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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Religion was not a consistent barrier for temple or mosque entry in India. It’s caste doing

Brahmins and Ashraafs not only set the rules for social climbing but also imposed rigid categories on the masses through their proximity to British power.

Ahead of the 2026 Char Dham Yatra, the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee has banned “non-Sanatanis” from all 48 temples under its jurisdiction. Its chairman framed the ban as “a matter of religious faith, not civil rights”. The BKTC claims that Adi Shankaracharya, the 8th-century philosopher-saint, established the system “since ancient times.”

There is no evidence Shankara did anything of the sort. In fact, beyond his philosophical contributions to Advaita, the guru is well known for his disputations with Buddhists and with rival Shaivite ascetics, particularly the skull-bearing Kapalikas. Islam had not even arrived in the Himalayas during his lifetime.

What the BKTC is really drawing on is a bigger idea: that “Abrahamic” religions are alien to, and incompatible with, Indian culture. This is a whitewashing of history. Over centuries, elite Indian Hindus and Muslims frequently shared spaces, ritual notions, and even some divinities. On the darker side, they also shared the idea that caste purity and political might, not religious affiliation, determined proximity to God.

What did religious identity mean?

While not the focus of this piece, I should point out that the historical record includes considerable sectarian violence between the “Sanatan” Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions. But to focus on the antagonism is to ignore a religious fluidity that they all shared with each other—and with Indian Islam.

In medieval South India, for example, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish archaeologically between a “Jain” site and a “Hindu” site. Leslie Orr, in Identity and Divinity: Boundary-Crossing Goddesses in Medieval South India, shows that many goddesses were worshipped in both Hindu and Jain traditions, the only difference being the name. The Jain goddess Padmavati, for example, was depicted riding a lion, just like Durga. Even ritual notions—daily ablutions, processions—were shared. Orr argues that the average person likely did not distinguish between the divinities of Sanskritic texts and the more familiar local mother goddesses.

Jainism scholar Michael Carrithers, in a landmark essay in Modern Asian Studies, used the concept of polytropy to describe this: Until recently, across the subcontinent, individuals and communities maintained multiple religious relationships simultaneously. Crucially, polytropy was hierarchical—one might offer most devotion to a village goddess or caste deity, while also, on occasion, worshipping a figure from another tradition entirely.

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