ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Hindu temples have served as sites for competitive constructions of a public sphere in modern India. The location of Hindu temples in both the bureaucratic structures of the colonial state and in local discourses illustrates one set of circumstances in which such disjunctions have persisted. Hindu temples are ubiquitous features in the built environment of southern India. The official, state-sanctioned discourse that constituted Hindu temples as public sites and the debates around the meanings of their public-ness were products of a history in which not only the form but the very possibility of a civic public in South Asia were contested. Temples symbolized the excrescence of caste society and were thus the antitheses of civil society. Whereas schools and homes were refurbished in accord with the dictates of modernity, temples seemed to hold residues of tradition.
