Temple, Body, and Space: Approaching Temple‐Car Cultures in South Asia

ABSTRACT

In religious festivals celebrated at many sites across South Asia, colossal wooden vehicles known as “temple‐cars” convey images of deities and saints in a rapturous procession. Temple‐cars have garnered a disciplinarily fragmented body of scholarship that has treated them primarily as mobile temples by privileging their superstructures over their wheeled wooden bases. This essay thematically synthesizes existing scholarship through a “ground‐up” approach centered on the vehicle's mobility. Reframing the temple‐car first as a ritual transport ( vāhana ), the essay critically surveys three dimensions of temple‐car cultures in South Asia: the vehicle's architectural logic; its sociopolitical function in procession; and its capacity to produce sacred space. The vāhana paradigm, as this essay preliminarily argues, offers a more productive framework for understanding how temple‐car processions affect religious and political life across South Asia.