It is sometimes claimed that there is no religious education in the general Indian school system. There are reasons to suggest that matters are more complex than that. Combining the two fields of religious and comparative educational studies, this article shows that there are themes in Indian syllabuses and teaching materials that involve religious content. Empirical data include the Indian National Policy of Education, the National Curriculum Framework and syllabuses, as well as syllabuses and textbooks from a particular school board (CISCE).

Religion as a school subject – Religious Education (RE) – is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both countries are secular, but where is the line drawn between the secular and the religious? Allowing the two contexts to meet reveals the particularities of each. The impact of Protestant Christianity, specifically Lutheranism, is evident in Swedish RE: religion is to be defined through beliefs and words, and religious actions should be excluded from classrooms. The Swedish context highlights ‘knowledge of’ religions, but avoids religious action. In India, there is no explicit RE, but Indian education does include learning from religion as well as ‘doing religion.’ The Indian approach is very inclusive, to the point of emphasising, as teachers put it, a common core of all religions. Both systems of RE offer particular opportunities and face certain difficulties in dealing with the contemporary globalised world. 

India is a country of many religious traditions. Although the state is secular, an Indian understanding of 'secular' (open secularism) is different from the ‘rigid secularism’ common in Europe. This has enabled a particular flavour of civil religion to develop, influenced in part by traditional religion. The civil religion of India is studied through society’s primary arena for socialization: school education. Indian school education is analyzed through national and local syllabi and guidelines, as well as through ethnographic research, composed of interviews and observations from different school boards in India. The results indicate there is an Indian civil religion. In school education, other religious traditions are subsumed under it, as they are seen to exemplify values common in all. The nature of the civil religion is, however, contested; primarily by open secularism and Hindu nationalism.

The article will discuss comparative education and comparative religious education in particular. Comparative research on religious education has been a neglected field, it has been claimed (Schweitzer 2004; Schweitzer and Schreiner 2020). Although progress has been made, this article will suggest that comparative work tend to neglect fundamental questions about key terms which might lead to misunderstandings and confusion — friction, in short. A methodology to handle such cases will be suggested, based on a comparative methodology developed by Bråten (2013) and key terms from Jackson (1997). In that way, friction will actually reveal opportunities to gain new insights about the context of origin in particular which otherwise might not have been reached. The article is based on the authors own, previous research involving cross-cultural comparison of religious education.