ABSTRACT
This chapter encloses religion in South Asia first sketches the core history of each tradition in the region and then briefly notes the key religious issues and conflicts facing each of the South Asian countries. Jainism remained purely a South Asian phenomenon, while Buddhism reached across most of Asia. The mosque is considered to be the key space for the Muslim community for their daily ritual prayer. Christianity in South Asia began with the arrival of Syrian Christians and other heterodox Christian communities on the southwest coast in the first centuries of Christianity. Unlike Islam and Christianity, which were imported into India and then transformed, Sikhism is best thought of as a syncretic religion, one built out of a combination of Islam and Hinduism. Nowadays, pockets of Ismailis dot the landscape of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Many of the tenets of Hinduism are portrayed in an easily understood narrative form in Hinduism's two great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
