The Growth of Hinduism
When the Delhi Sultanate took shape in the early thirteenth century, it brought new political institutions, new elites, and new cultural idioms to a subcontinent that already held diverse religious traditions. The rulers and administrators of the Sultanate were committed to Islam in law and ritual, yet they governed a vast population that remained overwhelmingly non Muslim and mainly Hindu. Daily life unfolded in markets, villages, workshops, and pilgrim centers where people of different faiths met, traded, and exchanged ideas. This produced a relationship that was sometimes tense and sometimes cooperative, with episodes of conflict and suppression alongside long periods of negotiation and accommodation.
In the north, the establishment of new capitals, military cantonments, and market towns drew artisans, peasants, and merchants into denser networks of exchange. The expansion of irrigation and taxation pressed rural society, but also integrated it more tightly. In this world, many Hindus worked for the new rulers as soldiers, scribes, financiers, or local intermediaries, and Muslim officials depended on Hindu revenue networks and agrarian management. The result was not a simple story of domination or resistance. Instead it was a pattern of daily bargaining, where rulers sometimes imposed discriminatory taxes like the jizya, and at other times granted protections or pragmatic favors to local communities and their shrines. Warfare could bring temple desecration and spoliation, as in other eras of South Asian conflict, yet many temples continued to function, and new ones were endowed by regional elites, guilds, and pilgrims, especially outside the core political zones of the north.
South of the Sultanate heartland, kingdoms such as the Hoysalas and later Vijayanagara extended temple-centered agrarian frontiers. Large temple complexes acted as landlords, employers, and ritual magnets. They organized water, markets, festivals, and craft production. From the fourteenth century, Vijayanagara emerged as a major Hindu power that traded with, fought against, and also borrowed from the Sultanates of the Deccan and the north. Its monumental gopurams, Sanskrit and vernacular scholarship, and elaborate ritual economies helped consolidate and broadcast Hindu practices across a vast landscape.
Alongside these political and economic shifts, devotional religion gained new reach. Long before the Sultanate, Tamil poet saints like the Alvars and Nayanars had sung passionate praise of Vishnu and Shiva, modeling a personal bond with the divine. That earlier template deepened and spread in the Sultanate centuries through what later observers called the Bhakti movement. The hallmark of Bhakti was a direct, loving relationship with God, expressed in song, story, and service. It often crossed boundaries of caste and learning by turning to the mother tongue rather than only to Sanskrit.
In western India, the Varkari tradition crystallized around Pandharpur. Dnyaneshwar, a prodigy of the late thirteenth century, rendered the Bhagavad Gita into Marathi as the Dnyaneshwari, making philosophical teaching singable and portable. Namdev, active in the early fourteenth century, composed abhangas that were memorized by common folk and traveled far beyond Maharashtra. In the Kannada zone, the older Virashaiva or Lingayat tradition affirmed Shiva devotion with a sharp critique of caste status, and later the Haridasa saints, in the Madhva lineage, carried devotional song into households and marketplaces. In the east, Bengali and Odia lands saw the rise of ecstatic kirtan centered on Krishna, culminating in the early sixteenth century with Chaitanya in Nadia and Puri, whose emphasis on congregational singing reframed devotion as a public, embodied act.
North India witnessed both saguna and nirguna strains of Bhakti. Ramananda in Banaras gathered disciples across social ranks and encouraged worship in everyday speech. Later figures like Kabir and Ravidas, at the cusp of the Sultanate and Mughal transition, sharpened the nirguna theme, insisting that the ultimate reality is beyond form and beyond the boundaries of mosque and temple. Their poems attacked hypocrisy in all communities and crafted a spirituality that many could claim, whether born Hindu or Muslim. Women found new space as authors and exemplars. Lalleshwari in fourteenth century Kashmir spoke through short, piercing verses that bridged Kashmiri Shaivism and Sufi sensibilities, and her younger contemporary Nund Rishi became a foundational figure for Kashmiri Sufism, a pairing that shows how porous devotional boundaries could be.
Sufi orders provided another set of structures and practices that intersected with Bhakti. The Chishti saints, especially in Delhi and Ajmer, built hospices and kitchens that welcomed the poor and cultivated music as a path to presence. Their gatherings drew people of many backgrounds, and the precincts of dargahs became shared social spaces. The use of the vernacular in songs and advice, the stress on a personal experience of the divine, and the valuation of moral sincerity echoed Bhakti themes. At the same time, differences remained in theology and law. What matters for the history of Hinduism is that the devotional turn gained prestige and tools, including musical forms, story cycles, and institutional hospitality, through sustained proximity to Sufi practice.
Language and art bear the imprint of this entanglement. Court poets like Amir Khusrau experimented with new meters and musical innovations, and over time a composite Hindavi idiom blossomed into Hindi and related vernaculars. Bhakti poets borrowed Persian words and imagery, while Sufi verse absorbed Indic metaphors. The lineages of kirtan, bhajan, and qawwali nourished what later became Hindustani music. Narrative retellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in regional languages multiplied, binding villages to a shared mythic vocabulary while allowing each region to color the stories with local ethics and aspirations.
Institutionally, Hinduism diversified and consolidated. Mathas and sampradayas organized teaching, pilgrimage, and charity. Smarta scholars and temple managers systematized ritual codes, while Vaishnava and Shaiva sects developed distinctive devotional paths such as the Srivaishnava, Madhva, and later Vallabha traditions. These currents did not erase caste hierarchies, and most temples still reflected social stratifications. Yet the public role of devotional song, the availability of scripture in the vernacular, and the charisma of saints from modest origins widened participation. Householders could practice intense devotion without renouncing the world, and migrants in new urban wards could carry their gods with them in a hymnbook or on their tongues.
The political climate remained variable. Some sultans pursued harsh fiscal extractions and religious restrictions, others cultivated Hindu allies, and many local officials improvised. There were moments of temple destruction in the wake of conquest and moments of protection when rulers valued the loyalty of influential communities. Through these cycles, Hindu practice adapted. Household shrines grew in importance, small neighborhood mandirs proliferated, and pilgrimage networks stitched together regions that war sometimes divided. Wealthy merchants became cultural patrons, underwriting festivals, lamps, and recitations. The devotional household, the street procession, and the regional sanctuary together formed a resilient lattice that did not depend on any single court.
By the time the Mughal empire emerged in the early sixteenth century, Hinduism had been transformed. It was more vernacular and more public, organized through a denser mesh of temples, mathas, and pilgrim circuits. It had absorbed and reinterpreted the challenges of a new political order by leaning into intimacy with the divine, by cultivating communities of song and service, and by negotiating space in shared cities and sacred geographies. The Delhi Sultanate did not produce a uniform outcome. It produced overlapping worlds where competing sovereignties and mixed neighborhoods pushed Hindus and Muslims into contact. Out of that contact grew a devotional culture that was confident enough to stand on its own terms and flexible enough to converse with its neighbors.