Ahead of the 2026 Char Dham Yatra, the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee has banned “non-Sanatanis” from all 48 temples under its jurisdiction. Its chairman framed the ban as “a matter of religious faith, not civil rights”. The BKTC claims that Adi Shankaracharya, the 8th-century philosopher-saint, established the system “since ancient times.”
There is no evidence Shankara did anything of the sort. In fact, beyond his philosophical contributions to Advaita, the guru is well known for his disputations with Buddhists and with rival Shaivite ascetics, particularly the skull-bearing Kapalikas. Islam had not even arrived in the Himalayas during his lifetime.
What the BKTC is really drawing on is a bigger idea: that “Abrahamic” religions are alien to, and incompatible with, Indian culture. This is a whitewashing of history. Over centuries, elite Indian Hindus and Muslims frequently shared spaces, ritual notions, and even some divinities. On the darker side, they also shared the idea that caste purity and political might, not religious affiliation, determined proximity to God.
What did religious identity mean?
While not the focus of this piece, I should point out that the historical record includes considerable sectarian violence between the “Sanatan” Buddhist, Jain and Hindu traditions. But to focus on the antagonism is to ignore a religious fluidity that they all shared with each other—and with Indian Islam.
In medieval South India, for example, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish archaeologically between a “Jain” site and a “Hindu” site. Leslie Orr, in Identity and Divinity: Boundary-Crossing Goddesses in Medieval South India, shows that many goddesses were worshipped in both Hindu and Jain traditions, the only difference being the name. The Jain goddess Padmavati, for example, was depicted riding a lion, just like Durga. Even ritual notions—daily ablutions, processions—were shared. Orr argues that the average person likely did not distinguish between the divinities of Sanskritic texts and the more familiar local mother goddesses.
Jainism scholar Michael Carrithers, in a landmark essay in Modern Asian Studies, used the concept of polytropy to describe this: Until recently, across the subcontinent, individuals and communities maintained multiple religious relationships simultaneously. Crucially, polytropy was hierarchical—one might offer most devotion to a village goddess or caste deity, while also, on occasion, worshipping a figure from another tradition entirely.
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Vishnu’s Muslim wives
This is why, even after the military-political ascendancy of Islam in the subcontinent, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of Hindus in ostensibly Muslim religious spaces, and vice versa. To be clear, Brahmanical sources frequently called Muslims mlecchas, barbarians. And Muslim theologians and court chroniclers demanded violence against infidels. However, the polytropic evidence is more concrete.
Mughal emperors (even Aurangzeb) routinely made endowments to Brahmins and to temples. Brajbhasha poetry on Krishna, composed by important Persian aristocrats, suggests that the religious boundary was indeed blurry. The great temple of Ranganatha at Srirangam was sacked by Malik Kafur, a Gujarati general of the Delhi Sultanate. But a female divinity called “Turk Princess”, Thulukka Nachiyar, has been integrated into the ritual calendar, ensuring at least a symbolic Muslim presence inside the temple. The same also goes for Tirumala, where Bibi Nancharamma is considered Venkateshwara’s consort—though the temple was extorted by the court of Arcot in the 18th century. Significantly, none of the legends of the Bibi and the Nachiyar claims they underwent a conversion ritual to become Hindu. They were accepted as the gods’ consorts through devotion alone.
Conversely, Hindu officials in the Mughal court, such as Chandar Bhan Brahman, described (in Persian, no less) the beauty of Shah Jahan’s Jama Masjid; Iranian travellers, such as Shustari in the 18th century, noted that many Hindus in Delhi constructed imambaras and even fought off other groups to defend Muharram processions.
Then, of course, there are dargahs, shrines to Sufi saints. Various scholars of Indian Islam have pointed out that dargah culture is a unique invention of the subcontinent, since it does not technically have a basis in the Qur’an or hadiths. By absorbing popular practices over the centuries, dargahs evolved into uniquely Indian spaces where worshippers across caste and religious boundaries worship and request divine intervention. As such, they have been criticised both by Hindutva activists and Islamist evangelists who insist on “pure” forms of devotion.
Who was kept out?
If religion was not a consistent boundary for temple or mosque entry, what was? Caste.
“Sanatan” histories, often with blatant disregard for Hindu texts, ignore how caste structured every aspect of temple practice—right down to the sanctum sanctorum. Take, for example, the Kamikāgama, a medieval Shaivite text. “Those who are born from Brahman’s mouth but without Śiva’s emission [i.e., Brahmans not of the five Adishaiva clans] are common Brahmans. They are not competent to offer worship for others. If by some mistake they do, king and country will be destroyed.” (Chapter 4, verses 7–9). Yet, socially, Smarta Brahmins—followers of Shankaracharya’s own Advaita tradition—claimed precedence over the Adishaiva Brahmins.
All evidence from premodern temples indicates that caste determined proximity to God. At Srirangam—the same temple that incorporated the Muslim princess Thulukka Nachiyar—inscriptions show that Brahmins cornered the most prestigious positions. In fact, in The Vaiṣṇava Community at Śrīraṅgam, Leslie Orr argues that Srirangam was exceptional in that its temple committees were not solely Brahmin. Outside the temple walls, the picture was stark. Eleventh-century inscriptions at the great Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur record Paraiyar—today classified as Scheduled Castes—living in segregated hamlets with separate cremation grounds. While the occasional Paraiyar rose to become temple patrons through military careers, by the 13th century, the term Paraiyar had become an insult. Temple compounds were walled, and “untouchables” were either entirely excluded or only allowed into the outermost courtyards on public occasions.
Middling groups gained temple access through wealth, prestige, and by adopting upper-caste norms—a process that anthropologist MN Srinivas termed Sanskritisation. Examples abound. As noted in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, in the 12th century, a group of artisans at Tiruvarur persuaded the local Brahmins to grant them the right to perform some Vedic rituals. In contrast, other sculptors, such as the Vishwakarmas, claimed the right to the sacred thread and ability to ritually invoke divinity into idols—but this was disputed by Brahmins over the centuries. Under the Vijayanagara Empire in the 15th century, Kaikkolar weavers secured the privileges of blowing the conch shell and riding palanquins on ritual occasions. Temples served as spaces for social mobility—but only by accepting the caste hierarchy.
By 1924, Dalits across much of India were systematically excluded from temples. In Travancore, they could not even walk on roads near temples. When activists marched on the roads near the Vaikom temple in Kottayam, they were arrested by the police—attracting national attention and the involvement of major Congress leaders, including MK Gandhi. Gandhi promptly declared it a “Hindu affair” and snubbed help from other religious groups. Even with his political clout, though, progress was slow. It was only in 1936 that the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation finally opened state-controlled temples to all Hindus regardless of caste.
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How elites constructed communities
Islam in the subcontinent absorbed the same notions of ritual purity. The 1901 Bengal Census describes a three-fold caste system: Ashraafs (claiming foreign or upper-caste descent) on top, Ajlafs (middle-caste converts) in the middle, and Arzal—who, as Ambedkar noted, other Muslims would not associate with, and who were “forbidden to enter the mosque or to use the public burial ground.”
Colonial observers and Muslim reformers alike dismissed Bengali Muslim practice—including that of Muslims who still bore Hindu surnames like Chanda and Datta—as superstitious. As historian Asim Roy documents in The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, a “syncretistic Muslim’s total life-style lay naked before the puritan’s scanning eyes” and “covered him with a sense of shame and guilt.” Scholars of Indian Islam have suggested that this produces an equivalent of Sanskritisation: Ashrafisation, climbing the social ladder by adopting elite norms and shedding supposedly “un-Islamic” practices.
Similar processes were at work among Hindus. David Gordon White, in The Kiss of the Yogini, draws on British ethnographic surveys from Bihar in the early 1800s. Bengali pandits working for the British reported that the religion of a quarter of the population was “unworthy of note”—these were cults of village goddesses worshipped by the marginalised. Of the “worthy” remainder, barely a tenth identified as Vaishnava; over 40 per cent were Tantric or Shakta. Yet today, worship of Ram has become one of the most important indicators of “Sanatan” identity.
The key point is that both Brahmins and Ashraafs not only set the rules for social climbing but also imposed rigid categories on the masses through their proximity to British power. In the tense decades leading to Partition, Hindu and Muslim elites selectively absorbed the “lower” castes once excluded from sacred spaces—and set the terms on which they could be considered Hindu or Muslim at all. These were antagonistic terms that rapidly erased living memory of polytropy.
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Erasing histories
The BKTC’s project does not recover ancient tradition. It forgets Thulukka Nachiyar, Vishnu’s Muslim wife at Srirangam. It forgets Vavar, whose mosque is the first stop on the road to Sabarimala. And it appropriates the memory of Shankaracharya to fit him into modern political agendas. And in projecting the “Sanatan” backwards, it imposes itself onto historical Buddhist, Jain, and local religious identities. And it does all this while systematically ignoring the way that caste structured, and continues to structure, religious spaces today.
There is a long precedent of elites using ritual spaces to establish who is politically “in” or “out”. The out-group can sometimes enter—through Sanskritisation, Ashrafisation, an affidavit or a sip of panchgavya. But only if they forget their history. The question that needs to be directed is not “who is allowed”. It should be “who holds the key?”
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)