The Formation of Religious Identities in India

Historians are always concerned about identifying elements of change and continuity, and points of disjunctures, in outlining and explaining historical processes. Further, the need to locate them within temporal and spatial contexts is also a sine qua non for them. The formation of religious identities in India needs to be studied from such a standpoint. More so, because religions are parts of large and complex historico-cultural dynamics. The world of ‘ideas’ and ‘divinities’ in Indian mythologies (of all religious hues) as well as the followers and practitioners of all religions have been rising, falling and changing through several millennia. These people, the real creators of the ‘world of divinities’, have never constituted a monolith – neither spatially, nor temporally.