Historical Geography of Religious Competition in India in the 20th – Early 21st Century

Журнал Белорусского государственного университета. История. 2023. No. 1. P. 28–37.

Gorokhov S., Dmitriev R., Zakharov I.

To determine the level of competition we made an assumption that one religion replaces another as a result of a cyclical change (cycle of the religious competition) in the proportion of adherents and the value of the modified index of confessional fractionalisation. The competition between Indian religions, Islam and Christianity in India increased quite slowly during the 20th century due to differences, firstly, in the mechanisms of their expansion and, secondly, in the territorial confinement of the latter. At the first stage all religions spread by expansion diffusion (Islam – through large cities in Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal, Kerala and Delhi; Christianity – through the countryside in the North-East of the country, in Sikkim, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, partly in Odisha; Indian religions – in Daman and Diu, Lakshadweep, Puduchcheri and Goa). Christianity retained this mechanism, while Islam spread after that to new territories (Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Karnataka, etc.) by diffusion of movement. The landscape of Indian religions has changed the vector, passing through the separation of contraction to compression due to the abandonment of previously developed areas. The main regions of religious competition at present are the Amritsar – Rajkot – Bhubaneswar triangle where the still powerful Indian religions are competing with the rising Islam, and the North-East of the country, where Indian religions have already almost been supplanted by Christianity, but Islam is quickly gaining followers.

Keywords: Islam, India, Christianity, religious competition, Indian religions