Worshipping the Invisible: Hindu Aniconism as a New Direction in the Study of South Asian Religions

Aniconism in India has been studied primarily through the lens of early Buddhism and, comparatively, through Islam and ancient Israelite religion. Yet within Hinduism, a largely unexamined tradition of aniconic worship persists across Tamil Nadu, where deities are venerated as formless presences in empty shrines, without a liṅga or mūrti. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted during a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, this paper documents numerous aniconic shrines across the region and proposes a framework for understanding Hindu aniconism grounded in South Indian theologies of space (ākāśa), emptiness (śūnya), and formlessness (arūpa, niṣkala). Building on Richard Davis’s 2017 study of Śaiva aniconism (perhaps the most recent scholarly treatment of this topic), the paper argues that Hindu aniconism demands attention as a living tradition rather than an ancient artifact, and that its study opens a genuinely new direction for the field of South Asian religions.