Hindu civilisation has long been able to hold contradictions without feeling bound to resolve them. It has accommodated countless gods, goddesses, sects, philosophies and regional practices. A devotee could worship Shiva without ceasing to revere Vishnu, regard Krishna as the supreme reality while living next door to a family devoted to Ram, or follow a local goddess whose name barely left a cluster of villages. In practice, Hinduism was rarely a corporation with a single headquarters, a uniform doctrine and an approved organisational chart.
This pluralism did not make Hindu society egalitarian. Caste hierarchy, exclusion and sectarian rivalry were deeply embedded in its history. Yet the sheer diversity of religious life often opened spaces in which inherited authority could be challenged. Bhakti Movement is the clearest example. It did not demolish caste, but it opened doors that ritual hierarchy had tried to keep shut. It weakened the monopoly of birth and priestly mediation over spiritual authority, and let people excluded from elite religious life speak directly about God and human dignity.
This matters now because modern political projects often want something very different from the untidy pluralism through which Hindu traditions evolved. The impulse towards a unified Hindu identity is understandable. It answers colonial categorisation, religious competition and electoral arithmetic. But unity and uniformity are not the same thing. A civilisation held together by its capacity to accommodate differences may lose something essential once it starts ranking its own traditions, choosing preferred symbols and implying that diversity is a defect to be corrected.
The recent controversy over Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, popularly known as Baba Bageshwar, is a revealing example. At a Ram Katha in Karera, in Madhya Pradesh's Shivpuri district, on 29 October, he contrasted Ram and Krishna in terms many listeners found demeaning. Ram, he said, was seedhe, straight, while Krishna was tedhe, crooked. He mocked the tribhanga posture, set the bow against the flute, and compared Ayodhya with Vrindavan. Reports also noted his repeated use of "ours" for Ram and "yours" for Krishna, a phrasing that casts devotion as rival camps. The clip spread quickly. Seers and devotees from Mathura and Vrindavan objected, Ahir community groups protested, Akhilesh Yadav condemned the remarks, and complaints, including a criminal defamation case in Agra, followed.
Shastri apologised in a video message from Nairobi on 2 November. He said his words were a loving grievance in the devotional idiom of Braj, that he never meant to demean Krishna, and that Ram and Krishna are manifestations of the same supreme reality. That clarification matters. It would be careless to treat one preacher's provocative language as proof of a coordinated campaign to demote Krishna. Shastri’s rhetoric has courted controversy before.
Yet the episode touched a real nerve, because contemporary Hindu politics has invested enormous symbolic capital in Ram. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement turned Ram from one universally revered figure among many into a potent emblem of political and cultural mobilisation. There is nothing illegitimate about devotion to Ram. The trouble begins when a political culture quietly converts preference into hierarchy, and hierarchy into a test of authenticity.
The Ahir and Yadav response is itself instructive. Communities have long attached themselves to particular deities. Yadav and related pastoral communities identify with Krishna through lineage, pastoral imagery and cultural memory. Parshuram holds special significance in some Brahmin traditions, while Ram has often stood for the ideal Kshatriya ruler, bound by duty and dharma. These associations grew out of regional identity, Sanskritisation, social aspiration and political mobilisation. They were neither fixed at the dawn of history nor entirely modern inventions. Hindu religious life endured because ishta-devatas, local cults and diverse sampradayas could coexist without one deity having to defeat another in a theological election campaign.
It needs to be noted that the Jai Shri Ram slogan is being used by the BJP-RSS to turn Ram into a symbol of monotheism. This will not go down well with the worshippers of Durga, Shiva, Krishna and Murugan, among others. Sooner or later, a blowback may create an atmosphere where the almost-extinct faultlines in the Hindu society may resurrect and harden. Already, caste is becoming a big sociopolitical factor, thanks to the actions of extreme right-wingers.
Bhakti shows why this diversity mattered socially as well as spiritually. Between roughly the sixth and seventeenth centuries, with wide regional variation, it prized personal devotion over elaborate ritual, Sanskrit learning and priestly mediation. Its saints came from far outside the traditional elite: Kabir from a weaving community, Ravidas from leather-working communities, Chokhamela from the Mahar community. Their words travelled across caste lines.
Their challenge was radical in a specific sense. They argued that spiritual worth could not be measured by jati, ritual purity or birth. Kabir attacked empty ritualism and priestly authority. Ravidas imagined Begampura, a city without sorrow, hierarchy or discrimination, while asserting the dignity of labour. The use of vernacular languages carried religious expression beyond Sanskrit-speaking elites to far wider audiences.
Bhakti was therefore a democratisation of religious access, not a social revolution in the modern sense. Shared songs, pilgrimages and meals sometimes created spaces where caste barriers were questioned. As a broad generalisation, nirguna traditions, which centred on a formless divine, rejected varnashrama and Brahmin claims more sharply, while saguna traditions devoted to Ram or Krishna widened access to devotion but sat more comfortably with existing social order.
B.R. Ambedkar's criticism remains essential here. Spiritual equality did not automatically yield social equality. Many Bhakti movements challenged the religious monopoly of birth while leaving the wider structures of caste largely intact. Sects became institutions, institutions acquired patrons, and hierarchy returned by the side door. The house had been opened, but its architecture was never rebuilt. Bhakti weakened caste-based claims to exclusive spiritual authority; it did not abolish caste as a social system.
That ambiguity has present-day force. Political mobilisation can celebrate Bhakti saints as symbols of cultural unity while ignoring the social protest in their words. Ravidas can be honoured as a saint without confronting the discrimination suffered by the communities whose dignity he defended. Kabir can be quoted for his spirituality while his contempt for religious and social pretension is sanitised. History is most useful to establishments when its inconvenient portions are placed in a glass case labelled "heritage".
The same tension runs through Ghar Wapsi, the organised "homecoming" campaigns. The VHP, RSS networks and allied groups have sought to bring back, particularly among tribal and marginalised populations, people who had embraced Christianity and, in some campaigns, Islam. Supporters call this cultural recovery and a response to missionary conversion. Critics argue that voluntariness is hard to establish, and that social pressure, inducement and a majoritarian climate blur the line between religious choice and organised political mobilisation.
The reality is more complicated than either slogan allows. Reconversion drives have continued in various regions with significant local participation, but they have not altered India's demographic structure at the national level. Nor can they simply be dismissed as failures. They remain persistent, localised and politically charged, reflecting competition over identity, community and allegiance.
What should concern a plural society is not only whether a given ceremony is voluntary, but the larger assumption that religious belonging must be brought into line with a single civilisational category. India has survived because identities overlapped. A tribal community could keep its own practices while engaging with Hindu traditions. A regional sect could develop its own theology without applying for a certificate of national acceptability. The urge to fit every Indian religious community into one cultural box is a modern political temptation, not an ancient requirement.
Sikh history is a further warning against simple stories of absorption. Sikh identity was already shaped by the Khalsa tradition, the Singh Sabha movement and demands for distinct political representation. Some reformist currents tried to place Sikhism within a wider Hindu framework, but Sikh leaders repeatedly asserted a distinct qaum. At Partition, Hindus and Sikhs often faced common dangers, and RSS networks took part in relief and protection work in some areas, though the organisation has also been accused of involvement in violence against Muslims. Whatever the balance, Partition reinforced Sikh political identity rather than producing a significant movement into a Hindu fold.
The tradition associated with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru approached India's diversity differently. Gandhi was deeply and unapologetically Hindu, yet his Hinduism did not require India to become a Hindu state. He urged respect among religions and saw Hindu-Muslim unity as essential to the moral and political project of independence. Nehru, from a more secular and modernist position, insisted that the state must not privilege any religion. Both understood that India's unity rested not on making its people culturally identical but on a political framework in which difference could coexist.
That remains the central challenge. Hindu civilisation holds immense resources for pluralism within its own traditions. Its many deities, regional practices, Bhakti lineages and philosophical schools show that unity need not mean uniformity. History also shows that hierarchy, exclusion and domination can live comfortably inside a plural religious universe.
The lesson, then, is neither to romanticise the past nor to see a conspiracy behind every controversy. Baba Bageshwar's remarks do not prove a coordinated plan to diminish Krishna. Ghar Wapsi is neither a demographic revolution nor something a single word can dismiss. Bhakti was neither a complete social revolution nor a harmless devotional pastime. Indian history is messier than its political salesmen would like.
But the broad pattern deserves attention. When a civilisation that long accommodated many paths begins to demand one authorised identity, it risks trading strength for conformity. When political symbolism turns one deity into a national mascot and leaves others secondary, devotion becomes entangled with power. And when the radical voices of Bhakti are celebrated without facing their challenge to inherited hierarchy, reverence becomes a convenient substitute for reform.
India's unity has been strongest not when its people were made to resemble one another, but when they could stay recognisably different while sharing a common political home. The pluralist resources of Hindu and Indian traditions are still alive. The question is whether modern India will draw on them, or keep searching for a single standardised version of a civilisation whose greatest historical achievement may have been its refusal to fit into one.
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