Religion in India: Discussion of Pew Research Center Survey

King’s India Institute is hosting a discussion of a major new survey of religion across India conducted by Pew Research Center. The survey, to be released by Pew Research Center on June 29 was based on nearly 30,000 face-to-face interviews of adults conducted in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020 (before the COVID-19 pandemic), exploring the role of religion in Indian public life. The study is part of a larger effort by Pew Research Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world. The nationally representative study, Pew Research Center’s biggest single-country survey outside of the United States to date, provides insights into the experiences and attitudes not only of Hindus and Muslims, but also of Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and Jains living in India. The new report, based on the survey’s findings, examines religious identity, beliefs and practices; views on Indian national identity; caste; experiences with discrimination; religious conversion; and the connection between economic development and religious observance. Some of the key questions the survey set out to explore include: How do Indians feel about living in such a religiously diverse society? What are the dynamics among India’s various religious groups in both public and private life? And in a democracy with a large Hindu majority, how do Indians view the relationship between Hindu identity and Indian identity? The event will begin with a short overview of the survey findings followed by a panel discussion.

Chair

Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is currently Director, King’s India Institute and Reader in Politics. She is also the programme director of the MSc Global Affairs. Louise’s research interests span federalism, democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and implementation. Louise is a regular commentator on Indian politics in UK, Indian and international media. She is an editor of the journal Regional and Federal Studies, and an editorial board member of Pacific Affairs.

Speaker

Neha Sahgal, Associate Director (Research), Pew Research Center

Neha Sahgal is associate director of research at Pew Research Center, specializing in international polling on religion. Sahgal is involved in all aspects of survey research, including designing the questionnaire, monitoring field work, evaluating data quality and analyzing results. She is an author of studies on the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims around the world, Christian-Muslim relations in sub-Saharan Africa, religion in Latin America, religious divisions in Israel, religion and national identity in Central and Eastern Europe and the role of religion in Western Europe.

Discussants

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008.

Hilal Ahmed

Hilal Ahmed is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Hilal works on political Islam, Muslim politics of representation, and politics of symbols in South Asia. His first book Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Routledge 2014) explores these thematic concerns to evolve an interdisciplinary approach to study Muslim politics.

Ravinder Kaur

Ravinder Kaur is a Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2015 to February 2018. She has previously taught at the University of Delhi and New York University. Most recently, she offered a course on Gender, Technology, and Society at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Her current research interests are in the areas of the sociology of gender, family, marriage, kinship, middle class, and technology.

Link to the report