‘Indian tradition, today, exhibits a form of neotraditionalism along with modernisation’. Comment. (1990)
Neo-traditionalism is not the survival of the old. It is the deliberate re-assertion and re-packaging of tradition by modern means — mass media, corporate organisation, market branding and state patronage — for purposes that are themselves contemporary. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (The Invention of Tradition, 1983) supply the lens: traditions that claim antiquity are often recent constructions serving present needs. The statement is therefore correct in a stronger sense than it appears — neo-traditionalism does not merely accompany modernisation, it is manufactured by it.
What makes it “neo”
A surviving tradition is transmitted; a neo-tradition is produced. It is self-conscious, selective about which past it invokes, addressed to a mass audience rather than a local community, organisationally rationalised, and usually national or global in ambition where the original was regional. It is also, decisively, defended in modern vocabulary — heritage, wellness, rights, identity — rather than in the idiom of revelation.
The machinery of manufacture
- Media and platform. Devotional broadcasting, and now devotion apps: India’s largest such platform reports several million monthly users and raised twenty million dollars in mid-2025, having arranged roughly 1.2 million commissioned pujas at more than seventy temples in a single year. Ritual becomes a subscription service with customer analytics.
- Corporate religion. Godmen and mega-ashrams operate as diversified enterprises with product lines, trusts, media arms and political access — charisma with a balance sheet.
- The wellness market. Yoga and Ayurveda have been standardised, certified and exported; India’s AYUSH sector, valued at roughly 43 billion dollars in 2024, is projected to approach 200 billion by 2030.
- State patronage. The eleventh International Day of Yoga on 21 June 2025 set a Guinness record with about 302,000 participants at one venue in Visakhapatnam, with associated events in 191 countries — an ancient practice staged as a nationally organised, globally audited spectacle.
- Identity politics. Caste associations, dietary regulation, festival processions as public assertion, and heritage claims over sites and calendars all use modern law and publicity to fix what was once fluid.
Why this is a modern phenomenon, not a relapse
S. N. Eisenstadt argued that fundamentalist and revivalist movements are thoroughly modern — totalising, organised, transnational and reconstructive of identity, arguing within modernity’s terms even when they denounce it. Ashis Nandy‘s distinction completes the point: neo-traditionalism belongs to religion-as-ideology, an identity mobilised for political ends, rather than to religion-as-faith, which is plural and locally tolerant. Yogendra Singh had already noticed the mechanism, observing that religious sects were adopting rational-bureaucratic organisation and using modern communication for national mobilisation, and that fission among sects was giving way to fusion.
The critical balance
Neo-traditionalism is not simply reactionary. It has funded education, given subordinated groups an organisational language, and preserved crafts and performance forms that markets would have erased. Its cost is homogenisation: a single, standardised, media-friendly version displaces local variants, and the “tradition” that wins is usually the one with capital behind it.
Conclusion
The statement stands, with one correction. Neo-traditionalism does not run “along with” modernisation as a parallel track; it is one of modernisation’s own products, made possible by the very media, markets and state capacity that were supposed to dissolve tradition. India is not resisting modernity with its past — it is manufacturing a usable past with modern tools.