Hinduism Today

How many Hindus are there?

Nearly 1.2 billion people identified as Hindu in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, or 14.9 percent of the world's population.¹² Their number rose by 126 million from 2010, a growth of 12 percent. People of other religions and none grew at about the same rate, so the Hindu share of the world stayed level.¹²

Pew counts people who identify as Hindu when a census or survey asks their religion.³

Why has the Hindu share held steady?

The Hindu population grew at about the same rate as everyone else, Pew finds, so its share stayed level.² Switching religions changed the total little: among adults ages 18 to 54, more people had left the Hindu category than joined it, but such switching was relatively uncommon.¹ Migration brought modest shifts in where Hindus live, Pew notes.²

Where do Hindus live?

About 99 percent of the world's Hindus live in the Asia-Pacific region, and about 95 percent, or 1.1 billion people, live in India.² Hindus are most likely of all religious groups to live as a majority: 97 percent live in the two Hindu-majority countries, India (79 percent Hindu) and Nepal (81 percent).¹²

From 2010 to 2020 the number of Hindus grew fastest in the Middle East and North Africa, by 62 percent, and in North America, by 55 percent, driven mainly by migrants seeking work in wealthy countries.² The first row of the table is this site's calculation from Pew's region figures; the other rows are Pew's.⁴²

Region	Hindus, 2020	Change since 2010
Asia and the Pacific	about 1.17 billion (calculated)	up about 12 percent (calculated)
North America	3.6 million	up 55 percent
Middle East and North Africa	3.2 million	up 62 percent
Europe	2.2 million	up 30 percent

Below, rows marked "calculated" multiply each country's population by its Hindu share; the shares come from Pew's country table.⁴

Country	Hindus, 2020	Share of the country
India	about 1.1 billion	79.4 percent
Nepal	about 23.5 million (calculated)	81.2 percent
Bangladesh	about 13.1 million (calculated)	7.9 percent
Pakistan	about 4.9 million (calculated)	2.1 percent
Indonesia	about 4.4 million (calculated)	1.6 percent
Sri Lanka	about 3.3 million (calculated)	14.5 percent
United States	about 3.0 million	0.9 percent

What do the projections say?

These projections come from a Pew Research Center report of April 2015, which looked ahead from 2010 to 2050 by extending the trends of the time.⁵ It projected that the number of Hindus would rise from slightly more than 1 billion in 2010 to nearly 1.4 billion in 2050, staying at about 15 percent of the world. Hindu growth was expected to keep pace with the world's through the period 2030 to 2035 and then fall behind, largely because of declining fertility rates in India.⁶

These projections start from Pew's original 2010 estimates, and Pew describes its later revisions to the Hindu share of the world as very small.⁷

How are Hindus organized?

Hinduism has no common creed or central authority, Michael Witzel notes.⁸ Dancing with Siva, a catechism that teaches a monistic form of Shaiva Siddhanta,⁹ says each main tradition has its own lineages of teachers, monastic communities, and temples.¹⁰¹¹

• Monastic seats of the Advaita tradition. Tradition credits Shankara with founding four monasteries, or mathas, at the four points of the compass. Their heads, the shankaracharyas, lead seats at Joshimath, Dwarka, Puri, and Sringeri.¹²¹³
• The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) is a Gaudiya Vaishnava movement. Its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, arrived in New York in 1965 and established it in the United States.¹⁴
• The Swaminarayan movement, a devotional tradition rooted in Vaishnavism, began in Gujarat with Sahajanand Swami (1781 to 1830), whom followers regard as Bhagavan Swaminarayan, the highest manifestation of reality. BAPS, a branch founded in 1907 and headquartered in Ahmedabad, reported over one million followers worldwide in 2005.¹⁵
• Shaiva monasteries. In Tamil Nadu, Shaiva Siddhanta monasteries called aadheenams (the Tamil term for a traditional monastic center) include Dharmapuram and Thiruvavaduthurai. Each is headed by an initiated preceptor and serves as trustee of its temples.¹⁶
• The Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission, headquartered at Belur in West Bengal, trace their origin to Ramakrishna and his disciple Swami Vivekananda, and teach Vedanta and the harmony of religions.¹⁷ Hiltebeitel writes that the Mission was established after Ramakrishna's death and carried forward by his disciples.¹²

What questions are Hindus debating today?

Two current debates concern how Hindu identity relates to Indian national identity, and who may enter certain temples.¹⁸¹⁹

Religion and national identity. In Pew's survey of India in 2019 and 2020, 64 percent of Indian Hindus said it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian.¹⁸ The view was far less common in the South (42 percent) than in the Central region (83 percent) or the North (69 percent). The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is often described as promoting a Hindu nationalist ideology, Pew notes.¹⁸

The debate came into focus in Ayodhya, which many Hindus hold to be the birthplace of the god Rama. Many also hold that the Babri Mosque, built there in the 16th century, replaced a temple. The Hindu American Foundation, a Hindu advocacy group, puts it this way: The final temple on the site was destroyed in the early 16th century by the first Mughal emperor for the construction of a mosque²⁰. In 1992 Hindu mobs, as the Associated Press describes them, tore the mosque down, and riots followed in which about 2,000 people died, mostly Muslims.¹⁸²¹²²

In 2019 India's Supreme Court accepted the Archaeological Survey of India's finding that the mosque was not built on vacant land but over a structure that was not Islamic. The court also said, according to these reports, that the survey had not specified that the structure was a temple, or established that a temple was demolished to build the mosque.²³²⁴

In the same judgment, as an ISAS brief summarizes it, the court concluded on a balance of probabilities that the remains suggested a temple structure dating to the 12th century. The court said it decided title on evidence rather than faith, and relied mainly on the record of long Hindu worship at the site. It found that the mosque had been desecrated on December 22 to 23, 1949, and called its destruction in 1992 an egregious violation of the rule of law. It granted the site for a temple and gave Muslims five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya for a mosque.²¹

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board resolved to seek a review and to refuse the five acres. Among its reasons, its spokesman listed that the court itself had accepted that Muslims prayed at the Babri Masjid from 1857 to 1949. Idols, the board said, were placed inside it illegally in December 1949, and Idols placed illegally inside the mosque cannot be treated as deities²⁵. Its member Zafaryab Jilani added: Land of mosque belongs to Allah and under Sharia, can't be given to anybody²⁶.²⁵²⁶

On January 22, 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration of the new Ram temple, where a stone image of Rama had been installed.²⁰²² For millions of Hindus, the Associated Press reported, the temple fulfilled a long-standing demand. Critics, including opposition leaders, accused Modi of hurrying the ceremony, before construction was finished, to win votes, and many Muslims regarded the temple as a sign of Hindu-first politics.²²

Beforehand, Scroll.in confirmed that none of the four shankaracharyas would attend. The heads of the Puri and Joshimath seats said the ceremony did not follow the scriptures, and the Joshimath head objected to consecrating the temple before it was finished: It is the duty of shankaracharyas to ensure that religious scriptures are properly followed¹³. The Sringeri and Dwarka seats said their leaders were not displeased with the ceremony.¹³ On the day, the Associated Press reported that four key Hindu religious authorities had refused to attend.²²

Who may enter the temple. The Sabarimala temple in Kerala, dedicated to the god Ayyappa, long barred women aged 10 to 50 from entering. In September 2018 India's Supreme Court, by four votes to one, held that this custom was unconstitutional.¹⁹

The temple's defenders, among them the respondents in 2018 and a brahman association that later sought review, hold that the rule protects the character of the deity as a naishtika brahmachari, a celibate god. They argue that the restriction rests on the deity's vow, not on any impurity in women.²⁷²⁸ Justice Indu Malhotra, the one dissenter, agreed that devotees' freedom of worship depends on preserving that character.²⁷

The majority held that women of any age have the same right as men to enter a temple, and Justice R. F. Nariman wrote that menstruation must not make a woman ritually impure.²⁷ More than 50 review petitions followed, including from the temple's chief priest and a women devotees' association, and a nine-judge bench took up the wider questions of religious freedom in April 2026 and reserved its judgment on May 14, 2026.¹⁹²⁹

As of a LawBeat report of August 12, 2026 the judgment was still awaited.³⁰

Hostility toward Hindus. Pew Research Center's report for 2023, published in 2026, found that Hindus were harassed by governments or social groups in 32 of the 198 countries and territories it studied.³¹ Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident in the year, whether physical or nonphysical.³¹ The figure shows how many countries, not how severe the harassment was or how many incidents occurred.³¹

Christianity vs Hinduism sets the two faiths side by side, and the God Theories book series goes further.