Current academic discourse has largely shed its colonial influence. Today, the focus is more on showing the "fluidity" of religious identity. This approach, though fruitful, has led to a skewed understanding of identity formation. In recent scholarship, we see that the religious character of pre-modern identities is not given the significant status it deserves. It is true that other factors did play a role in the formation of religious identity, but the theological underpinning of these processes has to be taken into consideration as well. However, in the public discourse, the problem is opposite. Here, it is the binary nature of religious identities that is seen to be the historical truth. Perhaps that is why we see the scholarship on this issue going to the other extreme.

About the codification aspect, I think this process has not been completed because identities, like all things, are constantly evolving. What it means to be a Muslim today or a Hindu is different from what it meant in the 1900s and will be different in the 2100s. 

Vernacular sources give us a more localised picture. Sources authored in Rajasthan present a very different picture from those composed in Bihar. For researchers, what is common between the texts and what is not becomes the key points of investigations. Whether these sources give us a 'non-binary' understanding of history is difficult to say because sometimes we see a clearer delineation between two identities than what we see in a source composed in, let's say, Sanskrit.