose and Mookerjee shared a mutual admiration even though their paths differed.

So, as we can see, the relationship between Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Hindu nationalist movement was layered and complex. It is very easy to use epithets such as ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ to describe it, but it will be a gross simplification. And, in politics, nothing is simple.

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• Hinduism, Indian culture, Vedic Science, Yoga, Spirituality, India

Swami Vivekananda’s Speech on Hinduism

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric—Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength.

But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith. From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas . They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning.The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation. If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: “The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles.” And this agrees with modern science. 

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, “I”, “I”, “I”, what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, “No”. I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence.

Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God? In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence—one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, now is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would by conscious even of your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up-try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu belives that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce-him the fire cannot burn-him the water cannot melt-him the air cannot dry. The Hindu belives that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body. Not is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free. unbounded. holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow of other it finds itself tied down to matter and thinks of itself as matter.

Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; an the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; an immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another.

The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions—a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?—was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: “Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again.”

And what is His nature? He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. “Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life.” Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas . And how to worship Him? Through love. “He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.”

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas , and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth. He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world—his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love’s sake, and the prayer goes: “Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward—love unselfishly for love’s sake.” One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, “Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s sake. I cannot trade love.”

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti— freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery. And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: “I have seen the soul; I have seen God.” And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising—not in believing, but in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus. And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone. “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion becomes perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation. “The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet.” Names are not explanations.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, “If I abuse your God, what can He do?” “You would be punished,” said the preacher, “when you die.” “So my idol will punish you when you die,” retorted the Hindu.

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, “Can sin beget holiness?”

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church?

The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress.

He must not stop anywhere. “External worship, material worship,” say the scriptures, “is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised.” Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, ”Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine.” But he does not abuse any one’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life. ” The child is father of the man.”  Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so man attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna,”I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.”

And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, “We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed. ” One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also. This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being, from the lowestgrovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature.

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka’s council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar’s, though more to the purpose, was only a parlour-meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every religion. May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour’s blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony.

~  Swami Vivekananda, Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893,Chicago.

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Parts of Rahul Gandhi’s parliament speech on ‘Hinduism’ expunged from LS records

New Delhi: The Lok Sabha speaker expunged parts of Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi’s remarks on Hinduism from the records of Parliament. The removed portions also included certain comments on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Gandhi launched a no-holds-barred attack on the BJP in the Lok Sabha on Monday, accusing the leaders of the ruling party of dividing people on communal lines, drawing massive protests from the treasury benches, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi slamming the Congress leader for calling the entire Hindu community violent.

"It is not just one religion that talks about courage. In fact, all our religions talk about courage," Gandhi said in his debut speech as the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, which was watched by his mother Sonia Gandhi and sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra from the visitors' gallery. The Congress leader was speaking during the debate on the Motion of Thanks on the president's address to a joint sitting of Parliament.

Gandhi quoted Prophet Muhammad to highlight that the Quran talks about fearlessness. Holding up pictures of Lord Shiva, Guru Nanak, and Jesus Christ, he referred to Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism to underline the importance of fearlessness. He also cited the attributes of Lord Shiva and the teachings of Guru Nanak, Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Mahavir to state that all religions and great people of the country have said "daro mat, darao mat (do not be scared, do not scare others)". "Shivji says daro mat, darao mat ... talks about ahimsa..."

As the treasury bench members stood up in protest, Gandhi slammed the BJP, saying, "Aap Hindu ho hi nahi (You are not Hindus). It is clearly written in Hinduism that one should stand with the truth and not back down from the truth or be scared of it," Gandhi said.

PM Modi, intervening Gandhi's speech, said, "This issue is very serious. Calling the entire Hindu community violent is a serious issue." Home Minister Amit Shah sought the Congress leader's apology to the House and the country for hurting the feelings of crores of people who take pride in identifying themselves as Hindus. He said the ruckus created by the opposition cannot drown the fact that Gandhi had made certain remarks in the House.

Shah spoke of the Emergency and 1984 anti-Sikhs riots to hit back at Gandhi, saying he had no right to talk about non-violence when the Congress had spread "ideological terror" in the country. In a swipe at Gandhi for alleging that the ministers do not greet him, the prime minister said democracy and the Constitution have taught him to take the leader of opposition seriously.

Meanwhile, Gandhi accused the BJP of launching "systematic attacks" on the Constitution and the fundamental concept of India, noting that millions of people have resisted the ideas proposed by the ruling party. "I was attacked on the orders of Prime Minister Modi and the government. There were 20-plus cases (against me), a two-year jail sentence, (my) house was taken away, (I was subjected to) 55 hours of interrogation by the ED," he said.

As Gandhi held up a picture of Lord Shiva, Speaker Om Birla reminded him that rules do not allow displaying placards in the House. Gandhi also criticised the Agnipath scheme for short-term military recruitment and said that the government does not even give them the status of a "shaheed" (martyr) and that no compensation is extended to their families in they are killed in action. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh intervened to rebut Gandhi's charge.

The Congress leader also hit out at the Centre over the situation in Manipur, alleging that it has pushed the northeastern state into a civil war. Later, in a post in Hindi on X, Gandhi said, "Narendra Modi has been running the 'reign of fear' for 10 years! By taking control of all the agencies, institutions and the media, the BJP has only worked to spread fear in every section of the society." (With PTI inputs)

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• Speech Writing /

Speech on Religion in English

• Updated on  
• Dec 27, 2023

Religion is our social and cultural identity. According to the Oxford Dictionary, religion refers to our faith and belief in superhuman powers, especially in God. Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions. For God alone reads our hearts.’ Our religion teaches us a way of living, what we will accomplish in life and how our actions will determine our afterlife. International sources estimate the existence of more than 4000 religions in the world, the popular being, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. But did you know that there is a large section of people who identify themselves as secular/ nonreligious/ agnostic? Today, we have brought to you a speech on religion in English. Stay tuned!

Table of Contents

• 1 Popular Religions in the World
• 2 10 Lines to Add in Speech on Religion
• 3 2-Minute Speech on Religion

‘All Religions Must Be Tolerated…For Every Man Must Go To Heaven In His Way.’ -Epictetus

Popular Religions in the World

The table below highlights some of the popular religions in the world with the total number of followers.

Also Read: Right to Freedom of Religion

10 Lines to Add in Speech on Religion

Here are 10 lines that you can add to your speech on religion. Feel free to use them in your speech or writing topics related to religion. 

• Every religion has its holy texts, where rules and rituals are mentioned.
• There are four Hindu holy texts or Vedas: the Rig Veda , the Yajur Veda , the Sama Veda , and the Atharva Veda .
• In India, there are eight major religions.
• Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world and was mentioned as ‘Sanathana’ in ancient Hindu texts.
• Christians and Muslims are monotheistic, meaning they believe there’s only one God, and he created the heavens and the earth.
• There are around 330 million gods in the Hindu culture.
• Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world.
• Religious tolerance and freedom are necessary to build a pluralistic society.
• Religions around the world offer moral guidelines and ethical principles that shape the behaviour and conduct of their adherents.
• Rituals and ceremonies are integral parts of religious expression.

Also Read: Best Speech on Christmas

Also Read: How to Prepare for UPSC in 6 Months?

2-Minute Speech on Religion

‘Hello and welcome to everyone present here. Today, I stand before you to present my speech on religion. We all have grown up hearing the phrase, ‘Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isai, sab apas me bhai bhai.’ Today, there are more than 4000 religions in the world, and the most popular ones are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. Since India is a Secular country, several religions co-exist. There are eight major religions in India, such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism Buddhism, etc.’

‘Religion is not a physical entity. Instead, they are rules and regulations, giving us a social and cultural identity to live in harmony with other religions. Every religion teaches us to find the meaning of existence; the purpose of our life. Different religions have their customs and celebrations, where people follow their belief practices, and pray to the god for the goodwill of their family’s health and overall wellbeing.’

‘In our country, some of the popular religious places are Varanasi (Kashi), Haridwar, Ujjain, Amritsar, Tirupati, etc. All these cities are holy places where millions of people every year gather to participate in religious practices. The famous Kumbh Mela is a Hindu pilgrimage and festival which is conducted every 12 years at four places in India. 

‘Our religion teaches us a lot of life lessons like being kind to others, telling the truth or following the path of righteousness, etc. Different religions have their learned men, who act as the medium between people and god. Christians have a Father in church, an Imam in the Mosque, a Pujari in the Hindu Temple, a Granthi in Gurudwaras, and so on. Although these people have different names, their job is the same; performing rituals in holy places to connect with god or deity.’

‘We respect religion and abide by all our religious practices. Religion is not just about visiting temples and celebrating festivals. It is a way of living, it’s our identity, it defines who we are and teaches us what we can achieve in our life. Every religion offers moral guidelines and ethical principles that shape the behavior and conduct of adherents.

Thank you.’

Ans: Religion refers to the beliefs and practices people follow, which connect them with their social and cultural identity. International sources estimate the existence of more than 4000 religions in the world, the popular being, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. ‘Religion is not a physical entity. Instead, they are rules and regulations, giving us a social and cultural identity to live in harmony with other religions. Every religion teaches us to find the meaning of existence; the purpose of our life.

Ans: The top three religions in the world are Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Ans: People who don’t follow any religion identify themselves as secular/ nonreligious/ agnostic. More than a billion people in the world identify themselves as secular/ nonreligious

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With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Vivekananda: A true icon of Hinduism

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He was born on January 12, 1863, and is credited with the revival of Hinduism. He was 30 years of age when he spoke before a learned amalgamation of delegates gathered at the Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions on September 11, 1893. He conclusively proved before the august gathering that the tenets of Hinduism were all-encompassing and that Hindu religion stood not just for tolerance but universal acceptance.

We can still feel the vibrations of his deep, soothing voice enthralling the vast audience in a foreign land when he said, “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.”

He used two shlokas in his speech, one from the Bhagwad Gita and the other one, a Shiv Mahim Stotram – both saying that all types of prayer, conducted in different ways, reach God. He gave many lectures in America and became famous due to his thoughts and his oratory.

Vivekananda was concerned that Hindu religion had been turned into a “kitchen religion” and “don’t touch me religion.” He referred to the scriptures to show that the divine, the absolute, exists within all human beings regardless of social status and caste. He was honest in his criticism of the social practices that kept India backward. He was against caste discrimination and intolerance. He was a religious reformer as well as a social reformer. He revolutionised the traditional image of the Hindu monk, the sanyasi, in India by making social service an integral part of the sanyasi’s life. He believed that a country’s future depended on its people and his teachings focused on the physical and mental development of the people. He once told students that they would be nearer to God through football than through the study of the Gita.

Vivekananda wandered throughout the country, and his voice was heard from Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, to Bengal. He was the monk who followed the tradition of Buddha and established the Ramkrishna Matha at Belur, bringing up an order of monks who served the world. He also started the Ramakrishna Mission as a philanthropic, volunteer organisation to work for the good of humanity.

Before Vivekananda, many social reformers and monks had tried to change the status quo of the Indian masses, but none succeeded in the way he did. Truth is, Vivekananda laid bare his heart and poured out the knowledge and feeling of Hinduism to the masses as no one had before. In a way, he was the first proponent of the ‘Right to Information’ and made available the Vedanta literature to all irrespective of caste. He declared that all human beings were equal in theory and in practice and God was present in everybody. In fact, all are an embodiment of God (Aham Brahmasmi). So, there can be no discrimination. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (The world is one family) was not a mere slogan for him.

The knowledge that was kept under wraps had to wait for the right person and the right time. Vivekananda made it all public as he was of the view that every person had the right to know our ancient knowledge, because that legacy belonged to all.

It is an injustice to him that his teachings have been given a decent burial and now India has become a country that differentiates on the basis of religion in giving citizenship to persecuted refugees. Vivekananda is remembered for the sake of it, but nobody bothers to live by his high ideals. In the present scenario, religious leaders are silent, political leaders are playing the blame game, social media is creating havoc, electronic media is busy in debates where each one spews venom on the other. There is still a semblance of hope only in the print media.

The coming Assembly election in Bengal is going to be a testimony to all the showbiz, when every party would invoke Swami Vivekananda to declare that they are nearer to his ideals. Dirty games will be played, nationalistic feelings will be provoked and violence may happen. It is a time when everybody who loves India should come forward and assert that no politics would be allowed in the name of Vivekananda.

The way forward is to remember the teachings of Vivekananda, in every educational institution and at every forum. The national and regional media has to popularise the teachings of Vivekananda, perhaps by giving a slot once a month to air his views as he presented them. The war against communalism, religious hatred, fanaticism and low mentality can be surmounted only by large-hearted thinking of religious harmony and acceptance of divergent views as enunciated by Vivekananda.

“Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.” Katha Upanishad

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Nearly 100 people crushed to death in India religious gathering stampede

Official confirms at least 97 deaths as casualties continue to rise; scores of others injured.

NEW DELHI: Nearly a hundred people were crushed to death at a Hindu religious gathering in northern India, with scores of others injured, a senior government official said Tuesday.

"We have confirmed 97 deaths so far and are focusing on providing relief and medical aid for the victims," Chaitra V., divisional commissioner of Aligarh city in Uttar Pradesh state, told AFP .

Initially, 27 bodies had been recieved by the medical authorities but the death toll has continued to rise since then.

The stampede happened in a village in Hathras district, some 140 kilometres (87 miles) southeast of the national capital New Delhi, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the Hindu deity Shiva in the city of Hathras. 

District police spokesperson Manish Chikara put the death toll at about 60 people, but said that figure may rise.

Videos on social media showed bodies piled up on the ground outside a local hospital. Reuters could not immediately verify the images.

"The incident happened due to overcrowding at the time when people were trying to leave the venue," Hathras district administrator Ashish Kumar told reporters.

An unidentified witness told broadcaster India Today that there was a narrow exit at the venue: "As we tried to exit towards a field, suddenly a commotion started, and we didn't know what to do."

Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state with more than 200 million people. Its Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath ordered an investigation.

"Instructions have been given to the concerned officials to conduct relief and rescue operations on war footing and to provide proper treatment to the injured," he posted on X.

Deadly accidents are common at places of worship in India during major religious festivals.

At least 112 people were killed in 2016 after a huge explosion caused by a banned fireworks display at a temple marking the Hindu new year.

The blast ripped through concrete buildings and ignited a fire at a temple complex in Kerala state, where thousands had gathered.

Another 115 devotees died in 2013 after a stampede at a bridge near a temple in Madhya Pradesh.

Up to 400,000 people were gathered in the area, and the stampede occurred after a rumour spread that the bridge was about to collapse.

About 224 pilgrims died and more than 400 others were injured in a 2008 stampede at a hilltop temple in the northern city of Jodhpur.

Additional input from AFP

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At least 87 people feared dead in stampede at religious event in India, NDTV reports

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India parliament redacts opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s speech targeting PM Modi

• India’s opposition leader had his first speech in parliament redacted for violating the rules of the legislature, including accusations against PM Modi

Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s first speech in the new parliament ran into controversy with parts of it, including accusations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, redacted on Tuesday for violating the rules of the legislature.

The decision by the speaker of the lower house came a day after Gandhi made his maiden speech as the leader of the opposition in the chambers, his first official position after two decades as a lawmaker representing the main opposition Congress party.

Among the sections removed from the speech, which was telecast live by TV channels, were Gandhi’s attacks on Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and what he said were their links to religious hate and violence.

Gandhi also made multiple references to industrialists Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani and linked them to Modi and his government, which were removed by speaker Om Birla, parliament records showed.

Following the speech, federal ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and Kiren Rijiju told reporters that they met Birla to point out “inaccuracies” in Gandhi’s speech and were assured their complaint would be examined.

Under Indian parliamentary rules, the speaker can expunge or redact words used by lawmakers in the chambers that are deemed defamatory, indecent, unparliamentary, or undignified, following which they cease to exist in parliament’s records and can no longer be reported by the media.

Responding to the speaker’s decision, Gandhi said, “truth cannot be expunged”.

He wrote to Birla requesting the redacted remarks be restored, saying they were not violations and conveyed the “ground reality” and “factual position”.

“Taking off from records my considered remarks goes against the very tenets of parliamentary democracy,” he said.

The scion of a dynasty that gave India three prime ministers, Gandhi is the first leader of the opposition in a decade in the lower house, where no opposition party was able to secure the numbers to claim the position in the last two terms.

He led an opposition alliance of two dozen parties that challenged denied Modi an outright majority in the April to June multiphase general election, forcing him to depend on regional parties for the first time and form a coalition government to return as prime minister for a rare third straight term.

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Top news of the day: At least 60 killed in Hathras stampede; Lok Sabha passes resolution against Opposition’s disruptions to PM Modi’s speech, adjourns sine die, and more

The major news headlines of the day and more..

Published - July 02, 2024 07:54 pm IST

Relatives outside a hospital where victims of the Hathras’ stampede are admitted, in Etah, on July 02, 2024. | Photo Credit: PTI

At least 60 killed in stampede at religious event in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras

At least 60 people died while 100 got injured in a stampede that broke out at a religious event in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh on July 2. The incident occurred during a prayer meeting organised by a religious leader named, Narayan Sarkar in Sikandrarau area of Hathras which was reportedly attended by 10,000 people, mostly women. Heart-wrenching visuals were shared by eyewitnesses from the spot in which bodies were lying outside the post-mortem house while kin of the deceased were crying for help but to no avail. Eyewitnesses also claimed that over 100 people were lying unconscious at Satsang spot and the administration ran shot of ambulances to take them to hospitals.

Lok Sabha passes resolution condemning Opposition’s disruptions during PM Modi’s address; adjourns sine die

The Lok Sabha passed a resolution on July 2 condemning Opposition’s disruptions during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address, with Union minister Rajnath Singh saying these actions “shredded” parliamentary norms. After the Prime Minister’s speech, Defence Minister Singh moved the resolution. “The manner in which the Opposition shredded parliamentary norms when the PM was speaking on the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s address, I propose that the House condemns this action,” Mr. Singh said.

SEBI slaps show cause notice on Hindenburg, U.S. firm terms it ‘nonsense’

U.S. short-seller Hindenburg Research, which had rocked the Adani Group with allegations of stock market manipulation and accounting fraud, on July 2 said it has received a show cause notice from Indian capital market regulator SEBI over alleged violations in placing bets on the conglomerate stocks. Hindenburg termed the show cause notice as “nonsense” and “concocted to serve a pre-ordained purpose: an attempt to silence and intimidate those who expose corruption and fraud perpetrated by the most powerful individuals in India.”

Kotak Mahindra says Hindenburg was not an investor in its fund

Kotak Mahindra International Limited said on July 2 that U.S. short-seller Hindenburg Research has never been an investor in the K-India Opportunities Fund. Kotak was responding to allegations that Hindenburg colluded with its client Kingdon Capital Management and used a Kotak group offshore fund to short Adani group shares last year. “The Fund was never aware that Hindenburg was a partner of any of its investors,” Kotak said in a media statement.

Over dozen students protesting NEET irregularities detained in Delhi

Over a dozen students were detained while attempting to march towards the Parliament on July 2 to protest against alleged irregularities in several competitive exams. The students belonging to different outfits under the banner “India against NTA” gathered at the Patel Chowk metro station in New Delhi and started raising “anti-NTA” slogans. Carrying posters and banners with slogans like “Sack Union Education Minister” and “NTA must go” written over them, the students staged demonstrations against the reported incidents of paper leaks and corruption in the medical entrance exam, besides others.

NEET-PG likely to be held mid-August: report

The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Post Graduate ( NEET-PG) 2024 is likely to be held mid-August , sources said on July 2. The revised date for the medical entrance exam is expected to be announced this week. A meeting was held in the Union Home Ministry on Monday, in which officials from the Health Ministry, National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences, along with its technical partner Tata Consultancy Services, and Cyber Cell officials discussed the preparedness for the NEET-PG, which is to be held online.

Court allows two-hour custody parole to Engineer Rashid to take oath as MP

A court in New Delhi on July 2 granted two-hour custody parole to Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdul Rashid to take oath as a Lok Sabha MP on July 5. Rashid, also known as Engineer Rashid, was elected from Baramulla seat as an independent candidate defeating National Conference leader Omar Abdullah in the recent Lok Sabha polls. He was arrested in a 2017 Jammu and Kashmir terror funding case.

Delhi excise policy ‘scam’: HC seeks CBI’s response to Kejriwal’s plea challenging arrest

The Delhi High Court on July 2 sought the CBI’s response to a plea by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal challenging his arrest in a corruption case related to the excise policy ‘scam’, and trial court order remanding him to the agency’s custody. Justice Neena Bansal Krishna issued notice to the CBI asking it to file its reply within seven days. The High Court said Mr. Kejriwal’s counsel may file rejoinder, if any, within two days thereafter.

At least 30 villages in Gujarat’s Junagadh cut off as heavy rains submerge roads; 362 mm rainfall in Vanthali

Around 30 villages in Junagadh district of Gujarat were cut off as roads leading to them got submerged following heavy rains, with Vanthali in the district recording 361 mm rains in the 24-hour period ending on July 2 morning, officials said. Ten talukas in the Saurashtra and southern region of the State received more than 200 mm rainfall in the 24-hour period resulting in water-logging in low-lying areas, they said. The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) said in a statement that it has sent one team to Keshod in Junagadh district to help the people who were left stranded as a result of disconnected roads.

Six Zika virus infection cases in Pune; two are pregnant women

Six cases of Zika virus infection have been reported in Pune city, health officials said on July 1. The patients include two pregnant women, they said. “A 28-year-old pregnant woman from the Erandwane area was detected with Zika virus infection. Her reports came positive on Friday. Another woman, who is 12 weeks pregnant, was detected with the infection on Monday. The condition of both women is good and they have no symptoms,” an official said.

Assam flood: Stranded people rescued by IAF chopper

A team of rescuers stranded on a sandbar or river island had to be airlifted to safety in northeastern Assam after their rescue boat capsized while rescuing flood-hit people on June 30. Officials of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA) said nine State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and Fire and Emergency Services personnel were stranded on a near-submerged sandbar in the Siang River during a rescue operation in Dhemaji district’s Siboguri area. Their rescue boat capsized during the operation.

Iran’s presidential contenders face hurdle of voter apathy

A zealous anti-Westerner and the low-key moderate hoping to become Iran’s next president could struggle to mobilise millions of supporters on July 5’s run-off election amid voter apathy about a tightly-controlled contest. Over 60% of voters abstained from the June 28 ballot for a successor to Ebrahim Raisi following his death in a helicopter crash, a historic low turnout which critics of the government see as a vote of no confidence in the Islamic Republic. The run-off election will be a tight race between lawmaker Massoud Pezeshkian, the sole moderate in the original field of four candidates, and former Revolutionary Guards member Saeed Jalili.

Joe Biden slams U.S. Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that benefits Donald Trump

U.S. President Joe Biden criticised the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that was seen as a win for his rival, former President Donald Trump, in forceful remarks from the White House. The U.S. Supreme Court found on Monday that Mr. Trump cannot be prosecuted for any actions that were within his constitutional powers as president, but can be for private acts, in a landmark ruling recognising for the first time any form of presidential immunity from prosecution.

Nepali Congress, CPN-UML strike deal to oust PM ‘Prachanda’; to form new alliance

In a dramatic political development, Nepal’s two largest parties — Nepali Congress and CPN-UML — have inked a midnight power-sharing deal to form a new ‘national consensus government’ to replace the coalition government led by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” . Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) chairman and former prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli, reached an understanding on forming a new coalition on Monday midnight, according to former foreign minister Narayan Prakash Saud.

Victorious Team India’s return journey: Airport will open in ‘next six to 12 hours’ says Barbados PM

The T20 World Cup-winning Indian cricket team is set to fly home aboard a charter flight on July 2 evening after Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said she expects the airport to become operational in the “next six to 12 hours”, ending the shutdown forced by a category 4 hurricane. The Rohit Sharma-led squad, its support staff, some BCCI officials, and the players’ families have been stranded for the past two days due to hurricane Beryl. The team won the title on Saturday, June 29, 2024, after defeating South Africa by seven runs in the final.

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