Concept, Determinants and Spatial Patterns of Religion

• Religious composition is the share of a population that belongs to each religious faith. It is one of the social demographic attributes, alongside caste, tribe and language.
• Religion is a personal belief, but it has a collective spatial expression: believers cluster, build sacred landscapes and form religious and cultural regions.
• It shapes marriage, fertility, diet, occupation and settlement, so the map of religions is also a map of demographic behaviour and cultural identity.
• India is one of the most religiously diverse countries: all the major world religions live here, with a Hindu majority (79.8%) and large minorities (Census 2011).

Concept of Religious Composition

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Religion as a Geographical Variable

• Religion is a socio-cultural institution. It:
  • defines beliefs, values and norms of behaviour;
  • creates social cohesion and community identity;
  • regulates marriage, family size, food and dress, and through them demographic indicators.
• It leaves marks on space:
  • Clustering of communities in villages, wards and regions.
  • Sacred places and pilgrimage circuits (Varanasi, Amritsar, Bodh Gaya, Ajmer, Velankanni).
  • Religious regions, such as the Islamic belt of the Old World or the Christian hill States of north-east India.
• Religion is therefore both a cultural trait and a spatial process that influences settlement, migration and regional identity.

Classification of Religions

• Universalising religions seek converts and claim to suit all people.
  • Christianity, Islam, Buddhism.
  • They spread far beyond their hearths.
• Ethnic religions belong to one people or place and do not seek converts.
  • Hinduism, Judaism, Shinto, and tribal and folk faiths.
  • They stay concentrated near their hearths.
• In India a second division is common:
  • Indic religions, born in the subcontinent: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism.
  • Religions of external origin: Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism.
• Tribal and folk religions survive alongside them: Sarna (Chotanagpur), Donyi-Polo (Arunachal Pradesh), Sanamahi (Manipur), Niamtre (Khasi hills).

Determinants of Religious Distribution

Hearths and Diffusion

• All the major religions arose in three hearths of Asia:
  • the Semitic hearth of West Asia: Judaism, Christianity, Islam;
  • the Indic hearth of the Ganga plain and Punjab: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism;
  • the East Asian hearth of China: Confucianism, Daoism, with Shinto in Japan.
• From these hearths religions spread by three kinds of diffusion:
  • Contagious diffusion: person to person along trade and caravan routes.
    • Islam moved along the Arab sea trade to Malabar, the Swahili coast and Indonesia.
    • Buddhism moved along the Silk Road to Central Asia, China, Korea and Japan.
  • Hierarchical diffusion: rulers and elites converted first and the people followed.
    • Ashoka for Buddhism; Constantine for Christianity.
  • Relocation diffusion: migrants carry their faith to new lands.
    • Christianity reached the Americas, Australia and much of Africa through colonial settlement and missions.
    • Hindus reached Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname as indentured labourers.

Other Determinants

• Political history: conquest and empire fixed the faith of whole regions.
  • The Arab and Turkish expansion made North Africa, West and Central Asia Muslim.
  • Spanish and Portuguese rule made Latin America and the Philippines Catholic.
• Physical isolation: hills, forests and islands preserve tribal faiths and slow outside influence.
  • Isolated hills were also open to missionary work in colonial times, as in the Naga, Mizo and Khasi hills.
• Migration and partition: mass movements redraw the religious map in a few years.
  • The Partition of 1947 emptied and refilled Punjab and Bengal.
• Differential fertility and age structure: groups with younger populations and higher fertility grow faster.
• Conversion and switching: people move in or out of a faith.
  • In the West and East Asia many are leaving religion altogether.
• State policy: communist regimes (China, North Korea, the former USSR) and secularisation produced large unaffiliated populations.
• Urbanisation and occupation: trading and urban communities (Jains, Parsis) concentrate in cities.

Global Patterns of Religion

World Religious Composition

• In 2020 about 75.8% of the world’s people identified with a religion and 24.2% were unaffiliated (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Three groups make up about 69% of humanity: Christians, Muslims and Hindus.

• Christians are a majority in 120 countries, Muslims in 53, the unaffiliated in 10 and Buddhists in 7. Hindus are a majority only in India and Nepal, and Jews only in Israel.

Spatial Distribution of Major Religions

• Christianity:
  • The most widely spread faith: Europe, the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.
  • Its centre of gravity has moved south: Sub-Saharan Africa now has more Christians than Europe.
  • The spread reflects colonial expansion, settlement and missions.
• Islam:
  • A contiguous belt from North Africa through West and Central Asia to South Asia and Indonesia.
  • About three in five Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific; only one in five lives in the Middle East–North Africa.
  • It spread through conquest, trade and conversion, which gave it strong territorial continuity.
• Hinduism:
  • A highly localised ethnic religion. About 95% of the world’s Hindus live in India.
  • Diaspora pockets: Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean, and recent migrants in the Gulf, the UK and North America.
• Buddhism:
  • Theravada in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.
  • Mahayana in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam; Vajrayana in Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia and the Indian Himalaya.
• East Asian religious complex:
  • Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism are blended, and many people report no formal affiliation.
• Unaffiliated population:
  • Very high in China, Japan, North Korea, Czechia, Estonia and Hong Kong.
  • Rising in North America (30%) and Europe (25%) through secularisation.
• Judaism: concentrated in Israel and the United States.

Recent Trends (2010–2020)

• Muslims grew fastest, by 347 million, more than all other religions combined.
  • Reason: a young age structure and higher fertility, not conversion.
• Christians grew by 122 million, but their share fell 1.8 points, mainly through switching out of religion in Europe and the Americas.
• The unaffiliated rose by 270 million to 1.9 billion.
• Buddhists were the only major group to decline in number (by 19 million), because of low fertility and ageing in East Asia.
• Hindus grew at about the same pace as world population.

Religious Composition of India

Composition (Census 2011)

• India’s religious structure shows dominance with diversity:

• Muslims are the largest minority. India has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan.
• “Other religions” are mostly tribal faiths. Sarna alone was returned by about 50 lakh people, mainly in Jharkhand.
• The Union Government notifies six religious minorities: Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and Jains.

Trends, 1951–2011

• The Hindu share fell from 84.1% (1951) to 79.8% (2011).
• The Muslim share rose from 9.8% to 14.2%.
• The Christian share stayed near 2.3%; the Sikh, Buddhist and Jain shares changed little.
• Causes of the change:
  • Differential fertility, linked to differences in female literacy, income, urban residence and access to health care rather than to religion as such.
  • A younger age structure among Muslims, which adds population momentum.
• The gaps are narrowing:
  • Muslim decadal growth slowed to 24.6% in 2001–11, against 17.7% for India as a whole.
  • Total fertility (NFHS-5, 2019–21, the latest round with religion-wise data): Muslims 2.36, Hindus 1.94, Christians 1.88, Sikhs 1.61, Jains 1.6, Buddhists 1.39.
  • Muslim fertility fell from 4.4 in 1992–93 to 2.36, the steepest fall of any group.
  • Fertility varies more by State than by religion. Hindu fertility in Uttar Pradesh is higher than Muslim fertility in Tamil Nadu.
  • India’s overall total fertility rate stayed at 2.0 in NFHS-6 (2023–24) and was 1.9 in SRS 2024.

Spatial Pattern of Religions in India

Core–Periphery Pattern

• The interior plains and plateaus form a Hindu core:
  • over 90% Hindu in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
  • The core reflects the long continuity of Indic civilisation and limited external penetration.
• The border, coastal and hill periphery shows greater diversity, and minorities are often local majorities:
  • Muslim majority in Jammu and Kashmir (68.8%) and Lakshadweep (96.6%); Muslims are the largest group (46.4%) in Ladakh.
  • Sikh majority in Punjab (57.7%).
  • Christian majority in Nagaland (87.9%), Mizoram (87.2%) and Meghalaya (74.6%).
• Why the periphery is diverse:
  • Frontier regions faced invasions, trade contacts, missions and cross-border migration.
  • Hills and islands kept tribal faiths that later became Christian or stayed distinct.
• The pattern is not random, but it is not purely peripheral either. Uttar Pradesh, in the heartland, has the largest Muslim population (3.8 crore, 19.3%), and Maharashtra has the most Buddhists.

Distribution of Each Religion

• Hindus:
  • A majority in 27 of the 36 present States and UTs.
  • The share falls below 60% only in the periphery: Kerala (54.7%), Sikkim (57.8%), and the north-eastern hill States.
• Muslims (14.2%): clustered, not uniform.
  • North-west: the Kashmir valley and Kargil, linked to Central Asian influence and historical rule.
  • East: Assam (34.2%) in the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, and West Bengal (27.0%) in its border districts. This reflects the Bengal Sultanate legacy and migration from East Bengal.
  • Northern plains: western Uttar Pradesh (Rampur, Moradabad, Saharanpur) and north-east Bihar (Kishanganj).
  • South: Kerala (26.6%), especially Malappuram, through Arab maritime trade.
  • Islands: Lakshadweep (96.6%).
• Christians (2.3%):
  • The north-eastern hills form a distinct Christian region. Missions worked among tribal communities in relatively isolated hills.
  • Manipur (41.3%) and Arunachal Pradesh (30.3%) have large Christian shares.
  • Coastal south and west: Goa (25.1%), Kerala (18.4%), coastal Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, reflecting early Syrian Christianity and Portuguese rule.
  • The Chotanagpur tribal areas of Jharkhand and Odisha.
• Sikhs (1.7%):
  • The most localised religion: Punjab, then Chandigarh (13.1%), Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand’s Terai and Rajasthan’s canal districts.
  • Sikhism originated in Punjab; post-Partition refugees settled in Delhi, Haryana and the Terai.
• Buddhists (0.7%):
  • Trans-Himalaya and the north-east: Ladakh (39.7%), Sikkim (27.4%), Arunachal Pradesh (11.8%) and Mizoram (the Chakma).
  • Maharashtra (5.8%): Navayana Buddhists, after B. R. Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956. Maharashtra holds about three-quarters of India’s Buddhists.
• Jains (0.4%): an urban trading community in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.
• Parsis (Zoroastrians): highly localised in Mumbai and Gujarat. Their number is falling, about 57,000 in 2011, because of low fertility, late marriage and ageing.
• Tribal and folk faiths: Jharkhand (12.8% “other”), Arunachal Pradesh (26.2%), Meghalaya (8.7%) and Manipur (8.2%). These faiths of tribal communities are often syncretic, blending with Hinduism or Christianity, and mark cultural transition zones.

Rural–Urban Differences

• Minorities with trading and service occupations are more urban; agrarian communities are more rural.

Partition and Migration

• The Partition of 1947 reshaped India’s religious geography:
  • Muslims moved out of East Punjab, Delhi and parts of western Uttar Pradesh.
  • Hindus and Sikhs moved in from West Punjab, Sindh and East Bengal.
  • The Muslim share of India fell from about 24% (undivided India, 1941) to 9.8% (1951).
• It created new clusters: Punjabi refugee colonies in Delhi, Bengali settlement in West Bengal, Tripura and Assam, and Sikh farmers in the Terai.
• Later movements continue to change local composition: migration from Bangladesh into Assam and West Bengal, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (1990), and the rural-to-urban migration of all groups.
• The next census has its population enumeration reference date on 1 March 2027 (1 October 2026 in snow-bound areas). Until its results appear, Census 2011 remains the official source on religion.