North vs. South: Unpacking the Deep Divide Among Religions in India

 

North vs. South: Unpacking the Deep Divide Among Religions in India

Ajay Prakash Video: https://youtu.be/9v79JIeNbAI

Hindi Version: https://rakeshinsightfulgaze.blogspot.com/2025/09/blog-post_30.html

Ajay Prakash, the voice behind the YouTube channel What Does the Data Say, recently covered a report exploring the cultural and ideological differences between religious traditions in South India and those in the North. His analysis places a strong emphasis on the peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in the South, attributing it largely to geographical, demographic, and historical conditions. While his observations carry weight, especially when viewed through recent data and trends, there’s a critical oversight in how the historical narrative is framed, particularly concerning pre-1947 North India. The assumption that communal tension was always more intense in the North doesn't align with earlier records, as there is little documented evidence of large-scale or deeply entrenched Hindu-Muslim conflict in North India before the Partition.

In fact, I want to acknowledge something often ignored in mainstream narratives: Muslims and non-Muslims in North India fought side by side against British colonial rule. During the 1857 Rebellion, the First War of Independence, religious lines blurred in the face of a common enemy. Shared struggles, common grievances, and unified resistance defined the spirit of that era. The religious rigidity that characterizes much of North India today simply did not exist in the same way before independence.

The hardening of communal identities came later and the British played a deliberate role in engineering that divide. Colonial administrators saw that religious fragmentation could be a tool for control. They funded and encouraged the growth of both the RSS and the Muslim League, understanding that a divided population was easier to rule. These divisions calcified tragically after 1947, when Partition tore the social fabric apart. Nearly a million people died in one of the largest and bloodiest migrations in human history, as Muslims moved toward Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fled to India. The psychological and physical scars of that rupture remain deeply etched into the Northern consciousness, and have since been cynically exploited by political forces seeking to weaponize identity for electoral gain.

By contrast, South India refused to be drawn into this post-Partition binary. While religious and caste-based inequalities still exist, the region did not inherit the same trauma of Partition, and more importantly, it retained a stronger culture of pluralism. Faith communities in the South have continued to coexist with a basic respect for one another’s space, tradition, and belief systems. The Southern experience shows that communal harmony isn’t accidental; it’s the result of cultural values, historical continuity, and a refusal to let politics dictate personal relationships.

While Ajay Prakash’s work opens the door to an important conversation, the full story of religious dynamics in India demands a broader historical and anthropological lens. It's not just about peaceful coexistence or statistical data; it's about colonial interference, political manipulation, and how regions choose to respond to the trauma of division. Understanding that difference is key to understanding India itself.

A Tale of Two Civilizations

To truly understand the divergence in religious practices, cultural values, and social structures across India, we have to begin with its civilizational foundations. Southern India was the heartland of the ancient Dravidian civilization, a deeply rooted, agrarian culture built on simplicity, ecological balance, and community life. These were not people of conquest or empire. Their priorities were local and spiritual, not political. They lived close to nature, content with what the land and sea provided.

Even today, remnants of that ethos survive. During a visit to Goa, I overheard someone say, “These locals are happy with their coconut trees, rice, and fish; they don’t need palaces to enjoy life.” That comment, while casual, reflects a deeper truth. The people of the South have historically valued sufficiency over ambition, stability over dominance. Much of the modern development of resorts, industries, and infrastructure was introduced by outsiders, not driven by the native populations themselves.

This deeply embedded worldview the cultural DNA of the Dravidian people is key to understanding what came next. When the Aryans, Indo-European migrants from the northwest, began arriving in the subcontinent, they encountered a people who were neither territorial nor aggressively protective. There’s no historical record of mass resistance, nor any clear evidence of war or conquest on a genocidal scale. And perhaps one reason is that, at that point in history, weaponry and military organization had not advanced enough to make large-scale annihilation possible.

But the more likely explanation lies in a different kind of response: the Dravidians didn’t reject the newcomers; they absorbed them. They welcomed, collaborated, and over time, co-created what we now refer to as the Vedic civilization. This fusion of cultures wasn’t instantaneous or even entirely peaceful; history rarely is but it was formative, and it left traces in the language, mythology, rituals, and philosophies that emerged from that period.

While we may not have precise archaeological or textual records detailing every moment of that encounter, we can read the collaboration in the cultural synthesis that followed. Vedic hymns bear structural and linguistic elements from Indo-European traditions, yet their spiritual themes, respect for nature, cycles of life, and inner realization, echo earlier Dravidian values. This wasn’t a conquest. It was a convergence.

In the North, Aryan influences eventually took stronger hold, particularly in the development of caste structures, priestly hierarchies, and ritual formalism. In the South, the Dravidian core remained more intact, even as it participated in shaping early religious thought. The result is a civilizational duality that still defines India today: one rooted in assimilation and balance, the other in expansion and stratification.

Understanding this dual origin story is essential not just for interpreting the religious and philosophical landscape of the past but for making sense of the cultural and political divides that persist in the present.

A Marketplace of Philosophies

The idea that India has always had a single, unified religion called Hinduism is simply not true historically, philosophically, or even linguistically. In fact, the term “Hinduism” itself is a relatively recent invention. It does not appear in any of the ancient scriptures. It was never claimed by the Vedic scholars, by the Upanishadic thinkers, by the followers of Bhakti, by the ascetics in the forests, or even by those who led temple traditions. India was never about one religion; it was, and still is, a marketplace of philosophies.

Religious and philosophical thought in India did not begin with the Vedas, and the Vedas themselves were not originally religious texts in the modern sense. They were more like manuals for living, governance, and cosmic understanding, blending ritual practices with poetic speculation about the nature of existence, time, and order. They offered frameworks for community life, not mandates for worshipping a particular god or subscribing to a dogma.

The real shift toward organized religion in the sense of public preaching, renunciation, and personal salvation came much later, most notably with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, around the 5th century BCE. He questioned the very premise of life, death, and suffering. He sought clarity not through ritual, but through direct inner experience and disciplined inquiry. His teachings gave rise to Buddhism, a path that rejected caste, questioned authority, and encouraged people to find liberation through self-awareness.

Around the same time, in the western part of India, Mahavira, another reformer deeply disturbed by the culture of violence and animal sacrifice, established what would become Jainism. Like Buddhism, Jainism emphasized non-violence (ahimsa), self-discipline, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death but through even stricter ethical codes. These were not just personal beliefs they became organized spiritual movements, complete with their own texts, communities, and monastic traditions.

What followed was an explosion of thought across the Indian subcontinent. From ascetic yogic traditions to devotional Bhakti movements, from nature-based tribal belief systems to sophisticated metaphysics in the Upanishads, India became a laboratory of spiritual ideas. Many of these traditions overlapped in values compassion, karma, rebirth, inner truth but they differed in approach, cosmology, and practice. And none of them operated under a single religious banner.

It was in this pluralistic environment that a broad, evolving worldview called Sanatan Dharma began to take shape. It wasn’t founded by a prophet, nor tied to a single text. Sanatan simply means “eternal,” and Dharma refers to the natural order, moral duty, and truth. It was a flexible, inclusive framework that absorbed local customs, regional deities, philosophical debates, and ritual practices over centuries. It wasn't about conformity it was about coexistence within diversity.

The term “Hinduism” did not emerge from within this world. It was an external label, popularized under colonial rule. The British, attempting to classify and control their Indian subjects, needed neat religious categories something they could compare with Christianity and Islam, which had clear founders, holy books, and institutional structures. But India didn’t fit that model. So they grouped everything east of the Indus River into “Hinduism” a term derived from “Hind,” the Persian word for the land beyond the Indus. What started as a geographical term became a religious one, artificially grouping together countless traditions that had never identified themselves as a single religion.

Many Indians today still challenge the accuracy of this label. They argue, rightly, that calling Sanatan Dharma “Hinduism” is reductive. It erases the diversity of practices and philosophies under one politically loaded name. It treats regional traditions like Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Tantra, Shakta worship, Bhakti movements, and countless tribal spiritualities as if they’re all part of one doctrinal system. But they’re not. There was never a religious authority that declared what was or wasn’t “Hindu.” There were only schools of thought, each with its own path to truth.

So, to say that India has “practiced Hinduism for thousands of years” is not only historically inaccurate, it’s also philosophically misleading. India has practiced many paths, asked many questions, worshipped many forms, or none at all. Its spiritual tradition is not built on consensus, but on inquiry and contradiction.

But this pluralism also helps us understand why South India, in particular, has maintained a uniquely peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims, even when the North became increasingly divided along religious lines. Some of the data Ajay Prakash presented is useful here. His findings show that in South Indian regions, there were no significant historical records of temple destruction or looting by Muslim rulers. This lack of violent conflict matters. In the North, centuries of war, plunder, and iconoclasm some real, some exaggerated fueled long-standing resentment, which later political forces exploited. In contrast, South India did not carry those historical wounds, and therefore had fewer reasons to treat Muslims with suspicion or hostility.

Furthermore, Hindu temples in South India developed a unique internal hierarchy, one that ironically was less about caste purity and more about money power. Temples became heavily commercialized over time. The spiritual experience was layered with economic transactions. If you had money, regardless of caste, you could buy your way into religious rituals, access, and respect. Wealth gave lower-caste individuals access to spaces that would have excluded them elsewhere in India. While this didn’t dismantle casteism, it created a more flexible form of inclusion, based not on birth, but on purchasing power.

This commercialization also had another effect: it diluted ideological rigidity. When spiritual access is transactional, the need to "protect the faith" from outsiders becomes less urgent. There is no deep psychological investment in defending a pure spiritual identity because the system itself has already turned spiritual capital into economic capital. In short, South Indian temple culture became more about business than ideological purity.

At the same time, this commercialization was not without contradiction. South India also saw the rise and exploitation of rituals like the Dasi Pratha, where women were dedicated to temples under the guise of religious service, only to be used and discarded in exploitative systems. These practices led to internal disillusionment many people grew resentful not of other religions, but of their own spiritual leaders, who had commodified faith and manipulated tradition for personal or institutional gain.

In that context, there was little appetite to demonize Muslims. There was more energy spent confronting the hypocrisies within. And because religion in South India was already a layered, transactional, and locally adapted system, there was no single ideology to defend against the so-called "outsider."

Just as South Indians had once integrated peacefully with Aryan migrants from the North, this historical openness seems to be woven into the cultural DNA of the region. That openness has produced a kind of tolerance by default a live-and-let-live attitude that persists as long as there is no direct conflict or external provocation.

But here’s the truth many overlook: South India is not immune to religious violence. Given the right conditions, fear, propaganda, and political manipulation, the region could react no differently than the North. We saw this clearly in 2012, during the conflict between Hindus and Muslims from the Northeast. The violence was triggered by doctored videos meant to incite fear and hatred. These videos were manufactured and circulated to stoke communal tension. The strategy almost worked panic and violence spread quickly.

At the time, I was in Bangalore, and a close friend of mine, an Inspector General in the police, led the team that apprehended the individuals behind those videos. That incident revealed something sobering: tolerance is not invincibility. Even a culture with a long tradition of peaceful coexistence can be manipulated into hate, given the right spark. The South remains peaceful not because it’s morally superior but because its unique history hasn’t been exploited the same way the North’s has. Yet.

Conclusion: Tolerance Is Not Weakness

If there's one myth we need to set aside, it's that violence in India is purely religious. More often than not, violence is driven by deeper, more primal forces: money, property, sex, ego, and power. Religion is just the wrapper used to justify it. And this is where South India has historically held an advantage, not because the people are inherently better, but because their cultural values have tilted toward minimalism, simplicity, and emotional restraint.

The typical South Indian way of life has not been rooted in showmanship. There's less obsession with grand displays of wealth, less pressure to dominate or “win” every argument. This doesn’t just curb materialism it chokes the ego, the same ego that in other parts of the country has often been weaponized into violent assertion. When you're not constantly comparing or competing, you're less likely to feel threatened and less likely to lash out.

But that is changing.

Modernization, political influence, aggressive media, and rising economic disparities are slowly altering the cultural landscape. With more material prosperity comes more insecurity. With more media exposure comes more polarization. And when political leaders, even in the South start challenging peace with incendiary rhetoric, it sends up a red flag. Take, for instance, the comments made by a Muslim leader in Hyderabad, who openly provoked Hindus and appeared to invite religious confrontation. In another part of India, especially in the North, such a statement could have led to immediate, even fatal retaliation. The fact that it didn’t in this case is not proof that anger doesn't exist in the South. It’s proof that anger is being held in check for now.

It would be a mistake to assume that South India is immune to religious violence. The capacity for conflict absolutely exists, as proven in 2012, when doctored videos falsely showing Muslims being killed by people from the Northeast sparked panic and clashes in Bangalore. I was in the city at the time. Many students from Assam and other northeastern states fled overnight, terrified. People died. The violence wasn’t widespread, but it was real. And it reminded us that it only takes the right trigger to set off something much bigger.

So why hasn’t it exploded?

Because South India still has more reasons not to fight than to fight. Business ties with Arab and Muslim-majority nations matter. Educational priorities and economic interdependence matter. Families matter. The social fabric is still largely intact, and the memory of coexistence still outweighs the propaganda of division.

If I were to add commentary to Ajay Prakash’s findings, here’s what I would say:

South India has been blessed with an inclusive cultural DNA. It is tolerant by nature but never mistake that tolerance for weakness. The people here are kind, thoughtful, and grounded. They are educated enough to recognize when politics is being used to pit neighbor against neighbor. And that awareness is exactly why divisive ideologies like those promoted by the RSS have never found deep roots in the South. They tried, and failed not because of lack of effort, but because the ground was never fertile for hate.

In the end, peace in South India isn’t just a passive state of calm; it’s an active cultural choice, reinforced by history, economics, and a deep understanding of the cost of division. But as society changes, it will take constant vigilance to ensure that peace doesn’t become a fragile illusion.

Because tolerance is not guaranteed. It’s earned, protected, and lived every single day.

On a personal note, Ajay Prakash and I graduated from Punjab University around the same time, though we lost touch over the years. We’ve recently reconnected, and I had the chance to watch his YouTube channel, What Does the Data Say.

I was genuinely impressed by the depth and clarity of his analysis. His video on the cultural and religious dynamics between North and South India inspired me to write this article not as a rebuttal, but as an extension of the conversation he started. I deeply respect his work and believe voices like his are essential in helping us understand India beyond surface-level narratives.