Chapter 21: Gods Across Communities: Sanskritization and the Absorption of Folk and Tribal Deities

One of the least appreciated dynamics in the history of Sanatan Dharma is the continuous two-way exchange between elite, pan-Indian, Sanskrit-textual religion and the local, regional, tribal, and folk religious traditions of specific communities and regions — a dynamic that produced much of the pantheon’s regional diversity.

1. Sanskritization

The sociologist M.N. Srinivas coined the influential term “Sanskritization” to describe the historical process by which lower-caste and tribal groups, and their local deities and practices, progressively adopted the rituals, deities, and customs of higher, “Sanskritic” castes, often in an effort to claim higher social status, while simultaneously the wider pan-Indian tradition absorbed and reinterpreted local deities as forms or incarnations of major pan-Indian gods (Srinivas, 1966, Social Change in Modern India, is the foundational text introducing this concept, based on his earlier fieldwork among the Coorgs of South India published in 1952).

2. Case studies of assimilation

Jagannath of Puri — many scholars, following early 20th-century ethnographic and textual research, argue that Jagannath’s distinctive stump-limbed wooden image form reflects origins as a tribal deity of the Odishan Sabara (Sora) people, later assimilated into mainstream Vaishnavism as a form of Krishna/Vishnu, a process Chaitanya’s own devotion to the Puri temple, discussed in Chapter 19, helped further cement (Eschmann, Kulke, and Tripathi, eds., 1978, The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, is the standard academic study of this assimilation).

Ayyappa of Sabarimala — a South Indian deity, especially popular in Kerala, whose cult combines Shaiva and Vaishnava elements (he is described in some traditions as the son of Shiva and Mohini, Vishnu’s female form) with what many scholars regard as pre-existing regional and possibly tribal hill-deity worship traditions predating full Brahmanical incorporation.

Khandoba of Maharashtra and Karnataka — a regional warrior-god particularly popular among pastoral and formerly “lower”-caste communities, progressively identified in Brahmanical texts as a form of Shiva, illustrating the Sanskritization process directly (Sontheimer, 1989, Pastoral Deities in Western India, is a dedicated academic study of Khandoba’s cult and its assimilation).

Village goddesses (grama devatas) — figures such as Mariamman (widely worshipped in Tamil Nadu, especially associated with protection from disease, particularly smallpox historically), Yellamma, and countless other local goddesses, historically often worshipped independently of Brahmanical ritual and, in some regions, historically propitiated with animal sacrifice, have in many places become linked, identified, or merged with the great pan-Indian goddesses Durga or Parvati, even as their local forms, temples, priesthoods (often non-Brahmin), and festival practices persist alongside this pan-Indian identification (Kinsley, 1986, ch. 13, “Village Goddesses,” is a dedicated scholarly treatment of this dynamic).

The overall pattern, as these case studies illustrate, runs in both directions: local communities gained prestige and legitimacy by connecting their deities to the great pan-Indian gods, while the pan-Indian tradition itself grew immeasurably richer, more regionally rooted, and more genuinely popular by continuously absorbing, rather than simply displacing, the specific religious lives of the many distinct communities across the subcontinent that came to identify, in the end, as followers of one eternal dharma.

3. Historical context, evidence, and interpretation

The subject of Gods Across Communities: Sanskritization and the Absorption of Folk and Tribal Deities needs to be approached at more than one level. A religious tradition is not only a collection of doctrines; it is also a record of texts, institutions, practices, places, memories, and changing interpretations. The same word may carry different meanings in different centuries, and the same institution may change while retaining its name. For that reason, the discussion in this chapter distinguishes, wherever the evidence permits, between what a primary source says, what a later community remembers, and what historians infer from comparing independent evidence. This distinction is especially important when a tradition describes its own origins in sacred or idealized language.

Chronology is another safeguard. Dates in South Asian religious history are often approximate because manuscripts are later than the compositions they preserve, oral traditions can predate their surviving written forms, and legendary biographies may combine historical memory with theological purpose. A date attached to a text should therefore not automatically be treated as the date when every idea in that text first existed. Conversely, uncertainty about an exact date does not make a source useless. Linguistic change, intertextual references, material culture, inscriptions, manuscript relationships, and the geographical distribution of traditions can all help establish relative sequence. The result is a history that sometimes has to use ranges and probabilities rather than false precision.

Regional diversity is equally significant. Sanatan Dharma traditions developed across languages and political regions, and religious vocabulary moved between Sanskrit, Prakrits, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and many other languages. A practice described in a Sanskrit normative text may not have been followed in the same form by every community. Conversely, a practice absent from a particular Sanskrit text may be important in a local tradition. Historians therefore compare textual sources with inscriptions, temple records, poetry, ritual manuals, oral histories, archaeology, and ethnography when those sources are available. This approach avoids treating elite textual traditions as a complete record of ordinary religious life.

The chapter's topic also demonstrates why the categories used in modern scholarship should be handled carefully. Terms such as “Sanatan Dharma,” “sect,” “orthodox,” “reform,” “tradition,” “modern,” and “folk” are analytical tools, not neutral labels that existed in exactly their present meanings throughout history. A community may understand itself through lineage, deity, village, language, caste, monastic order, philosophical school, or several of these at once. Modern institutions can preserve older practices while introducing new organizational forms, technologies, educational programs, or global networks. Describing such developments as either pure continuity or complete rupture usually misses the more interesting historical process of selective adaptation.

Primary sources deserve particular attention because they constrain what can responsibly be said. Where the chapter discusses a scripture, the strongest evidence is the text itself in a reliable critical or scholarly translation. Where it discusses an institution, inscriptions, legal records, institutional constitutions, archival documents, court records, or contemporary statements can be more probative than later summaries. Secondary scholarship remains indispensable for chronology, context, translation, and historiographical disagreement, but it should be possible for a reader to trace important claims back toward the underlying evidence. Where evidence is disputed, the text should identify the disagreement rather than manufacture certainty.

Finally, interpretation should remain proportionate to evidence. Similar symbols do not necessarily prove direct historical borrowing; theological similarity does not by itself establish institutional descent; and a later community's claim about antiquity is evidence for that community's self-understanding, not automatically proof of the claimed chronology. These cautions do not diminish the significance of religious traditions. They make the history stronger by allowing sacred claims, scholarly hypotheses, archaeological evidence, and modern institutional narratives to be distinguished rather than conflated. The aim of this chapter, as with the book as a whole, is therefore not to settle every contested question but to give readers enough evidence and context to understand why the questions remain meaningful.

4. Beyond a One-Way Model of Sanskritization

The concept of Sanskritization is useful, but it should not be treated as a universal law of religious change. M. N. Srinivas developed the term from sociological fieldwork to describe processes of social mobility and cultural change; historians of religion have also used related ideas to describe the incorporation of regional traditions into wider Sanskritic frameworks. Yet the historical record often shows reciprocal transformation rather than a simple movement from “folk” religion toward an already complete Brahmanical system. Local communities could reshape the meaning of a major deity, while temple institutions and political patrons could recast a regional cult in a wider theological vocabulary. The resulting tradition might preserve local priests, festivals, myths, foods, ritual specialists, sacred geography, and distinctive iconography even after the deity received a Sanskritic identification.

Jagannath provides a particularly instructive case because the scholarly literature does not reduce the cult to a single origin story. The interdisciplinary study edited by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi examines the interaction of classical Sanatan Dharma traditions with regional religious practices, royal patronage, priestly institutions, ritual change, and later political identity. Its contents include separate studies of the formation of the Jagannatha triad, royal patronage, priestly power, Navakalevara, Caitanya in Orissa, and the relationship between Jagannatha and Oriya nationalism. This range of topics is important: it demonstrates that the history of a regional deity cannot responsibly be reconstructed from a single hypothesis about “tribal origins.”

The archaeological study of Sanatan Dharma likewise cautions against automatically equating prehistoric or Indus-period objects with later Sanatan Dharma deities. Material similarities can suggest questions for investigation, but they do not by themselves establish an unbroken line of worship. The same caution applies to village goddesses. A modern identification of a local goddess with Durga, Parvati, Kali, or another pan-Indian form may describe a living theological relationship without proving that the local cult historically originated as a manifestation of that deity. The strongest historical account therefore allows multiple layers to coexist: local religious memory, regional political integration, Sanskrit textual classification, temple administration, and later devotional reinterpretation.

This approach also changes how “absorption” should be understood. Absorption can imply that one tradition disappears into another, but many regional cults demonstrate persistence rather than disappearance. A village deity may acquire a Sanskrit name while retaining a local festival; a temple may adopt a Purāṇic narrative while preserving hereditary service groups; and a deity may be understood simultaneously through several theological identities. Such layered identities are not anomalies. They are one of the principal mechanisms by which South Asian religious traditions have remained both locally specific and capable of transregional recognition.

5. How Historians Reconstruct Regional Religious Change

A useful way to study local-deity integration is to compare several kinds of evidence rather than privileging one source. A temple inscription may establish patronage at a particular date, but it may say little about village worship outside the temple. A Purāṇic narrative may explain a deity's theological identity, but its literary form may postdate the practice it describes. Ethnography can document a living ritual but cannot automatically project that practice unchanged into antiquity. Archaeology can establish a shrine, image, settlement pattern, or material practice, but an object rarely explains its own meaning without contextual evidence.

These limitations are especially important when modern traditions provide elegant origin narratives. A claim that a deity has “always” been a form of Śiva, Viṣṇu, or Devī can be religiously meaningful while remaining historically difficult to date. Conversely, a claim that a deity was once exclusively “tribal” can also oversimplify a history in which different communities participated in the cult at different times. The most responsible conclusion may therefore be that a cult displays evidence of multiple historical layers without assigning a single origin to the whole tradition.

The broader archaeological literature supports this layered approach. Namita Sugandhi's survey of the archaeology of Sanatan Dharma notes that proposed links between Indus-period material and later Sanatan Dharma iconography remain tenuous, while later periods provide a much richer combination of temples, sculpture, inscriptions, and textual evidence. She also emphasizes that archaeological knowledge is disproportionately drawn from institutional and elite contexts, leaving ordinary household religion more difficult to reconstruct.

This evidence-based approach strengthens rather than weakens the concept of continuity. Continuity can be demonstrated in particular practices, sacred places, symbols, institutions, or communities, but it should be described at the level actually supported by evidence. Where evidence indicates transformation, transformation should be acknowledged. The history of Sanatan Dharma is therefore better represented as a long process of preservation, adaptation, reinterpretation, and regional synthesis than as either complete rupture or perfect unchanged continuity.

6. Evidence, Terminology, and Responsible Interpretation

Several methodological principles help prevent overstatement. First, terminology must be historically situated. Words such as “Sanatan Dharma,” “sect,” “folk,” “tribal,” “orthodox,” “reform,” and “modern” have different meanings in different contexts. Applying a contemporary category to a much earlier community can create the illusion of continuity where the evidence actually shows a change in identity or institution. Second, religious traditions should not be represented solely through elite texts. Archaeology, inscriptions, regional literature, temple records, biographies, oral traditions, and ethnographic research can reveal dimensions of religious life that normative Sanskrit texts do not record.

Third, similarities should be described cautiously. A shared ritual form, deity name, symbol, or philosophical idea may result from direct borrowing, common inheritance, independent development, or later reinterpretation. Establishing influence requires chronological plausibility and some evidence of transmission. This is particularly important when discussing connections between local traditions and pan-Indian deities, between Sanatan Dharma and Islamic traditions, or between ancient and modern institutions.

Finally, uncertainty should be treated as information rather than a weakness. A historical account becomes more trustworthy when it tells readers what is known, what is probable, what is disputed, and what belongs primarily to sacred tradition. The purpose of a research-oriented portal is not to eliminate religious meaning but to keep different kinds of claims intelligible. Where the evidence cannot establish a precise conclusion, the chapter should say so explicitly. That standard will be applied consistently throughout the remaining chapters.