It’s surprising that pagan religions of Europe have disappeared, but polytheistic religions of Asia (especially India) survived and are still widely followed there. Why?
It’s surprising that pagan religions of Europe have disappeared, but polytheistic religions of Asia (especially India) survived and are still widely followed there. Why?
Besides the other reasons mentioned here, i think there is a strong factor in the social and intellectual sphere. Christianity was a cohesive standardized institution with a written holy book (or set of texts, before the council where they canonized which books would go to the bible), and later became a part of enforced state policy. That mixture of standardization and officialdom allowed it to essentially accumulate ‘capital’ to such a degree it could (after absorbing lots of ideas and practices) overwhelm the local polytheistic societies and religions.
Local polytheistic religions were extremely varied, and each village tribe or city had its own gods, beliefs, etc. The mess of beliefs meant that the religions spread organically, not in an institution with quasi industrial ways (standardized beliefs, practices, texts, even rows of clergy trained in the same ways on churches and monasteries). They could be challenged and be overwhelmed by the bigger faith, in intellectual ways (evangelization) or by demographic superiority. Or just by immigration to other regions (which many people did, like the barbarians in late Rome or Imperial legions and soldiers since always), where multiple contradictory faiths coexisted, until a cohesive unified alternative popularized.
All that is inverted in India. Hinduism was (is) varied, but way less than paganism from ireland to iran, and it is a formalized institution with written holy texts supported by the state (or by castes, specially the Brahmins), very constant and stable over many generations. That inertia even allowed it to not become muslim majority (except in a few regions).
Other countries in Asia actually have Buddhism as the main religion or state religion (or main historical religion). Even if buddhism absorbs lots of pagan deities, ideas and praxis, the core institution is solid and formalized, and dominant. Japanese Shinto is very different from pre buddhist times. China had buddhism, and confucianism and taoism as also very standardized formalized state institutions (aka not a different religion per village). So asian polytheism is very reduced compared to european one.
“Hinduism” as a religion erases the unique folk identities in India. It is a lazy, colonialist way to group an entire subcontinent with a stereotypical, uniform religion.
Religious syncretism in India is a very visible and real thing - not just for “Hinduism”, but also other religions in India. Casteism, on the other hand, is a effect of Brahminism - meaning that not every place in India has the codified chaturvarna (quad-caste) system - especially in the South of India, where’s there’s an incomplete caste system, comprising of Brahmin-Shudra inside, and Dalit/Tribal outside, as opposed to the Brahmin-Kshatriya-Vaishya-Shudra inside and Dalit/Tribal outside classification. In fact, there have been multiple anti-casteist movement before, like the Nath (started from my mother land), Lingayat movement (in mainland Karnataka), the Bhakti movement (somewhere in Tamil Nadu), the Adi-Dharma (in Punjab) and the Arya Samaj movement (around colonial era in Bengal) - there’s more of them, but I can only remember these.
Not really - there were repeated Islamic invasions aimed to chip the wealth. Religious conversion, however, was a secondary thought. Matter of fact, there was no need for Muslims to convert Hindus in central India, because rulers did not act over religion, but over power. Many Muslim leaders in the North of India had Hindu officials in their court, they also married and did not convert their wives to Muslim, and vice versa. In fact, there’s also a case of a homosexual Muslim ruler called Alauddin Khilji, who had a relationship with his slave Mallik Kafur. Mubarak Shah, son of Alauddin Khilji, also had a male lover called Khusrau Khan. In fact, it was also advantageous for the Muslims to impose jizyah and kharaj tax.
In the place that I am from, which is the south of India, there’s a temple that is often visited by Muslims, which would probably be frowned upon by Muslims from Arab. In fact, these Muslims also take part in animistic rituals - remember how I said that “Hinduism” is a colonialist term? Yes, Tulu-folkism is what is practiced in my motherland, and Brahmins have no control over these rituals - it is the tribal groups Koragas, who organize prayers for the Shudra groups in Tulu Nadu. In the north of India, Sufism, which is a type of mystical Islamism, is the very opposite of radical Islam, and in fact, was open to the idea of “many paths, one Gods”.
Sabarimala?
No, this temple is in Tulu Nadu. Since you’re a Malayali, you must know about Bappa Beary, a Muslim trader from Kerala?
The temple built by him is called the Bappanadu temple. It is not only a Hindu temple, but also a Tulu folk-religion temple for Koragajja (Koraga + ajja), and also a Durga temple, I think. Bappa’s descendants are still invited to the ceremony, even to this day.
I know that Tulu Nadu is now a bastion for the BJP/Bajrang Dal/RSS ecosystem thanks to sanskritisation, but this was not the case 40 years ago.
About Sabarimala, I don’t remember properly, but family head are supposed to refrain from eating meat, wear a black lungi and plan a long-distance pilgrimage to Sabarimala to pay visit to the celibate God Ayyappa. I’ve been told that he had a lowly birth, and that Brahmins are trying to appropriate this God too - this information might be incorrect though.
I haven’t heard of it. Thank you for sharing information on it.
Yep.
No meat, no footwear, no shaving, no swearing, no alcohol or similar material etc. It’s seen positively by many because it helps reduce alcoholism in some of the believers. I had a distant relative who’d be totally different during Mandalakaalam vs other times.
I’ve heard similar things too. That it was a tribal or buddhist diety that has been appropriated
Great information. I made a very general analysis, with the aim of covering the majority of territories and populations, not of exhausting every local specificity. Hinduism is not a uniform religion, as i said, but a very diverse one. But still, there are common traits that unify the vast majority of Indians that makes the situation very different (less diverse) compared to the historical European polytheism. The vast majority of Hindus believe that religious knowledge and rituals must be studied and performed by a specific social group, the brahmin caste. Or will you tell me that a random foreigner or a Dalit can enter any temple in north or south india, study sanskrit and rituals, and start preaching and performing rituals ? Not by a long shot. Hinduism has a diversity of holy texts, but the important aspect is that in each tradition and place there is a good degree of codification and formalization: at least one set of written (fixed) texts that people will adhere for doctrine and rituals, not for instance an exclusively oral tradition that changes radically in each house of worship, over time, and over the next village (old polytheism). This is stuff that only a developed urban civilization makes, that makes a religion have more ‘capital’ so to speak (to spread and be reproduced over time).
The muslim rulers also did not immediately convert everyone to islam in the conquests over persia to north africa, but due to the characteristics of traditional polytheism (along with the conquests and violence), Islam converted and spread over time, including to places christianity had not reached (like interior Egypt). This did not happen with indian religions because of the higher degree of formalisation and codification (you said yourself that this temple is part Hindu, showing that it is a syncretism that the local tradition eventually made with the more ‘established’ religion of hinduism, not a pure local religion temple either).