This research examines the major religions of India, notably Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. The research will discuss major features of the religions, including historical background, key concepts, rituals, and relevance to social organization in India, as well as the distribution of population and elements of religious diversity in countries where Indian religions are found.
Religion, with the Hindu religion predominant, emerges as the decisive element in all areas of Indian history and contemporary society. To see why Hindu culture predominates in India, claiming some 700 million adherents and accounting for 80% of Indians' religion ("Hinduism"), it is important to know that its history goes back to about 1500 BCE. It was in that period that the highly developed agricultural civilization in the Indus River Valley of northern India became dominated by nomadic peoples known as Aryans. Evidence exists of Indus worship of a mother goddess, as well as "phallic gods, sacred bulls, and in one case a deity in perhaps a yogic meditation posture" (Ellwood 61). The Aryan peoples possessed the Vedas, or basic scriptures of Hinduism, plus a strong priestly class, led by the Brahmins, and strict rituals, designed to hold together the order of the cosmos (Ellwood 61, 65-6). The Hindu pantheon seems to have incorporated various deities of the Indus and Aryan peoples, with the god Brahman, "the One beyond and in all these forms and changes" (Ellwood 69), expressing the unchanging cosmos.
Hindu texts, written down about the fourth century CE, include the Vedas, as well as esoteric texts originally meant only for advanced wisdom and meditation on "the inner or final meaning of things" (Ellwood 66), called Upanishads. Additional texts include the Smriti, or "what is remembered," which includes two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana ("Hinduism"). Hindu laws governing society and human nature were elaborated these text...