Modern Hinduism Since 1947: Law, Yoga, Ayodhya, Hindutva

The record of modern Hinduism centres on the Hindu Code Bills, Ambedkar’s conversion, global yoga, the televised epics, the Ayodhya litigation, and the state of caste and of women’s temple access.

1. The Hindu Code Bills: a state reforms a religion

Ambedkar, as Law Minister, drafted a comprehensive bill to codify and reform Hindu personal law. It met sustained opposition from Hindu traditionalist members and from President Rajendra Prasad, and was broken up and stalled. Ambedkar resigned in September 1951; his resignation statement lists the Code’s fate as one of five grievances, alongside his confinement to the Law portfolio, exclusion from the Planning Commission, the treatment of the Scheduled Castes, and Nehru’s Kashmir policy.^[5] Nehru pushed the pieces through in 1955–56 as four separate Acts.^[1]​^[34]

The reform also had a long colonial prehistory: the Hindu Marriages Validity Act 1949 had already validated inter-caste marriage, and Bombay and Madras had banned Hindu bigamy in 1946 and 1949.^[2]

What changed for Hindus (and, by the Acts’ definition, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists):

What it proves. This is the largest single change in the practice of Hinduism in this chapter, and it was made by a secular legislature against significant religious opposition, at the urging of a man who had publicly burned the Manusmṛti and would convert to Buddhism within months.

It also created an asymmetry that remains politically live: Hindu personal law was reformed and codified, while Muslim, Christian and Parsi personal laws largely were not. That asymmetry is the root of the continuing Uniform Civil Code argument, which Article 44 of the Constitution names as a directive principle and which Uttarakhand enacted at state level in 2024.^[35]​^[23] Consensus on the history; Political on the current debate

2. Ambedkar’s exit

On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur, Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism, taking the refuges from the monk U Chandramani, and then converted a crowd usually estimated at around 400,000 people. He administered twenty-two vows, given in Marathi (English versions differ), several of which explicitly renounce belief in the Hindu gods and in the Buddha as an avatar of Viṣṇu.^[7]​^[8] He died seven weeks later, on 6 December 1956.^[5]

What it proves. The conversion is the logical endpoint of the argument in Chapter 11: if caste is authorized by the tradition’s own scriptures, then reform from inside is not available and exit is.^[36] The Navayāna Buddhism he founded (this-worldly, rationalist, oriented to social liberation) now has millions of adherents concentrated in Maharashtra (the 2011 census counted 8.4 million Buddhists in India, about 6.5 million of them in that state), and constitutes the largest religious secession from Hinduism in modern history.^[26]​^[8] Consensus

3. Yoga leaves home

Modern postural yoga descends principally from T. Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), who taught in the Mysore palace and trained the teachers who globalized it: B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and his son T. K. V. Desikachar.^[37]

Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body (2010) argued that the dynamic āsana sequences at the core of modern practice (sun salutations, flowing vinyāsa, the emphasis on physical postures) took shape in the early twentieth century through contact with European gymnastics, Scandinavian physical culture and Indian wrestling traditions.^[37]

What happened next is more interesting than the dispute. James Mallinson’s 2011 response thanked Singleton for explaining how the sun salutation, absent from the medieval sources, became central to yoga, while documenting non-seated postures in premodern texts from about the tenth century on.^[38] The two then co-authored Roots of Yoga (2017) from over a hundred premodern sources, and worked with Jason Birch on the Haṭha Yoga Project at SOAS (2015–2020), which substantially expanded the known premodern repertoire: the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati (c. 18th c.) describes some 112 postures including dynamic, jumping and rope-assisted sequences.^[39]​^[40] The honest current statement: Singleton’s account of the modern lineage stands; the implied thinness of the premodern record has been revised by his own later work. [Was contested; substantially settled by the disputants' joint work]

What is not disputed: the relationship to Chapter 5 and Chapter 7 is loose. Yoga in the Rigveda means yoking a chariot; in the Gītā it means disciplined action, knowledge or devotion; in Patañjali it means stilling the fluctuations of the mind, with posture given three sūtras out of 195 (YS 2.46–48).^[41]​^[39] A practice now done by millions of people, most of them not Hindu, mostly for health, is continuous with that history in name and lineage and quite distant from it in content. Whether that constitutes appropriation, evolution, or successful export is argued by Hindus themselves. Political

4. Television and the standardizing of story

Ramanand Sagar’s Rāmāyaṇ (1987–88) and B. R. Chopra’s Mahābhārat (1988–90) drew audiences routinely estimated at 80–100 million per episode.^[42]​^[3] Streets emptied. Sets were garlanded and worshipped.^[3]

What it proves. Chapter 10 established that India had many Rāmāyaṇas: Vālmīki’s, Tulsīdās’s, Kamban’s Tamil, Krittibas’s Bengali, Jain versions in which Rāvaṇa is a tragic hero, folk versions in which Sītā is the protagonist and versions where she is Rāvaṇa’s daughter. A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (1991) documented this plurality; it was removed from a Delhi University syllabus after protests in 2011.^[43]

Broadcasting one version to a hundred million people simultaneously does something print never quite managed: it makes a single telling the telling. The serials drew mainly on Tulsīdās, and, as Lutgendorf and Rajagopal argue, the serial’s version became the default telling for a generation of viewers.^[3]​^[12] Media technology has shaped religious content at every stage of this history: oral memorization (§3), manuscript (§4 onward), print (§11), broadcast, and now the feed. Majority

5. Ayodhya

The dispute over the site at Ayodhya (a mosque built in 1528, claimed by Hindus as the birthplace of Rāma) was litigated from 1885. It became a mass movement in the 1980s: the VHP’s campaign from 1984, the śilānyās foundation ceremony in 1989, L. K. Advani’s rath yātrā in 1990.^[6]

On 6 December 1992 a crowd demolished the Babri Masjid. Riots followed across India, killing roughly two thousand people, and the bombings in Bombay in March 1993 killed some two hundred and fifty more.^[15]

On 9 November 2019, in M Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das (2020) 1 SCC 1, a unanimous and deliberately unsigned five-judge bench decreed the disputed land not to “the Hindus” generically but to the deity itself, Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman, with possession to a trust to be constituted by the Central Government. The Nirmohi Akhara’s suit was dismissed as time-barred, and the Sunni Waqf Board’s claim to the site failed for want of proof of exclusive possession; five acres elsewhere were directed for a mosque under Article 142, expressly as a remedy for two wrongs the Court itself named as unlawful: the placing of idols inside the mosque in December 1949 and the demolition of December 1992, which it called “an egregious violation of the rule of law.”^[19]

On the archaeology, the Court held the ASI report admissible but ruled that “a finding of title cannot be based in law on the archaeological findings.”^[19] The ASI had found that the mosque was not built on vacant land and that the underlying structure was not Islamic, but not that it had been demolished to build the mosque: “No evidence is available in a case of this antiquity on (i) the cause of destruction of the underlying structure; and (ii) whether the pre-existing structure was demolished for the construction of the mosque.”^[19] The temple was consecrated on 22 January 2024, and its construction was formally declared complete with a flag-hoisting ceremony on 25 November 2025.

The legal sequel matters as much as the judgment. The 2019 bench expressly endorsed the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, which freezes the character of every other religious site as it stood on 15 August 1947.^[22] That Act is now itself under challenge, and on 12 December 2024 the Supreme Court barred the registration of new suits seeking surveys of religious places and barred effective orders in the roughly eighteen already pending: Gyanvapi, the Shahi Idgah at Mathura, Sambhal, Bhojshala and others.^[21] Whether Ayodhya was an endpoint or a template is, as of 2026, still being litigated. Political

What it proves. Reporting this factually matters more than adjudicating it. What the sequence shows is that the historical questions running through this entire series, what happened to temples under Muslim rule (§10), who is indigenous to India (§0), what counts as Hindu (§11), are not academic. They have produced mass mobilization, a demolished building, thousands of deaths, a Supreme Court judgment, and a consecrated temple. Consensus on the events; Political throughout

6. Caste now

• Legally: untouchability abolished (Art. 17), atrocities criminalized (1989 Act), reservations in education, employment and legislatures for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and (after the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were adopted in 1990 and upheld in 1992) Other Backward Classes.^[4]​^[44]​^[13]
• Socially: inter-caste marriage runs at roughly 5–6% of all marriages nationally (IHDS-II, 2011–12: 5.82%), and (the more striking finding) has shown no clear upward trend across four decades of marriage cohorts. State variation is wide, from about 1% in Madhya Pradesh to far higher shares in some north-eastern states, where survey samples are small.^[30]​^[45] Endogamy is the strongest surviving element of the system and the mechanism by which caste reproduces itself, a point Ambedkar argued as early as Castes in India (1916).^[46] NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, against 57,582 in 2022.^[31]
• Politically: caste is a primary axis of electoral mobilization. On 30 April 2025 the government approved caste enumeration in Census 2027, the first in a national census since 1931, and the reason that 1931 figure still anchors every argument about caste numbers.^[24] In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) a seven-judge bench held 6:1 that states may sub-classify within the Scheduled Castes, overruling E. V. Chinnaiah (2005); several judges urged extending the creamy-layer principle to SC/ST.^[20] It is the most consequential caste-law ruling since Indra Sawhney.^[13]

What it proves. The doctrinal history traced across this series (occupational ranking in §3 hardening into a birth order in §4, codified in §7, contested by devotional movements in §9 and §10, fixed administratively in §11) did not end when the law changed.^[47] Consensus

7. Women and access

Legal transformation, ritual continuity. In 2018 the Supreme Court held 4:1 that excluding women of menstruating age from the Sabarimala temple was unconstitutional (Indu Malhotra J. dissenting).^[18] Mass protests followed, including by women devotees. In November 2019 the Court kept the review petitions pending and referred a set of broader questions to a nine-judge bench by 3:2, but, contrary to widespread reporting, it did not stay the 2018 judgment, and the two dissenting judges, Nariman and Chandrachud JJ., stressed that it remained binding.^[25]

The reference then sat dormant for six years. The nine-judge bench began hearing on 7 April 2026 and reserved judgment on 14 May 2026, taking Sabarimala together with Muslim women’s entry to mosques, Parsi women’s entry to fire temples after interfaith marriage, and Dawoodi Bohra practices.^[25] The question it must answer is the one running under this whole section: whether a court may weigh “constitutional morality” against a religious denomination’s own account of what is essential to it.^[48]​^[49] As of early October 2026 the judgment had not been delivered. Political Meanwhile training programmes have produced small but growing numbers of women performing priestly functions, mostly in Maharashtra and among urban householders.

The long arc from Chapter 5 is worth stating plainly: Gārgī argued in open assembly around 700 BCE^[50]; Manu declared women unfit for independence around the turn of the era (§7)^[51]; the bhakti saints made room for Āṇṭāḷ, Akka Mahādēvi and Mīrā (§9, §10) at the cost of exit from ordinary life; and formal legal equality arrived in the 1950s and 2005. Ritual authority has moved least. Majority

• Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007; rev. 2017).
• Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (2021).
• Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (2010), with James Mallinson & Singleton, Roots of Yoga (2017) for the counterweight.
• Philip Lutgendorf, “Ramayan: The Video,” TDR 34 (1990), on the televised epic.
• A. K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (1991).
• Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998).
• Anupama Rao, The Caste Question (2009).
• Vasudha Narayanan and Diana Eck on diaspora Hinduism; Eck, A New Religious America (2001).