Women’s empowerment in contemporary India and, indeed, much of the world is measured in terms of the extent to which religiously-sanctioned gender norms that are restrictive of women’s agency are weakened. Surveys such as the National Family Health Survey and the India Human Development Survey typically capture this by examining gender norms set by different religious groups. The implicit assumption is that the extent of religiosity is the same across different individuals within the same religious group.
Yet social change over the last 200 odd years means that not everyone is religious to the same extent — indeed, some of us may only be nominally affiliated to one’s religious group while for others religious identification is backed up by adhering to religiously-sanctioned rituals and norms in their daily lives. It is commonly assumed that those in rural areas are more religious than their peers in urban areas, that religiosity decreases with higher education levels, and socialisation norms render women more religious than men. But these are broad strokes and are inadequate to measure the relation between the intensity of religious beliefs and the practice of norms that have religious sanctions. Practice is particularly important to study how the religiously inclined navigate everyday living.
The issue is complicated in India because the standard measures of religiosity applicable for Abrahamic religions do not hold for Hinduism. There is a mandated congregational dimension in Islam and Christianity that entails followers of these faiths to gather regularly for communal prayer and religious observance. Hinduism, however, does not have any mandate on communal worship. In fact, many forms of religious practice are mandated to be performed in isolation. Even regular visits to temples are not necessary: Hindu homes typically have their own prayer spaces where householders offer regular prayers. Further, there are diverse and mutually exclusive ways in which religiosity is expressed. For example, devotees may keep fasts or follow dietary restrictions as a form of worship but need not be regular visitors to the temple. There are also those who do not indulge in any of these ritual observances and, yet, are pious. All these make it difficult to construct an objective, comprehensive measure of religiosity specific to Hindus.
The Mahakumbh of 2025 that drew the religiously inclined offered social scientists a way out of this conundrum. As a socio-religious site, it provided social scientists a unique opportunity to observe how different dimensions of Hinduism intersect with religiously-sanctioned social norms. Conducted between January 18 and February 17, 2025, the Rashtram School of Public Leadership Pilgrim Survey-Mahakumbh 2025 asked a randomly-selected sample of 1,415 pilgrims (and visitors) their religious beliefs and practices along with their gender beliefs and political opinions. In particular, respondents were asked about their opinion on the performance of parents’ last rites by a son (or other male member of the family), strictures against married women’s ownership of parental property and intercaste marriage norms.
A substantial majority — 85% of men and 72% of women — affirmed that it is “very important” for male members to perform last rites but an almost equivalent proportion also considered it acceptable or somewhat acceptable for daughters to perform these rites in the absence of male relatives. This duality suggests not a rigid and a blind acceptance of ritual practices but a flexible and pragmatic accommodation of traditional norms to respond to contemporary changes, such as the increasing number of single-child families or many with only daughters and no sons.
Traditional norms give women weak inheritance rights. Inheritance was patrilineal with widows enjoying more rights than unmarried daughters, who, in turn, had more rights than married daughters. Independent India has enacted laws giving equal rights to sons and daughters to inherit property. But what are the views of those who are rooted in the traditions of Hinduism? Here too, we found overwhelming support for women’s claim for their share of the parental property (84%) with the gap between those who visited the Mahakumbh primarily for religious and others whose reasons for the visit were non-religious to be trivial, at around 3 percentage points. But the extent to which this support translates into action remained unclear as it was not probed in the survey.
While respondents were willing to disregard the restrictions placed on women, the survey reveals considerable support for the stricture against inter-caste marriages. Nearly half of the survey respondents found inter-caste marriages to be unacceptable, with a 6 percentage points difference between those coming to the Mahakumbh for religious and non-religious reasons. The resistance towards intercaste marriage conforms broadly to national trends — an overwhelming majority of marriages were within the same caste in both the IHDS of 2004-05 and 2011-12. Further, although opposition to inter-caste marriages is highest among general caste respondents (57%), scheduled castes follow at 51% and other backward classes at 42%, suggesting that endogamous preferences are not confined to a single varna location.
Thus, simple descriptive analysis appears to belie the commonly-held assumption that the religious among Hindus are more rigid than the rest in subscribing to faith-sanctioned norms. Further, statistical analysis will reveal to what extent these patterns hold when other factors such as gender, caste and education level are taken into account. Nevertheless, the results challenge the binary framings of tradition versus modernity and underscore the need to move towards a more nuanced understanding of evolving social norms in contemporary Hindu society.
Manjistha Banerji is an Associate Professor and Arunoday Majumder is an Assistant Professor at Rishihood University