The Gods We Inherited, the Gods We Met

How India’s religious traditions grew through encounter, argument and change

By CA. S. Muralidharan, Business Mentor and Thought-Leader

At the entrance to a Tamil village stands a small shrine. Its guardian deity has a name known to every family nearby. Once a year, the village gathers for a festival that belongs to this place and no other.

A few kilometres away is a large Shiva temple. The same family may pray there too.

Which is their religion?

Today we might answer, “Hinduism.” That answer is understandable. But if we want to know how these forms of worship came together, the question becomes more interesting. Did the village deity always belong to the same religious world as Shiva? Did the two traditions meet gradually? Did someone decide that one form of worship was more respectable than the other?

India’s religious history is full of questions like these. It is a history of people carrying beliefs across borders, arguing over how to live, and finding new meanings in practices they inherited.

What did people believe before there was one umbrella?

We often speak of Hinduism as though it had always been one religion with a settled list of gods and a common set of rules. Ancient India was much less tidy.

People belonged to particular places and communities. Some followed teachers devoted to Shiva or Vishnu. Others worshipped goddesses, ancestors or guardians of a village. These traditions could overlap in a person’s life without being governed by one institution.

The broad name Hinduism became much more clearly defined in later centuries, especially during the colonial period. That does not mean the British created its older traditions. It means that a modern label brought many living traditions together under one heading. The word Hindu itself has a longer, changing history, which historians continue to study and debate. (cambridge.org, cambridge.org)

That distinction helps us see the past more clearly. A king’s gift to a Shiva temple tells us about that king, that temple and its community. It does not automatically tell us what every village in his kingdom believed.

The world of the Vedas

The oldest Vedic hymns bring us into a different setting. We hear praise of Agni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and solar deities. Fire and the sun are part of this world, as are rain, power and cosmic order. Calling it “nature worship” captures something real, but only part of it. The hymns also ask what human beings can seek from the gods and what offerings mean. (academic.oup.com, academic.oup.com)

These hymns were composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest form of Sanskrit known to us. The language had a history before those hymns and continued to change afterwards. Evidence from languages and ancient DNA supports movement of Indo-Aryan-speaking groups into northwestern South Asia, followed by mixing and interaction with people already living there. It does not give us a scene in which one people arrived on one day and replaced everyone else. (cambridge.org, science.org, sciencedirect.com)

What did the people already living in the region worship? We know less than we would like. The Indus civilisation left objects and images, but its script has not been deciphered. A figure on a seal is sometimes called an early Shiva; that identification remains disputed. We should be curious about possible continuities without treating guesses as established history. (britishmuseum.org, cambridge.org)

There is another surprise here. The Shiva and Vishnu who became central to later temple worship were not already the central gods of the Rigveda. Rudra appears in the text and is connected to the later history of Shiva. Vishnu appears too, but his prominence grew greatly in subsequent centuries. The traditions we know today had long histories of development within India. (academic.oup.com, academic.oup.com, academic.oup.com)

An argument about killing

Some Vedic rituals involved animal sacrifice. People also ate meat, although the texts do not show one rule followed by everyone.

One passage in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa makes the disagreement unusually vivid. It advises against eating the flesh of a cow or ox. Then it records the sage Yājñavalkya saying that he would eat it if it were tender. We do not need to make either view stand for an entire age. The passage matters because both views appear in the same tradition. (wisdomlib.org, wisdomlib.org)

Imagine watching an animal led to a sacrifice and asking: Can killing truly be a path to spiritual good?

Jain and Buddhist teachers gave that question great force. Jainism placed extraordinary emphasis on avoiding harm to living beings. Its Ācārāṅga Sūtra objects to killing for sacrifice as well as for other human purposes. Early Buddhist teaching also criticised animal killing in sacrifice. Yet the earliest Buddhist rules did not require every monk to refuse all meat. Their concern included whether an animal had been killed specifically to feed the monk. (en.wikisource.org, suttacentral.net, suttacentral.net)

Sacrifice was an important disagreement. It was not the only reason Buddhism and Jainism emerged. Their teachers also asked deeper questions: What causes suffering? What binds a person to repeated birth? Is performing a ritual enough? What kind of life leads to freedom? They were part of a wider period of searching and debate, in which other Indian traditions were changing too. (cambridge.org, cambridge.org)

What happened to the village gods?

The great texts tell only part of the story. For many people, the nearest sacred place was not a famous centre of learning. It was the shrine at the edge of a field or at the entrance to a village.

A guardian deity might have a festival, a story and a priestly family particular to that community. People could worship that deity while also visiting a Shiva or Vishnu temple. Over time, a local goddess might be associated with a wider Goddess tradition. A shrine might acquire new patrons or new rituals. In other places, older forms of worship carried on. Research in one Tamil village, for instance, found guardian-deity practices that had not simply been replaced by non-sacrificial temple rites. (cambridge.org)

Sometimes we call such change Sanskritisation or Brahmanisation. But those words should lead to questions, not close them. Did local people want a new form of worship? Did a ruler fund the shrine? Did a Brahmin priest gain a role? What happened to the family that had cared for the deity before?

The answer may differ from one village to the next. Religious change happened through people with unequal power, but local communities were never absent from their own history.

Faiths could compete—and still survive

It would also be a mistake to imagine that all traditions now called Hindu always acted together. Shaiva and Vaishnava communities could disagree sharply. At Chidambaram, a 12th-century Chola court poem associates King Kulottunga II with removing an image of Vishnu from a temple complex centred on Shiva. The accounts disagree on the image’s fate. Even with that uncertainty, the episode shows why we should not erase older sectarian loyalties beneath a modern umbrella name. (journals.sagepub.com, ignca.gov.in)

Buddhists and Jains also faced changing fortunes in South India as Shaiva and Vaishnava temples gained prominence. Some later stories describe religious contests in dramatic, even violent terms. We need to read such stories carefully: they show how communities remembered their rivals, but their most sweeping claims are not automatically confirmed by contemporary records.

The material evidence tells us something equally important: decline was not the same as sudden disappearance. Jain communities survived. Buddhism remained present at particular sites long after it became less prominent elsewhere. Around 1006 CE, for example, a Buddhist monastery at Nagapattinam received support through a grant associated with the Chola ruler Rajaraja I. (govtmuseumchennai.org, metmuseum.org, ignca.gov.in)

A ruler could be deeply devoted to one tradition and still support an institution of another. History rarely gives us the simple divisions we expect.

Why did Buddhism travel so far?

Buddhism began in India, yet it became deeply rooted across Asia. Teachers travelled. Merchants supported monasteries near routes of trade. Rulers sometimes offered protection and resources. Monasteries trained new generations and preserved texts that could be translated into other languages. (metmuseum.org, academic.oup.com, cambridge.org)

The people who received Buddhism did more than preserve an Indian teaching. Communities in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, China, Tibet, Korea and Japan interpreted it through their own languages and lives. That helps explain its endurance abroad.

Its position in India changed for several reasons over a long period. Patronage shifted; monastic institutions contracted in many regions; and later upheavals damaged important centres. Yet eastern Indian monasteries still flourished for centuries after Buddhism had weakened elsewhere. There was no single date on which “India lost Buddhism.” (academic.oup.com, cambridge.org, academic.oup.com)

Jainism’s history offers a different kind of endurance. It did not become a majority religion in other Asian countries. Its monks, nuns, families and donors sustained it chiefly within India, where it remains a living faith.

The contrast is visible today. India’s 2011 census counted about 8.4 million Buddhists and 4.5 million Jains. Pew estimated about 10 million Buddhists in India in 2020, still less than one per cent of its population. By Pew’s 2020 estimates, Buddhists formed 94% of Thailand’s population, 97% of Cambodia’s, 89% of Myanmar’s and 70% of Sri Lanka’s. These are counts of religious identity, not a measure of everyone influenced by Buddhist thought. (pewresearch.org, pewresearch.org, pewresearch.org)

Jainism remained strongest where it began. Buddhism became a major faith far beyond its birthplace.

A familiar pattern, but not necessarily a borrowed one

Buddhism’s travels invite comparison with Christianity. Both reached distant communities through teachers, relationships, travel and translation. Both gained the support of rulers at certain moments. In both, believers built institutions that outlasted the travellers who began them.

Does that mean Christianity learned its original missionary method from Buddhism? We do not have evidence to make that claim. Early Christian missions grew in a Jewish and Greco-Roman world. Their surviving records tell us about Jesus’ followers, Paul and the communities they reached. Much later, Christian missionaries in Asia did respond to Buddhist institutions: Jesuits in 16th-century China initially adopted an appearance resembling Buddhist monks. That is evidence of a particular encounter, not proof that one religion’s entire method was copied from the other. (academic.oup.com, cambridge.org)

The comparison is still worth making. It helps us ask how a teaching travels, what makes a community sustain it, and how much it changes when it reaches a new home.

The question behind the history

None of these traditions lived in isolation. Vedic ritual changed. Village worship persisted and adapted. Jain and Buddhist teachers challenged practices they believed caused harm. Shaiva and Vaishnava communities built great temples and sometimes disputed one another’s place. Buddhism travelled abroad; Jainism kept its roots in India.

Calling this simply a story of one religion replacing another misses the people who lived through it.

The family at the village shrine may never have asked whether their guardian deity belonged inside a historian’s category. They knew who had protected their village, who conducted its festival and where their parents had taken them to pray. Their descendants could also visit a Shiva temple without forgetting any of that.

Perhaps the most revealing question in religious history is therefore not only “Where did this belief come from?” It is also:

Who kept it alive, who changed it, and what did it mean to the people who practised it?