What if the answer to religious nationalism isn’t less religion?
Kerala’s recent elections suggest that a healthier alternative to fundamentalism may not be the absence of faith, but a more confident way of living with it.
Earlier this month, Kerala’s state elections made news for an obvious reason: the Congress-led opposition ended ten years of Communist-led rule in one of the last places in the world where communists still won power through the ballot box. But the more interesting story was elsewhere.
As the politician Shashi Tharoor noted: a Hindu-majority constituency, Kalamassery, had elected a Muslim candidate; a Muslim-majority constituency, Thavanur, had elected a Christian candidate; and a Christian-majority constituency, Kochi, had elected another Muslim candidate.
In a country where every vote gets parsed as consolidation or backlash, where every candidate is their community first and a human second, those results were worth pausing on. It isn’t because they proved Kerala is a paradise of communal harmony — no place in India deserves that kind of romance — but because they interrupted a logic that has settled so deeply into our political language that we’ve stopped noticing it at all. Hindu seat. Muslim candidate. Minority consolidation. Majority backlash. These are concepts that start as analysis and somewhere along the way become fate.
When India became independent, it inherited a genuine problem: how do you hold together a country of this many faiths and languages without it tearing itself apart? The answer Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, offered was a particular kind of secularism where public life bracketed religion, kept faith out of serious political business, and treated India’s pluralism as something to be managed from above. In the wreckage of Partition, the instinct was understandable.
But the model he reached for was more at home on the shores of Europe than on the Subcontinent. It was not quite French laïcité, but it shared some of its discomfort with public religion: the belief that modern politics should keep faith at arm’s length, that the state’s neutrality depended on rising above religious life rather than learning how to live within it. France arrived at it through its own history of religious wars; Nehru, however, picked it up at Cambridge.
The problem is that it was never really true of India. In a country where the calendar runs on religious festivals, where every alley can become a procession route, and where your name often announces your community before you open your mouth, you cannot push faith into the private sphere without pretending it is not there. And when a State built by English-educated elites starts treating religion as something to be managed down, people notice. The resentment that builds from that feeling doesn’t dissipate. It simmers.
Hindu mobilisation from the 1980s onward drew heavily from exactly that grievance. The argument — that secularism had become a cover for treating Hinduism as the problem while protecting everyone else — wasn’t always a fair characterisation. But it landed because it pointed to something real: That the Nehruvian model had never seriously reckoned with what religion meant to most people, which was not a private matter to be kept indoors but the primary way they understood themselves and their place in the world. In trying to rise above India’s religious question, it quietly fed it.
But Kerala’s older coexistence was built on something completely different. It was not on religion being absent from public life, but on no single religion being able to claim the whole of it. And that distinction, between a secularism imposed from above and a pluralism that grew from the ground, is worth sitting with, because one of them has a two-thousand-year head start.
The modern-day state of Kerala is where St Thomas — the doubting Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles — is said to have arrived in 52 AD, finding a place already in conversation with the world. He landed at the ancient port of Muziris, near today’s Kodungallur, a city said to have been swallowed by a flood. Once one of the busiest ports on earth, it welcomed ships from Alexandria and the Red Sea in search for pepper and pearls. When St Thomas stepped ashore, he found Jewish traders who had already made their homes on the coast, some say since the time of King Solomon. Christianity in Kerala, then, was never a colonial import. It was indigenised from the beginning, speaking Malayalam but praying in Syriac. Even now, many Syrian Christian families speak of Brahmin ancestors who converted under St Thomas.
A few miles from Muziris, there’s another story. The Cheraman Juma Masjid in Kodungallur is often described as India’s first mosque. The legend goes that the Chera king Cheraman Perumal saw the moon split in the sky, sailed across the Arabian Sea, met the Prophet, embraced Islam, and asked that a mosque be built in his name. You can take it as history or legend (or both, which is probably the honest answer). But what struck me standing there was the building itself: sloping tiled roof, oil lamps, wood carvings, built entirely in the Kerala architectural language of its time. It doesn’t feel like something dropped onto the coast from Arabia, but like Islam translated into the idiom of Malabar.
What is striking, then, is not simply that Christianity and Islam arrived early in Kerala, but that they were, by and large, given room to take root. The older Hindu society of the coast did not always respond to new faiths as existential threats. Rulers granted land, communities accepted them, and converts often remained embedded in the social worlds from which they came.
I don’t intend to romanticise the past. Acceptance did not always mean equality. Kerala’s caste order could be brutal, and no serious account of the state’s past can pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between a society that absorbs difference unequally and one that sees every difference as invasion. Kerala’s older religious landscape seems to have done more of the former than the latter.
This matters not only for minorities, but for the Hindu majority too. A mosque that borrowed the architectural form of a temple and that doesn’t feel “out of place”, or a Christian family that remembers an older Hindu lineage, tells the older society that the new faith has not come merely to erase what was there before. Its difference remains real, but it is not rootless. It acknowledges the land it inhabits.
And so, what accumulated on this coast over millenia was not tolerance in any thin sense — a polite looking away from difference — but something closer to familiarity. Too many faiths had arrived, taken root, borrowed from each other, and left communities that remembered several pasts at once, for any single religion to convincingly claim ownership of the place. That is not just a constitutional achievement but a historical one.
At the Cheraman Juma Masjid, the caretaker who showed me around was a Hindu man named Tilakam. He didn’t offer his faith as a curiosity or a point of pride. He showed me how to do the wuzu, the ablution, before I could enter — matter-of-factly, the way you’d show someone where to leave their shoes outside a temple — then went back to watching over the mosque while the believers prayed inside. When I asked him about it, he spoke with pride about the Bhagavathy temple nearby, whose architecture this mosque was said to have borrowed. His religion wasn’t set aside. It was just there, alongside everything else.
I’ve been thinking about such stories a lot. Travelling through India’s sacred geography this past year, the people I kept meeting who moved most easily between faiths — who’d leave flowers at a dargah and light a lamp at a temple or a candle at a church and think nothing of it — were not people who had loosened their grip on their own religion. If anything, it was the opposite. They were at ease with someone else’s faith precisely because they were settled in their own. It’s a different thing entirely from the discomfort with religion that runs through a particular kind of Indian liberalism: the instinct to treat public devotion as backwardness, to see the person prostrating at a temple or clutching a rosary as someone who hasn’t quite caught up yet. That instinct doesn’t just misread India. It leaves the conversation about faith entirely to people who want to turn it into a weapon, and then seems surprised when the weapon keeps working.
The way out of religious nationalism may not be less religion. It may be the ability to be rooted enough in one’s own practice not to need anyone else’s diminishment. That is not easy, especially for minorities. To belong to another faith and still feel fully at home requires more than liberal slogans. It requires a dense sense of community, a world in which difference is not treated as a problem to be solved but as part of what makes the place what it is.
Kerala has more of that than most places, not because its people are less devout, but because they have never had the luxury of pretending that faith belongs to only one community. It should be acknowledged that its politics has mattered too. A long Communist presence did not erase religion from Kerala, but it did help train public life around ideas of class, welfare, education, unions and community rather than religious identity alone. People still remained Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew. But they were also workers, voters, neighbours, party members, students, migrants, beneficiaries of public services, and participants in a shared civic life.
When the mosque you enter is built in the style of a Hindu temple and watched over by a Hindu caretaker, or when the synagogue you visit shares a wall with a temple, on land granted by a Hindu ruler, and is now watched over by a Christian caretaker, as at the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry, the story of religion as siege and conquest begins to feel like someone else’s story. It feels imported from somewhere that never had this coast’s particular history.
This is why last week’s election results matter.
Voters in Kerala crossed lines they are increasingly told they cannot cross. I don’t think it’s because they forgot their religion. I don’t think they floated above history as abstract citizens. I think they simply refused to let one part of identity decide everything — and in doing so drew on a habit that no constitution can manufacture and no government can install from above. It is older than the nation, older than the political parties, older than the word secularism itself.
Across India, every political act is being read as a communal act. A Muslim candidate’s victory becomes Muslim consolidation. A Hindu candidate’s becomes Hindu assertion. A mosque becomes a historical grievance and a temple becomes a civilisational claim. Kerala is not immune to this — the national mood has arrived here too, albeit a little less loudly.
The argument India keeps having about secularism — whether to have it, what it means, whose faith it marginalises — is still largely the argument Nehru framed: constitutional, conducted in English, and trying to settle from above what was never going to be settled from above. Kerala suggests a different starting point. Not a principle borrowed from elsewhere but a practice built here, over two thousand years, by people who had no choice but to figure out how to share a coast.
Kerala’s coexistence is not untouched by history. It is made of history. Maybe that’s what it means, in the end, for this to be ‘God’s Own Country’ as its tourism brochures won’t let us forget. It’s not because any one god claimed it, but because so many gods came here and made it their home.
Very illuminating article! Reminds of the fact that in precolonial India it was not uncommon for rulers of one religion to appoint as generals of another religion.
What a great thought provoking read! Really enjoyed it.