Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
The proliferation of hindu temples now spread over the North American religious landscape appear at first glance to be part of a new process of globalization for Hinduism in an era of transnational religions. South India, long a bastion of temple culture, is simultaneously in the midst of a new boom in temple construction. The present resurgence of “Hinduism” in north India, steeped in ideology, nonetheless is written in terms of the alleged destruction of thousands of temples in north India by Muslim rulers and calls for their reconstruction. “My gods are crying,” writes one “angry” Hindu; “They are demanding restatement in all their original glory” (quoted in Bhattacharya 1991, 127).