Religion and Society in India

Introduction: Religion in the Indian Context

India is one of the most religiously diverse societies on earth. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism all have deep roots here, and the country's Constitution guarantees freedom of religion to all. Yet religion in India is not simply a matter of private belief: it shapes caste relations, political mobilisation, family structures, gender hierarchies, and national identity. Sociologists of religion in India are therefore simultaneously sociologists of caste, ethnicity, nationalism, and the state.

The three fundamental questions that organise the sociology of religion in India are: How do India's diverse religious traditions relate to each other? How does the secular constitutional state manage religious diversity? And how are religious identities being transformed by modernity, democracy, and globalisation?

Religious Pluralism in India

Religious pluralism is a condition in which two or more groups with diverse religious beliefs, practices, and identities coexist in society. India has been pluralistic from ancient times: Buddhism and Jainism emerged within and alongside the Vedic tradition; Islam arrived in the 7th century and Sikhism was founded in the 15th century; Christianity came through the Apostle Thomas and later through Portuguese missionaries.

Amartya Sen, in his essay "Secularism in India," argues that India's pluralism has always been a doctrine of the state: rooted in the traditions of tolerance exemplified by Ashoka's edicts, Akbar's Din-e-Ilahi, and the composite culture of the Mughal court. But he also observes that illiteracy, rural living, and commitment to tradition mean that constitutionally India is pluralistic while internally there are conflicts within all major religions.

Peter Berger links pluralism to modernisation and secularisation: modernity brings values of individualism, freedom, and the separation of state from religion, creating conditions in which multiple religious beliefs coexist rather than one orthodoxy dominating. Stark and Bainbridge (Religious Economist Theory) take the opposite view: pluralism makes religion stronger, not weaker, by creating a "free religious market" with competition among providers, contrasting the pluralistic, competitive American religious market with the monopolistic European model where state-sponsored churches have suppressed competition and weakened religious vitality.

Contemporary challenges to Indian pluralism include: the use of religion for vote-bank mobilisation; Hindu nationalist organisations acting as moral gatekeepers restricting entry of Muslims and Dalits in public festivals (Garba controversy, Gujarat); the politics of conversion and reconversion; and the global rise of religious fundamentalism generating local echoes.

Syncretic Traditions: Bhakti and Sufi Movements

The Bhakti and Sufi movements represent the most significant syncretic traditions in Indian religious history: movements that accepted, celebrated, and learned from diverse religious traditions, producing a composite popular culture that cut across the Hindu-Muslim divide.

The Bhakti movement (8th-17th centuries) rejected caste hierarchy and ritual formalism in favour of personal devotion to God. Its saints came from all castes: Kabir was a Muslim weaver, Ravidas a cobbler, Tukaram a Shudra farmer, Mirabai a Rajput princess. They composed in vernacular languages (Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil) rather than Sanskrit, making their teaching accessible to the masses. The Bhakti movement challenged both Brahminical caste hierarchy and Islamic orthodoxy, producing a space of shared spiritual experience that transcended communal boundaries.

The Sufi movement represented Islam's mystical dimension: emphasising direct personal experience of God (fana, or annihilation of the self in God), love and ecstasy over legal compliance, and openness to local cultural forms. The Chishti order (Moinuddin Chishti, Nizamuddin Auliya, Amir Khusrau) became deeply embedded in Indian popular culture. The dargahs (shrines) of Sufi saints attract devotees of all religions: embodying the syncretic spirit of popular Indian religiosity. The Sufi concept of Wahadut-ul-Wajud (Unity of God: God and his creations are one) resonates with Advaita Vedanta's non-dualism.

The Bhakti-Sufi synthesis produced a composite culture: shared music (qawwali, bhajan, doha), shared pilgrimage sites, shared vocabulary of devotion: that formed the cultural backdrop against which both anti-colonial nationalism and communalism later struggled. This composite culture is what TN Madan calls "Indianised" or "domesticated" religion: religious traditions that have adapted to each other through centuries of co-habitation.

Islam as Practised in India

Islam reached India through Arab traders on the Malabar coast, Sufi saints and Turkish and Mughal rule, and most Indian Muslims descend from local converts. Indian Islam therefore joins a shared textual faith (the Quran, the five pillars, the shariat) with practices rooted in local society. Imtiaz Ahmad's edited volumes, notably Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India (1973) and Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India (1981), argued that these levels are complementary parts of one lived religion, not a pure faith corrupted by Hindu custom.

Distinct features:

• Sufi orders and shrines: Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri and Naqshbandi orders, veneration of pirs, and dargahs such as Ajmer and Nizamuddin whose urs festivals draw people of all faiths.
• Caste-like stratification: the Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal division, with occupational birth groups (biradaris) and endogamy.
• Shared custom and regional variety: life-cycle rites, dress, food, music and language shared with neighbouring Hindus, from the matrilineal Mappilas of north Kerala and the islanders of Lakshadweep to the Meos of Mewat, who long kept Hindu customs, and the Bohra and Khoja trading communities of Gujarat.
• Personal law: marriage, divorce and inheritance under the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937.

How they have changed:

• Reform and purification: from the nineteenth century, Deoband (1866), the Ahl-i-Hadith and the Tablighi Jamaat, founded by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas among the Meos in 1926, campaigned against shrine worship and customs they saw as un-Islamic. The Barelvi school defended Sufi practice, so Indian Islam divided into rival schools.
• Modernisation: the Aligarh movement promoted Western education and an educated Muslim middle class emerged.
• Islamisation and Ashrafisation: upwardly mobile groups adopt Ashraf titles and stricter scriptural practice, a parallel to Sanskritisation. Gulf migration from the 1970s brought remittances and Gulf-influenced practice, notably in Kerala.
• Identity under pressure: Partition, riots and communal politics have pushed many towards a more uniform, visible identity. Francis Robinson (1983) argued, against Ahmad, that the shift towards scriptural Islam is a long-run historical trend.
• Internal democratisation: the Pasmanda movement of backward-caste Muslims challenges Ashraf dominance, and Muslim women won Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017), which struck down instant triple talaq, followed by the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act 2019.

Impact of Muslims on Indian society: Indo-Islamic architecture, Hindustani music, qawwali and the ghazal, the Urdu language, Mughal painting, cuisine and dress, the revenue and administrative systems of the Sultanate and the Mughals, and the Bhakti-Sufi meeting that produced figures such as Kabir. Islam also offered lower castes an exit from Brahmanical hierarchy, though caste reappeared within it.

Communalism

Definition and Nature

Communalism is the mobilisation of people on the basis of religious community to pursue sectional interests, generally at the expense of others: using social-religious traditions to serve vested political and economic interests. Bipan Chandra defines communalism as the belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common secular (social, political, economic) interests. Communalism is therefore distinct from religiosity: one can be deeply religious without being communal, and communal leaders often have only a cynical relationship to their professed religion.

Bipan Chandra identifies three stages of communalism:

• First stage: the belief that people who follow the same religion have common secular (political, economic, social and cultural) interests. This is the root of communal ideology, even before it generates antagonism toward others.
• Liberal Communalism: members of a religious community believe their secular interests differ from those of other communities, but hold that these interests can be reconciled and the communities can coexist.
• Extreme Communalism: the belief that two religious communities have such fundamentally different and antagonistic secular interests that they cannot coexist. This is the logic of the Two-Nation Theory (Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations) that culminated in Partition.

Causes of Communalism

• Unhealthy competition for scarce opportunities (government jobs, political seats, business licenses) along religious lines
• Different (often manipulated and mythologised) perceptions of history: historical grievances, both real and constructed, are weaponised by communal leaders
• The trauma of Partition and its unhealed wounds continuing to poison Hindu-Muslim relations
• Vested interests: politicians who benefit electorally from communal polarisation; religious leaders who derive authority from communal mobilisation
• Insecurity among religious minorities (fear of conversion, cultural erasure, physical violence)
• Perception of threat even among the majority (demographic anxiety, narrative of historical victimhood)
• International linkages: events outside India (Palestinian conflict, Rushdie affair, Danish cartoons, anti-CAA protests) imported into domestic communal politics
• Colonial legacy: the British deliberately used the "divide and rule" policy, separate electorates (Morley-Minto reforms, 1909), and communal census classifications to produce and harden communal identities

Consequences of Communalism

• Communal riots: episodic but devastating violence (1947 Partition, 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, 2002 Gujarat riots, 2013 Muzaffarnagar, 2020 Delhi)
• Atmosphere of chronic mutual distrust and unrest
• Forced migration and ghettoisation: religious minorities concentrated in enclaves for safety, reducing social contact and entrenching segregation
• Xenophobia and othering: members of the opposing religious community treated as foreign, suspect, and potentially dangerous
• Hindrance to social change: communal mobilisation can function as a substitute for class mobilisation, channelling economic grievances into religious conflict rather than structural reform
• Political mobilisation degenerating into electoral vote-bank politics based on communal identity rather than developmental performance

Problems of Religious Minorities

Jagannath Pathy identifies four dimensions of problems faced by religious minorities in India:

• Subordination: physical and economic subordination; reduced access to space and resources
• Deprivation: material, employment, and educational deprivation
• Inferiority: the culture of the majority is celebrated as national culture; minority cultures are marked as "other" or exotic
• Distinctiveness: manifestly marked as different through clothing, language, food habits, and ritual practices that invite discrimination

Additional problems: low literacy and ghettoisation leading to limited employment options; suspicion about loyalty to the nation-state; difficulties in housing due to communal segregation (Kashmiri Pandits displaced from the Valley; Muslims denied housing in many Indian cities); underrepresentation in the police, military, and judiciary; threat to cultural preservation as minority languages and practices face assimilationist pressure; violence during communal tensions; and the pressure of the Uniform Civil Code debate (minority personal law seen as under threat).

The Sachar Committee Report (2006) on the social, economic, and educational status of the Muslim community found that Muslims were significantly below national averages on virtually every development indicator: literacy, income, government employment, share of IAS/IPS/IFS officers, presence in urban formal economy. The Ranganath Mishra Committee (2007) on religious and linguistic minorities made recommendations for affirmative action that were never implemented. These reports confirmed that India's largest religious minority faces systematic, structural disadvantage that communal rhetoric alone cannot explain.

Religious Fundamentalism

Religious fundamentalism is a movement or belief system calling for a return to the fundamental or basic religious texts, treating certain original values as pure and inviolable: in direct contrast to modernist interpretations that accommodate change and pluralism. The term originated in 1920s American Protestantism (publication of "The Fundamentals") but the phenomenon is found in virtually all religious traditions.

Causes of Fundamentalism

Giddens argues that the cause of fundamentalism is high modernity and globalisation. Whenever there is a period of drastic social change that disturbs established order, disrupts traditional social bonds, and creates rootlessness and identity anxiety, people clutch onto any available support. Fundamentalism promises a return to an earlier, better age: a time of certainty, moral clarity, and community cohesion. The psychological appeal is difficult to resist for those experiencing rapid, disorienting change. Other causes include: perception of cultural threat (globalisation seen as Western cultural imperialism eroding indigenous values); economic deprivation creating receptive audiences for simple explanatory frameworks; vested interests of religious leaders seeking to consolidate authority; lack of modern education that might provide alternative frameworks; and political manipulation by parties seeking to mobilise fundamentalist constituencies.

Mechanisms of Fundamentalism

Fundamentalists build rigid belief systems and enforce intense commitment among believers. They treat their interpretation of sacred texts as literally true and infallible. Non-believers are denied legitimacy and sometimes rights. Fundamentalism frequently takes an aggressive militant form where violence against "enemies of the faith" is theologically justified: the Taliban's implementation of Sharia in Afghanistan is the most extreme recent example.

Consequences of Fundamentalism

Negative consequences include: religious orthodoxy suppressing dissent; intolerance for diversity; hindrance to progressive social change; riots, terrorism, and war; perpetuation of social evils that harm women especially (strict dress codes, restrictions on mobility, denial of education and employment). However, fundamentalism also has some sociologically observable positive functions: it can check abrupt and disorienting social change; it provides psychological security and solidarity in times of uncertainty; and it can provide a basis for political and social mobility for groups previously excluded from mainstream power (the BJP's rise drew many lower-caste Hindus into a new Hindu nationalist identity that promised social dignity).

Clifford Geertz identifies fundamentalism as an ideology-based belief system and phenomenon. It exists at a latent level in all religious traditions but becomes socially problematic when manifested in public action: when private belief becomes the basis for coercing others.

Secularism in India

The Indian model of secularism is distinctive and has been the subject of sustained sociological and political debate. Western secularism (the American or French model) involves a "wall of separation" between state and religion: the state is strictly neutral and religion is a purely private affair. Indian secularism, by contrast, involves what Rajeev Bhargava calls "principled distance": the state maintains an equal relationship with all religions rather than distancing itself from all. The Indian state funds Hindu temples, Muslim mosques, Sikh gurdwaras, and Christian churches, regulates personal law for different communities, and grants special rights to religious minorities.

Four basic tenets of secularism as a value system: tolerance; flexibility (accommodation of diverse practices); rationality (public reason rather than religious authority governing state decisions); coexistence.

D. Smith identifies India as having strong secular credentials: the Constitution (Article 25-30) guarantees freedom of religion, the state has attempted to remain equidistant from all religious communities, and the judiciary has intervened to protect minority rights. However, critics argue that Indian secularism is "pseudo-secularism": either because it involves too much state intervention in religion (Hindu reformers who want the state to keep out of temple affairs) or because it protects minority personal law while reforming Hindu personal law (communal critics who see this as "minority appeasement").

TN Madan, in his influential essay "Secularism in Its Place," argues that secularism is a minority viewpoint in India: a viewpoint of Hindu elites who have internalised Enlightenment values but who represent neither the majority of Hindus nor the Muslim, Christian, or Sikh communities for whom religion is not separable from public life. For Madan, secularism in India is therefore "an impossible project." Ashis Nandy similarly argues that Western secularism cannot be the solution to Indian communalism: it requires the privatisation of religion in societies where religion is inseparably public.

Partha Chatterjee responds that secular modernity, however imperfectly realised, remains the best available framework for managing India's religious diversity without permanent communal civil war. Amartya Sen emphasises that India has ancient traditions of religious coexistence and tolerance (Ashoka, Akbar) that can provide an indigenous foundation for secular values, without requiring a purely Western model.

Hindu Nationalism

Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is the ideology that India is essentially a Hindu nation and that Hindu cultural values should define the national identity of all Indians regardless of their religion. It was systematised by VD Savarkar in Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923) and further developed by MS Golwalkar. Savarkar defined Hindutva through three criteria: Pitribhumi (fatherland, India must be the ancestral land of one's fathers), Punyabhumi (holy land, India must be one's sacred land), and Rashtra (nation). Under this definition, Muslims and Christians are not fully Hindu because their holy lands are in Arabia and Palestine: they are guests who must accept subordinate status in a Hindu Rashtra.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, founded 1925 by KB Hedgewar), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bajrang Dal constitute the "Sangh Parivar": the organisational family of Hindu nationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing. Under Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has moved from the political periphery to the centre of Indian governance: with the abrogation of Article 370 (special status of Jammu and Kashmir), the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, which critics see as discriminating against Muslims) all marking the consolidation of Hindutva in state policy.

Sociological perspectives on Hindu nationalism: Christophe Jaffrelot sees it as a form of ethnic nationalism using the vocabulary of Hinduism to mobilise a majoritarian social movement. Thomas Blom Hansen argues Hindutva is a form of modern mass politics rather than pre-modern traditionalism: it uses modern organisational forms (the shakha system of RSS, mass media, social media) to mobilise a new Hindu public sphere. Suhas Palshikar identifies the BJP's electoral success as producing a new "regime party": a party that shapes the terms of political competition so fundamentally that even the opposition must engage on its terms.

Dalit Religion and Religious Conversion

Religious conversion has been a central site of struggle over social inequality in India. Dalits have converted to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism as strategies of exit from the Hindu caste hierarchy: a form of collective resistance that Brahminical Hinduism and Hindu nationalism have tried systematically to suppress.

BR Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism in 1956, along with approximately 600,000 followers, was the most significant act of collective conversion in Indian history. Ambedkar had famously declared in 1935: "I was born a Hindu but I will not die a Hindu." His choice of Buddhism was deliberate, it was an Indian religion rooted in the same soil as Hinduism but without the caste system; its egalitarian philosophy was opposed to Brahminism from the very beginning. Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma reinterpreted Buddhism as a philosophy of social liberation rather than withdrawal from the world. The Navayana (New Vehicle) Buddhism that Ambedkar created rejected traditional Buddhist metaphysics (karma, rebirth, nirvana) in favour of a this-worldly ethic of human dignity and social equality.

Christianity has historically attracted Dalit and tribal communities, particularly in the Northeast and among specific communities (Mahars in Maharashtra, Nadars in Tamil Nadu, Madigas in Andhra Pradesh). Missionaries provided education, healthcare, and a theological framework of human equality that contrasted with Brahminical hierarchy. The sociological consequence has been complex: conversion sometimes enabled social mobility while generating new forms of discrimination (Christian Dalits are excluded from SC reservations under the 1950 Presidential Order, which restricts SC status to Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists).

Islam attracted Dalit converts during the Sultanate and Mughal periods, often among artisanal communities (weavers, potters) who found in Islamic theology a rejection of caste hierarchy. However, as Gail Omvedt observes, caste has been reproduced within Islam in India: the Ashraf-Ajlaf-Arzal hierarchy among Indian Muslims replicates caste distinctions based on descent and occupation, demonstrating that conversion to an egalitarian religion does not automatically dismantle social hierarchy.

The "Ghar Wapsi" (homecoming) movement, organised reconversion campaigns by Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindutva groups, represents the Hindutva response to conversion, reinterpreting Islam and Christianity as "foreign" religions and Hinduism as the "original" religion of all Indians. These campaigns have been controversial, with questions about coercion and the legal standing of reconversion.

Religion and the State: Constitutional Framework

Article	Provision
Art. 25	Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice, and propagation of religion (subject to public order, morality, health)
Art. 26	Freedom to manage religious affairs and establish religious institutions
Art. 27	No person compelled to pay taxes for promotion of any particular religion
Art. 28	No religious instruction in state-funded educational institutions
Arts. 29-30	Right of minorities to conserve their culture and establish educational institutions
Art. 44 (DPSP)	State shall endeavour to secure a Uniform Civil Code for citizens (has never been enacted; remains contested)
42nd Amendment (1976)	Added "secular" to the Preamble, making India officially a "Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic"

Caste and Religion in Contemporary India

The relationship between caste and religion in India is far more complex than the traditional understanding that caste is a Hindu institution confined to Hinduism. Empirical studies have consistently shown that caste operates within all Indian religious communities:

• Islam in India has its Ashraf (claiming Arab, Persian, or Afghan descent), Ajlaf (artisan and cultivating castes who converted), and Arzal (the "lowest" converted castes analogous to Dalits) distinctions
• Indian Christianity has caste divisions: Dalit Christians face discrimination from upper-caste converts and from the dominant Brahmin and Vellala Christian communities
• Indian Buddhism (Navayana) is almost entirely a Dalit community, making it effectively a caste-religion
• Sikhism's founding principle of equality has not prevented the emergence of caste hierarchies among Jat Sikhs, Khatri Sikhs, Mazhabis (Dalit Sikhs), and Ramgharias

Rajni Kothari argued that democracy has politicised caste rather than dismantled it: and similarly, secularism has politicised religion rather than privatised it. The ballot box has made both caste identity and religious identity into political resources that parties mobilise for electoral advantage: producing what Kothari called the "ethnicisation of politics."

Religion, Gender, and Social Change

Religious institutions have historically been key sites for the subordination of women: through control of sexuality (child marriage, purdah, widowhood restrictions), restriction of religious roles (women excluded from priestly functions in most Hindu and Muslim traditions), and theological legitimation of domestic hierarchy. But religious traditions have also generated women's resistance: the Bhakti movement's female saints (Mirabai, Akkamahadevi, Andal) created a tradition of women's spiritual authority that subverted patriarchal orthodoxy; the Sufi tradition's inclusion of women seekers (murids) created spaces of spiritual equality; and the reform of religious personal law (divorce rights, inheritance rights, protection from domestic violence) has been a central feminist demand.

The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 (Shah Bano case) and its amendment (2019 Triple Talaq Act criminalising instant triple talaq) show the contested terrain where religion, gender, state power, and minority rights intersect. The Sabarimala verdict (2018, Supreme Court allowing women of all ages into the temple) sparked massive protests: illustrating that changes to religious practice through legal intervention generate fierce resistance even from religious women who see their exclusion as religiously meaningful.

Patriarchy: Ideology and Material Basis

Patriarchy, literally 'rule of the father', is a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women (Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990). It works as an ideology that presents male authority and the sexual division of labour as natural, sacred or customary, taught through family, religion, school and media. Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) made the term central to feminist theory. The ideology rests on a material base.

• Property: Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) tied women's subordination to private property and men's wish to pass it to legitimate heirs, which required control of women's sexuality. In India patrilineal inheritance kept land in male hands, and Bina Agarwal (A Field of One's Own, 1994) showed how few women control land.
• Labour: Heidi Hartmann ("The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism", 1979) located the material base of patriarchy in men's control over women's labour power, at home through unpaid domestic work and in the market through exclusion from better jobs.
• Sexuality and reproduction: marriage rules, seclusion, the stress on virginity and son preference.
• Walby's six structures: household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and cultural institutions, with a historical shift from private patriarchy in the household to public patriarchy in employment and the state.

Brahmanical patriarchy: Uma Chakravarti ("Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India", Economic and Political Weekly, 1993) argued that caste purity depends on controlling women's sexuality, since caste is reproduced through endogamy. Seclusion, early marriage and enforced widowhood among upper castes guarded caste boundaries, so gender, caste and class interlock.

Patriarchy as dominance: it works through force (domestic violence, honour crimes), through law and the state, and above all through consent, as women internalise norms of service and sacrifice. Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986) showed it to be historical, not natural, and so open to change.

Social and Cultural Determinants of the Sexual Division of Labour

Functionalists explained the division by biology: George Murdock's cross-cultural survey linked it to childbearing and male strength, and Talcott Parsons gave men 'instrumental' and women 'expressive' roles. Ann Oakley (Housewife, 1974) showed the housewife role to be a social construction. In India, caste decides which women work outside: upper castes withdraw women from field labour as a mark of status, while Dalit and Adivasi women work in fields and on construction sites. Maria Mies (The Lace Makers of Narsapur, 1982) showed how defining women as 'housewives' let their home-based craft work be paid as mere side income. Purdah, family honour and the burden of care confine women to the home or to low-paid work.

Is patriarchy a key to inequality? It is a key, since it shapes access to property, work, education, health and power in every community, but not the only one. Gopal Guru ("Dalit Women Talk Differently", 1995) and Sharmila Rege (1998) argued that Dalit women face caste and class oppression that upper-caste feminism overlooked, and Kimberlé Crenshaw's 'intersectionality' (1989) captures how gender, caste, class and religion combine.

Patriarchy and Honour Killing

An honour killing is the murder of a person, usually a woman or a couple, by family or community members who believe the victim has dishonoured them, typically by choosing a partner across caste or religion or within a prohibited gotra. The links with patriarchy are direct.

• Women as bearers of honour: family and caste honour (izzat) is vested in women's sexual conduct, so a woman's choice of partner is treated as a collective matter for men to decide.
• Caste endogamy: in the logic of Brahmanical patriarchy, controlling marriages preserves caste boundaries and property. Many killings punish inter-caste unions, above all a dominant-caste woman marrying a Dalit man.
• Property and alliance: a daughter's free choice threatens control over land and the alliances families build through marriage.
• Community enforcement: caste councils such as the khap panchayats of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh pronounce couples guilty and impose boycotts. Prem Chowdhry (Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples, 2007) traces how land, marriage markets and caste pride drive this policing.
• Backlash against autonomy: education, mobile phones, urban work and constitutional rights increase self-chosen marriages, and violence reacts against this loss of control.

Cases: Manoj and Babli, killed in Haryana in 2007 for marrying within their gotra, a case in which a khap leader was among those convicted. Shankar, a Dalit youth hacked to death at Udumalpet, Tamil Nadu, in 2016 for marrying Kausalya, a Thevar woman. Kevin Joseph, a Dalit Christian killed in Kottayam, Kerala, in 2018. Pranay Perumalla, killed at Miryalaguda, Telangana, in 2018 at the instance of his wife Amrutha's father. Ankit Saxena, killed in Delhi in 2018 by the family of his Muslim girlfriend.

Law: the Supreme Court upheld adults' right to marry by choice in Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2006), called khap diktats illegal in Arumugam Servai v. State of Tamil Nadu (2011), and in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) laid down preventive, remedial and punitive measures, including protection and safe houses for couples. The Law Commission's 242nd Report (2012) proposed a separate law, but no central law exists.

Patriarchy, Girl-Child Socialisation and Entitlements

Leela Dube ("On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India", Economic and Political Weekly, 1988) showed that in patrilineal, patrilocal families a daughter is a temporary member of her natal home, paraya dhan (another's wealth), so her upbringing is training for life in another household.

• Gendered training: girls learn service, restraint, modesty and self-sacrifice, take on chores and sibling care early, and face curbs on movement after puberty, while boys are prepared for authority and the outside world. Sudhir Kakar (The Inner World, 1978) traced the psychology of the 'good woman' this produces.
• Body and purity: menstrual taboos and the stress on virginity teach girls that their bodies carry family honour.
• Unequal investment: sons are seen as old-age security and performers of last rites, so families spend more on their food, health and schooling.

Effects on entitlements: Amartya Sen used 'entitlements' for the goods a person can command, and his idea of household 'cooperative conflict' explains why women command less.

• Survival: Sen's 'missing women' (1990) and a child sex ratio of 918 in Census 2011 reflect sex-selective abortion and neglect. NFHS-5 (2019-21) recorded a sex ratio at birth of 929.
• Health: in NFHS-5, 59.1 per cent of girls aged 15-19 were anaemic, against 31.1 per cent of boys.
• Marriage: 23.3 per cent of women aged 20-24 had married before 18 (NFHS-5), cutting short schooling and autonomy, and dowry makes daughters a financial burden.
• Property: daughters became coparceners in Hindu joint family property in 2005, and Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) held that the right does not depend on the father being alive in 2005. In practice many daughters give up their share to keep ties with brothers.

Responses: the PCPNDT Act 1994, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (2015) and the 2005 inheritance reform tackle symptoms. Lasting change needs a change in socialisation itself, through girls' education, women's employment and men sharing care.

Desacralisation and Secularisation in India

Desacralisation refers to the process by which supernatural beliefs are no longer seen as controlling the world: action is no longer governed by religious belief but by rational, scientific calculation. In MN Srinivas's sociological terminology, Westernisation and Secularisation are two faces of the same modernising process: though they can be separated analytically.

Evidence for secularisation in India: growth of scientific education; decline of traditional healers; commercialisation of religious services (online puja, temple apps, e-darshana); the "Traditionalisation of Modernity" (Y. Singh): even traditional religious practices are mediated by modern technology (Sanksar channel on cable TV, matrimonial websites, kundli software). Evidence against secularisation: religious observance has not declined; political mobilisation along religious lines has increased; the BJP's electoral dominance represents a re-sacralisation of public life in some respects; pilgrimages have grown in scale (Kumbh Mela, Sabarimala). The Indian evidence is consistent with Peter Berger's later position: his abandonment of the classic secularisation thesis in favour of the view that modernity produces pluralism, not necessarily the decline of religion.