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magine a Google Earth view of South Asia; slowly zoom in on the beauti-
ful blue globe and gently twist the view west to east, north to south. Google
imagery provides a landforms view of valleys and mountain chains, but
what if you could see the distribution of religions across that vast space? (Per-
haps someday we will.) More than 1.7 billion people, one fourth of all humans,
live here. In the largest nation, India, 80 percent call themselves Hindu.
Another 13 percent are Muslim, 2.3 percent Christian, 1.9 percent Sikh. There
are also smaller percentages of Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Jews, and Baha’is. In
Nepal, 80 percent are Hindus (plus Buddhists, 9 percent; Muslims, 4 percent;
Christians and others 1–3 percent). This is the gigantic heartland of Hinduism.
Where are the Muslims? Besides India, they are west in Pakistan (95 per-
cent, or 174 million), east in Bangladesh (89 percent, or 154 million), and
south in the Maldives (officially 100 percent, as everyone is required to be Mus-
lim—about 300,000 persons).
Where are the Buddhists? The largest density of Buddhists is in Sri Lanka,
where 70 percent are Buddhists, alongside 15 percent Hindu, 8 percent Chris-
tian, and 7 percent Muslim. In Bhutan, 75 percent are Tibetan Buddhists,
while 24 percent are Hindus.
These distributions can be traced historically to the movements of mission-
aries (e.g., taking early Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the third century B.C.E.), the
arrival of conquerors bringing their own religions originating elsewhere (Islam,
beginning in the seventh century, Christianity in the nineteenth century), and
political population transfers (the Partition in 1947 that resulted in high Mus-
lim concentrations in Pakistan and Bangladesh). Rulers were responsible for
intensifying some religious traditions by adoption for themselves and their peo-
ple (Ashoka in the third century B.C.E., the Gupta revival of Brahmanism in the
third century C.E.). Conversions to new religions (Islam, Christianity) or old
ones (Buddhism) came about as oppressed groups tried to escape the domi-
nance of the caste system. Charismatic gurus founded new syntheses based on
strands of older ideas (the Buddha; Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism). Mean-
while, castes and tribes had their long traditions of worship and practice, pre-
ferring certain deities and rites over others.
In this chapter, however, we will not examine Asian religion nation-by-
nation, or by a history of ideas, tracing the development of ideas over time, as
is commonly done. Though both are valuable approaches, ours is different.
This chapter also is not organized on a World Religions plan (Hinduism, Bud-
dhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, etc.), although that is also a familiar mode of
I
Chapter opener photo: The goddess Durga travels by rickshaw to the Hooghly River in
Calcutta as part of the Durga Puja Festival.