ABSTRACT
As new technologies and new diasporas emerge across the world, as tourism and the marketplace offer new religious mobilities and goods, and as modern governance exerts its claim on ancient political structure, Hinduism in modern South India invents and adapts itself. One illustration is a weekly Telugu-language television program called Dharma Sandehalu (Doubts about Dharma) that is viewed both through a live broadcast and through YouTube recordings by more than five million viewers across Asia, the Middle East, and North America. The program features an expert on South Indian Hindu traditions who resolves callers’ dilemmas of practicing Hinduism amidst the exigencies and diversity of modern life. In another example, temples in the Hindu diaspora commonly adjust their ritual calendars to accommodate the work routines of host countries and extend maps of traditional Hindu sacred landscapes to include their new local geographies. The Sri Venkateshvara temple in suburban Pittsburgh, the oldest temple in North America, uses its hilly geographic setting to authenticate its belonging to the network of temples in the tradition of the famous hill temple of Sri Venkateshvara in Tirupati in South India. Almost every temple today has a cyber-presence: an elaborate website and Facebook pages that detail its origin stories and devotional experiences, web links to related temples, audiovisual streaming media of the worship rituals, and, often, facilities for ‘e-worship’ through which devotees can request and pay for particular rituals. Cell phone apps bring ritual procedures to handheld devices such as goddess worship in a South Indian format to an iPhone app. These new applications and mediations reflect the changing contours of sacred space and time and religious experience.
