For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to
South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of
worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political
hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these tem-ples, not only the human and
the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the
communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in
isolation, but stand in multiple re¬lationships to other temples and sacred sites.
They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a
conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban
centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist
within a shared sacred space. The current volume pays close attention to the
con¬nections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it
within a particular place or on a trans-local level. These connections are described
as ¿temple networks,¿ a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures
looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in
numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes.